One of the texts for today at church was Malachi 3:6 – 12. The sermon covered many other good things, but I got stuck on the first verse:

The rest of the text goes on to tell how God’s people fail. They (we!) rob God — and argue with him about it. But they (we!) do not get the destruction they earn. Why? Because the Lord does not change. (I will write some other day about how we ruin ourselves and our world when we run away from God, and how “robbing God” is about what we do to ourselves, not some harm we bring to God.)

Sometimes preachers or writers will say that “God himself is the good news.” This is a picture of that truth. Why is it that our defiance of all that is good in the world — our wars, our greed, our lust, our insert your sin here — does not just end up with us judged and destroyed? Because, this verse tells us: because God does not change.

The idea that God never changes¹ has a bad rap among some theologians because they feel it makes God too unlike us: unrelatable.

This text tells us that is exactly backwards. As I put it to my daughters a couple minutes ago: the good news is that God is not like me. He is not patient one day and irritable the next. He is not kind one day and harsh the next. He is not unpredictable. He is the same.

Crucially, he is the same in his goodness. He is wholly good, and he is reliably good. He is who he is, all the time, 100% of the time. That makes God himself the good news. Because he is good, always.