Some Things never Change

“I the Lord do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed”–Malachi 3:6 (NIV).

As I was shopping recently, I overheard someone say, “Some things never change.” I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation but I had to agree.

Fights between siblings never do change. My grandson, trying to elicit sympathy from me during a phone conversation, said, “Nana, Cheyenne won’t share her toys.”

“What did you do?” I asked him. He replied, “I hit her.”

I just had to chuckle because some things never do change.

As a friend and I discussed this topic, we concluded the following things do not change:

there will always be wars because people will disagree;
all people will eventually die;
the sun will always rise in the east and set in the west;
people will complain about the weather, whether it is hot or cold, wet or dry;
no one can change the past;
no one can accurately predict the future;
no one can change another person;
there will always be poor people who need help and there will always be people who take advantage of others;
there are always people who genuinely want to make a difference in this world
and there will always be people who think only of themselves.

My list could go on. However we view the world in its constant state of change, some things never change. Even with technological advances, humankind never really changes. If you go back to the beginning of the Bible and follow man’s attempt at making things work on his own, you can see that some things never change.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and earth, and then Adam and Eve, He had only one rule: “You may freely eat any fruit in the garden except fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat of its fruit, you will surely die.”

Of course, we know what happened next. Eve was tempted by Satan to taste the fruit, which she shared with her husband. When God discovered what they had done, He confronted Adam. What did he do? He blamed his wife. Humankind is still playing the blame game today. Some things never change.

We know the story of 99-year-old Abraham, and his wife, Sarah, who had a son, promised by God nearly a decade and a half earlier. Before that, the impatient couple took matters into their own hands and Abraham produced a son by his wife’s servant, Hagar. Some things never change.

Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid. He began to sink. Crying out, he said, “Lord, save me!”

How often do we take our eyes off the Lord and start sinking in fear? Some things never change. Human behavior never changes. We can be grateful, however, that the One who created us also never changes. Even when everything around us may be changing, His steadfast remains.