There is in everything that is mutable a composition either essential
or accidental; and in all changes, something of the thing changed
remains, and something of it ceaseth and is done away; as for example,
in an accidental change, if a white wall be made black, it loses its
white color; but the wall itself, which was the subject of that color,
remains and loses nothing of its substance: likewise in a substantial
change, as when wood is burnt, the substantial part of wood is lost,
the earthly part is changed into ashes, the airy part ascends in smoke,
the watery part is changed into air by the fire: there is not an
annihilation of it, but a resolution of it into those parts whereof it
was compounded; and this change doth evidence that it was compounded
of several parts distinct from one another. If there were any change
in God, it is by separating something from him, or adding something
to him; if by separating something from him, then he was compounded
of something distinct from himself; for if it were not distinct from
himself it could not be separated from him without loss of his being;
if by adding anything to him, then it is a compounding of him, either
substantially or accidentally. Mutability is absolutely inconsistent
with simplicity, whether the change come from an internal or external
principle. If a change be wrought by something without, it supposeth
either contrary or various parts in the thing so changed, whereof it
doth consist; if it be wrought by anything within, it supposeth that
the thing so changed doth consist of one part that doth change it,
and another part that is changed, and so it would not be a simple
being. If God could be changed by anything within himself, all in God
would not be God; his essence would depend upon some parts, whereof
some would be superior to others; if one part were able to change
or destroy another, that which doth change would be God, that which
is changed would not be God; so God would be made up of a Deity and
a non‑Deity, and part of God would depend upon God; part would be
dependent, and part would be independent; part would be mutable, part
immutable: so that {a333} mutability is against the notion of God’s
independency as well as his simplicity. God is the most simple being;
for that which is first in nature, having nothing beyond it, cannot by
any means be thought to be compounded; for whatsoever is so, depends
upon the parts whereof it is compounded, and so is not the first being:
now God being infinitely simple, hath nothing in himself which is not
himself, and therefore cannot will any change in himself, he being his
own essence and existence.[613]
4. God were not eternal if he were mutable. In all change there is
something that perishes, either substantially or accidentally. All
change is a kind of death, or imitation of death; that which was dies,
and begins to be what it was not. The soul of man, though it ceaseth
not to be and exist, yet when it ceaseth to be in quality what it was,
is said to die. Adam died when he changed from integrity to corruption,
though both his soul and body were in being (Gen. ii. 17); and the
soul of a regenerate man is said to “die to sin,” when it is changed
from sin to grace (Rom. vi. 11). In all change there is a resemblance
of death; so the notion of mutability is against the eternity of God.
If anything be acquired by a change, then that which is acquired was
not from eternity, and so he was not wholly eternal; if anything be
lost which was from eternity, he is not wholly everlasting; if he did
decrease by the change, something in him which had no beginning would
have an end; if he did increase by that change, something in him would
have a beginning that might have no end. What is changed doth not
remain, and what doth not remain is not eternal.[614] Though God alway
remains in regard of existence, he would be immortal, and live alway;
yet if he should suffer any change, he could not properly be eternal,
because he would not alway be the same, and would not in every part
be eternal; for all change is finished in time, one moment preceding,
another moment following; but that which is before time cannot be
changed by time. God cannot be eternally what he was; that is, he
cannot have a true eternity, if he had a new knowledge, a new purpose,
a new essence; if he were sometimes this and sometimes that, sometimes
know this and sometimes know that, sometimes purpose this and
afterwards hath a new purpose; he would be partly temporary and partly
eternal, not truly and universally eternal. He that hath anything of
newness, hath not properly and truly an entire eternity. Again, by
the same reason that God could in the least cease to be what he was,
he might also cease wholly to be; and no reason can be rendered why
God might not cease wholly to be, as well as cease to be entirely and
uniformly what he was. All changeableness implies a corruptibility.
5. If God were changeable, he were not infinite and almighty. All
change ends in addition or diminution; if anything be added, he was
not infinite before, if anything be diminished, he is not infinite
after. All change implies bounds and limits to that which is changed;
but God is infinite; “His greatness is unsearchable:”[615] we can add
number to number without any end, and can conceive {a334} an infinite
number; yet the greatness of God is beyond all our conceptions. But
if there could be any change in his greatness for the better, it would
not be unsearchable before that change; if for the worse, it would
not be unsearchable after that change. Whatsoever hath limits and is
changeable, is conceivable and searchable; but God is not only not
known, but impossible in his own nature to be known and searched out,
and, therefore, impossible to have any diminution in his nature. All
that which is changed arrives to something which it was not before,
or ceaseth in part to be what it was before. He would not also be
almighty. What is omnipotent cannot be made worse; for to be made
worse, is in part to be corrupted. If he be made better, he was not
almighty before; something of power was wanting to him. If there
should be any change, it must proceed from himself or from another;
if from himself, it would be an inability to preserve himself in the
perfection of his nature; if from another, he would be inferior in
strength, knowledge, and power, to that which changes him, either in
his nature, knowledge, or will; in both an inability; an inability in
him to continue the same, or an inability in him to resist the power
of another.
6. The world could not be ordered and governed but by some Principle
or Being which were immutable. Principles are alway more fixed and
stable than things which proceed from those principles; and this is
true both in morals and naturals. Principles in conscience, whereby
men are governed, remain firmly engraven in their minds. The root
lies firmly in the earth, while branches are shaken with the wind. The
heavens, the cause of generation, are more firm and stable than those
things which are wrought by their influence. All things in the world
are moved by some power and virtue which is stable; and unless it were
so, no order would be observed in motion, no motion could be regularly
continued. He could not be a full satisfaction to the infinite desire
of the souls of his people. Nothing can truly satisfy the soul of man
but rest; and nothing can give it rest but that which is perfect and
immutably perfect; for else it would be subject to those agitations
and variations which the being it depends upon is subject to. The
principle of all things must be immutable,[616] which is described
by some by a unity, the principle of number, wherein there is a
resemblance of God’s unchangeableness. A unit is not variable; it
continues in its own nature immutably a unit. It never varies from
itself; it cannot be changed from itself; but is, as it were, so
omnipotent towards others, that it changes all numbers. If you add
any number, it is the beginning of that number, but the unit is not
increased by it; a new number ariseth from that addition, but the unit
still remains the same, and adds value to other figures, but receives
none from them.
III. The third thing to speak to is, that immutability is proper
to God, and incommunicable to any creature. Mutability is natural to
every creature as a creature, and immutability is the sole perfection
of God. He only is infinite wisdom, able to foreknow future events;
he only is infinitely powerful, able to call forth all means to
effect; so that wanting neither wisdom to contrive, nor strength to
execute, {a335} he cannot alter his counsel. None being above him,
nothing in him contrary to him, and being defective in no blessedness
and perfection, he cannot vary in his essence and nature. Had not
immutability as well as eternity been a property solely pertaining
to the Divine nature, as well as creative power and eternal duration,
the apostle’s argument to prove Christ to be God from this perpetual
sameness, had come short of any convincing strength. These words of
the text he applies to Christ (Heb. i. 10‒12): “They shall be changed,
but thou art the same.” There had been no strength in the reason, if
immutability by nature did belong to any creature.
The changeableness of all creatures is evident:
1. Of corporeal creatures it is evident to sense. All plants and
animals, as they have their duration bounded in certain limits; so
while they do exist, they proceed from their rise to their fall. They
pass through many sensible alterations, from one degree of growth to
another, from buds to blossoms, from blossoms to flowers and fruits.
They come to their pitch that nature had set them, and return back
to the state from whence they sprung; there is not a day but they
make some acquisition, or suffer some loss. They die and spring up
every day; nothing in them more certain than their inconstancy: “The
creature is subject to vanity” (Rom. viii. 20). The heavenly bodies
are changing their place; the sun every day is running his race, and
stays not in the same point; and though they are not changed in their
essence, yet they are in their place. Some, indeed, say there is a
continual generation of light in the sun, as there is a loss of light
by the casting out its beams, as in a fountain there is a flowing out
of the streams, and a continual generation of supply. And though these
heavenly bodies have kept their standing and motion from the time of
their creation, yet both the sun’s standing still in Joshua’s time,
and its going back in Hezekiah’s time, show that they are changeable
at the pleasure of God. But in man the change is perpetually visible;
every day there is a change from ignorance to knowledge, from one
will to another, from passion to passion, sometimes sad and sometimes
cheerful, sometimes craving this, and presently nauseating it; his
body changes from health to sickness, or from weakness to strength;
some alteration there is either in body or mind. Man, who is the
noblest creature, the subordinate end of the creation of other things,
cannot assure himself of a consistency and fixedness in anything the
short space of a day, no, not of a minute. All his months are months
of vanity (Job vii. 3); whence the Psalmist calls man at the “best
estate altogether vanity,” a mere heap of vanity (Ps. xxxv.) As he
contains in his nature the nature of all creatures, so he inherits in
his nature the vanity of all creatures. A little world, the centre of
the world and of the vanity of the world; yea, “lighter than vanity”
(Ps. lxii. 9), more movable than a feather; tossed between passion and
passion, daily changing his end, and changing the means; an image of
nothing.
2. Spiritual natures, as angels. They change not in their being, but
that is from the indulgence of God. They change not in their goodness,
but that is not from their nature, but divine grace in their {a336}
confirmation; but they change in their knowledge; they know more
by Christ than they did by creation (1 Tim. iii. 16). They have an
addition of knowledge every day, by the providential dispensations
of God to his church (Eph. iii. 10); and the increase of their
astonishment and love is according to the increase of their knowledge
and insight. They cannot have a new discovery without new admirations
of what is discovered to them: there is a change in their joy when
there is a change in a sinner (Luke xv. 10). They were changed in
their essence, when they were made such glorious spirits of nothing;
some of them were changed in their will, when of holy they became
impure. The good angels were changed in their understandings, when
the glories of God in Christ were presented to their view; and all can
be changed in their essence again; and as they were made of nothing,
so by the power of God may be reduced to nothing again. So glorified
souls shall have an unchanged operation about God, for they shall
behold his face without any grief or fear of loss, without vagrant
thoughts; but they can never be unchangeable in their nature, because
they can never pass from finite to infinite.
No creature can be unchangeable in its nature:――1. Because every
creature rose from nothing. As they rose from nothing, so they
tend to nothing, unless they are preserved by God. The notion of
a creature speaks changeableness; because to be a creature is to be
made something of nothing, and, therefore, creation is a change of
nothing into something. The being of a creature begins from change,
and, therefore, the essence of a creature is subject to change. God
only is uncreated, and, therefore, unchangeable. If he were made he
could not be immutable; for the very making is a change of not being
into being. All creatures were made good, as they were the fruits of
God’s goodness and power; but must needs be mutable, because they were
the extracts of nothing. 2. Because every creature depends purely upon
the will of God. They depend not upon themselves, but upon another for
their being. As they received their being from the word of his mouth
and the arm of his power, so by the same word they can be cancelled
into nothing, and return into as little significancy as when they were
nothing. He that created them by a word, can by a word destroy them:
if God should “take away their breath, they die, and return into their
dust” (Ps. civ. 29). As it was in the power of the Creator that things
might be, before they actually were, so it is in the power of the
Creator that things after they are may cease to be what they are; and
they are, in their own nature, as reducible to nothing as they were
producible by the power of God from nothing; for there needs no more
than an act of God’s will to null them, as there needed only an act of
God’s will to make them. Creatures are all subject to a higher cause:
they are all reputed as nothing. “He doth according to his will in the
armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can
stay his hand, or say unto him, What dost thou?” (Dan. iv. 35.) But
God is unchangeable, because he is the highest good; none above him,
all below him; all dependent on him; himself upon none. 3. No creature
is absolutely perfect. No {a337} creature can be so perfect, or can
ever be, but something by the infinite power of God may be added to it;
for whatsoever is finite may receive greater additions, and, therefore,
a change. No creature you can imagine, but in your thoughts you may
fancy him capable of greater perfections than you know he hath, or
than really he hath. The perfections of all creatures are searchable;
the perfection of God is only unsearchable (Job xi. 6), and, therefore,
he only immutable. God only is always the same. Time makes no addition
to him, nor diminisheth anything of him. His nature and essence, his
wisdom and will, have always been the same from eternity, and shall be
the same to eternity, without any variation.
IV. The fourth thing propounded is, Some propositions to clear this
unchangeableness of God from anything that seems contrary to it.
_Prop. I._ There was no change in God when he began to create the
world in time. The creation was a real change, but the change was
not subjectively in God, but in the creature; the creature began
to be what it was not before. Creation is considered as active or
passive.[617] Active creation is the will and power of God to create.
This is from eternity, because God willed from eternity to create
in time; this never had beginning, for God never began in time to
understand anything, to will anything, or to be able to do anything;
but he alway understood and alway willed those things which he
determined from eternity to produce in time. The decree of God may be
taken for the act decreeing, that is eternal and the same, or for the
object decreed, that is in time; so that there may be a change in the
object, but not in the will whereby the object doth exist.
1. There was no change in God by the act of creation, because there
was no new will in him. There was no new act of his will which was not
before. The creation began in time, but the will of creating was from
eternity. The work was new, but the decree whence that new work sprung
was as ancient as the Ancient of Days. When the time of creating came,
God was not made _ex nolente volens_, as we are; for whatsoever God
willed to be now done, he willed from eternity to be done; but he
willed also that it should not be done till such an instant of time,
and that it should not exist before such a time. If God had willed the
creation of the world only at that time when the world was produced,
and not before, then, indeed, God had been changeable. But though God
spake that word which he had not spoke before, whereby the world was
brought into act; yet he did not will that will he willed not before.
God did not create by a new counsel or new will, but by that which was
from eternity (Eph. i. 9). All things are wrought according to that
“purpose in himself,” and according to “the counsel of his will” (ver.
11); and as the holiness of the elect is the fruit of his eternal will
“before the foundation of the world” (ver. 4), so, likewise, is the
existence of things, and of those persons whom he did elect. As when
an artificer frames a house or a temple according to that model he had
in his mind some years before, there is no change {a338} in the model
in his mind; the artificer is the same, though the work is produced by
him some time after he had framed that copy of it in his own mind, but
there is a change of the thing produced by him according to that model.
Or, when a rich man intends, four or five years hence, if he lives,
to build a hospital, is there any change in will, when, after the
expiration of that time, he builds and endows it? Though it be after
his will, yet it is the fruit of his precedent will. So God, from all
eternity, did will and command that the creatures should exist in such
a part of time; and, by his eternal will, all things, whether past,
present, or to come, did, do, and shall exist, at that point of time
which that will did appoint for them: not, as though God had a new
will when things stood up in being, but only that which was prepared
in his immutable counsel and will from eternity, doth then appear.
There can be no instant fixed from eternity, wherein it can be said,
God did not will the creation of the world; for had the will of God
for the shortest moment been undetermined to the creation of the world,
and afterwards resolved upon it, there had been a moral change in God
from not willing to willing; but this there was not, for God executes
nothing in time which he had not ordained from eternity, and appointed
all the means and circumstances whereby it should be brought about. As
the determination of our Saviour to suffer was not a new will, but an
eternal counsel, and wrought no change in God (Acts ii. 23).
2. There is no change in God by the act of creation, because there was
no new power in God. Had God had a will at the time of creation which
he had not before, there had been a moral change in him; so had there
been in him a power only to create then and not before, there had been
a physical change in him from weakness to ability. There can be no
more new power in God, than there can be a new will in God; for his
will is his power, and what he willeth to effect, that he doth effect:
as he was unchangeably holy, so he was unchangeably almighty, “which
was, and is, and is to come” (Rev. iv. 8); which was almighty, and
is almighty, and ever will be almighty. The work therefore makes no
change in God, but there is a change in the thing wrought by that
power of God. Suppose you had a seal engraven upon some metal a
hundred years old, or as old as the creation, and you should this
day, so many ages after the engraving of it, make an impression of
that seal upon wax; would you say the engravement upon the seal were
changed, because it produced that stamp upon the wax now which it did
not before? No, the change is purely in the wax, which receives a new
figure or form by the impression; not in the seal, that was capable of
imprinting the same long before. God was the same from eternity as he
was when he made a signature of himself upon the creatures by creation,
and is no more changed by stamping them into several forms, than the
seal is changed by making impression upon the wax. As when a house is
enlightened by the sun, or that which was cold is heated by it, there
is a change in the house from darkness to light, from coldness to heat;
but is there any change in the light and heat of the sun? There is a
change in the thing enlightened or warmed by that light and heat which
remains fixed and constant in the sun, which was {a339} as capable in
itself to produce the same effects before, as at that instant when it
works them; so when God is the author of a new work, he is not changed,
because he works it by an eternal will and an eternal power.
3. Nor is there any new relation acquired by God by the creation of
the world. There was a new relation acquired by the creature, as, when
a man sins, he hath another relation to God than he had before,――he
hath relation to God, as a criminal to a Judge; but there is no change
in God, but in the malefactor. The being of men makes no more change
in God than the sins of men. As a tree is now on our right hand,
and by our turning about it is on our left hand, sometimes before us,
sometimes behind us, according to our motion near it or about it, and
the turning of the body; there is no change in the tree, which remains
firm and fixed in the earth, but the change is wholly in the posture
of the body, whereby the tree may be said to be before us or behind
us, or on the right hand or on the left hand.[618] God gained no new
relation of Lord or Creator by the creation; for though he had created
nothing to rule over, yet he had the power to create and rule, though
he did not create and rule: as a man may be called a skilful writer,
though he does not write, because he is able to do it when he pleases;
or a man skilful in physic is called a physician, though he doth
not practise that skill, or discover his art in the distribution of
medicines, because he may do it when he pleases; it depends upon his
own will to show his art when he has a mind to it. So the name Creator
and Lord belongs to God from eternity, because he could create and
rule, though he did not create and rule. But, howsoever, if there were
any such change of relation, that God may be called Creator and Lord
after the creation and not before, it is not a change in essence, nor
in knowledge, nor in will; God gains no perfection nor diminution by
it; his knowledge is not increased by it; he is no more by it than
he was, and will be, if all those things ceased; and therefore Austin
illustrates it by this similitude:――as a piece of money when it is
given as the price of a thing, or deposited only as a pledge for the
security of a thing borrowed; the coin is the same, and is not changed,
though the relation it had as a pledge and as a price be different
from one another: so that suppose any new relation be added, yet there
is nothing happens to the nature of God which may infer any change.