How Can a God Who Doesn't Change Answer Prayers?

God said, “I am the LORD, I do not change” (Malachi 3:6). While this is an incredibly comforting truth (e.g., in this passage, God’s inability to change kept the “sons of Jacob” from being “consumed”), it presents a challenge to believers: if God doesn’t change, how can He answer our prayers? Should we assume when God answers our prayers positively that He was really going to do whatever we asked all along and that our prayers therefore do not matter?

Let’s step aside from prayer for a moment to consider whether or not we understand the concept presented in Malachi 3:6 and passages like it properly. Consider for a moment the account of another minor prophet named Jonah. Jonah was told to go to Nineveh with a very clear and seemingly unchangeable message: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (Jonah 3:4). There doesn’t seem to be any if’s, and’s, or but’s there; there’s no condition placed upon this destruction and no opportunity described for Nineveh to repent and receive a different outcome. However, “Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them” (Jonah 3:5), and afterwards, “God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it” (Jonah 3:10). We can already conclude from this passage that God’s inability to change doesn’t mean that what we do is irrelevant; if Nineveh had not repented, it really would have been overthrown.

Jonah 3:4 represents the will of God relative to the Ninevites. Though in Jonah’s preaching there weren’t any caveats, it’s clear that this declaration represented what I’m going to call God’s conditional will: that is, that Jonah’s words represented what would have happened without Nineveh’s repentance or change. When Nineveh changed its behavior, it changed the way they stood before God. And, since the Lord is, as Jonah said, a “gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm,” their change allowed God to change His will toward them (Jonah 4:2). This illustrates one aspect of God’s will displayed in the Bible, but there are at least two other dimensions of God’s will to consider.

Let’s next consider God’s revealed will. To me, God’s revealed will represents what God has revealed through His inspired Word, the Bible. When I think of the inspired words of the Bible, I think of a message that has been “once and for all delivered” (Jude 1:3), a message that like God cannot change and that brings a curse to those who attempt to do so (Galatians 1:6-10). Of course, you could argue that Jonah 3:4 was also God’s revealed will (it’s even in the Bible!), but I tend to believe there’s a different dynamic at work between inspired prophets like Jonah and his audiences as compared to us and the Bible today. Before God in His wisdom determined that the gift of prophecy would “fail” and “be done away” (1 Corinthians 13:8, 10), those who exercised this gift offered an ongoing communication from God to man. Now that the word has been “delivered,” again, “once and for all,” we shouldn’t expect it to change under any circumstance. Instead, like the Ninevites, we should change ourselves in response to it.

There’s one more aspect of the will of God to consider, something I’m going to call God’s final will. The final will of God operates a lot like the revealed will of God in that it doesn’t change regardless of what people do. I sometimes use Moses’ exchanges with Pharaoh to illustrate it. When Moses told Pharaoh, “Let my people go” (Exodus 5:1; 7:16; 8:1, 8, 20; 9:1, 13; 10:3) it seems like a command was being given and that Pharaoh had a choice as to whether or not he was going to obey it. In actuality though, God had already determined that his people were going to go out of Egypt; in fact, He determined it before they were even in Egypt (Genesis 15:13-14)! Pharaoh really did not have a choice; Israel was going to leave. Likewise, there are times when God has determined something that human activity cannot change.

So, where does prayer fit in? It stands to reason that if God’s revealed will cannot change that it would be wrong to pray in opposition to it. I think this is exactly what led John to warn us not to pray for forgiveness for a “sin leading to death,” which I believe to be unrepentant sin (1 John 5:16-17). The revealed will of God has already determined that such sins will not be forgiven, so it would be wrong to pray contrary to that will. However, in that same text John says, “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him” (1 John 5:14-15). This reminds us that though there is a revealed will of God that won’t change, it’s revealed in God’s will that He wants us to pray and to ask for things, and that, contingent upon our asking, He will grant us what we ask. Clearly, prayer affects God’s circumstantial will. Just as Nineveh’s repentance led God to change His behavior towards them, so too our prayer leads God to change His behavior towards us.

James is quite helpful in illustrating this point. First, he warns us that sometimes we “do not have because [we] do not ask” (James 4:2). Second, he warns us that it is possible to “ask and… not receive” by asking “amiss,” effectively, praying against the revealed will of God, in this case, relative to our behavior. However, he later adds just how powerful the prayer of a “righteous man,” a person who is living and praying in line with God’s revealed will, is: “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain; and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth produced its fruit” (James 5:16-18). Clearly, prayer “avails much”! Evidently, without Elijah’s prayer, the weather cycle would have continued as per normal.

Prayer does not give us carte blanche before God’s throne though. Remember, there is a final will of God to be considered, that is, there are things that God has determined will happen regardless of what anyone does. Is it wrong to pray about those things? Should we interpret a “no” answer in prayer as being something contrary to God’s final will? The revealed will of God gives a resounding “no” in answer to these questions. In fact, Jesus taught on multiple occasions that in the absence of revelation we should pray with persistence (Luke 11:5-13; 18:1-8; 21:36; cf. Romans 12:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:17). Paul adds that when “we do not know what we should pray for as we ought” that “the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us” (Romans 8:26). We never have to fear that we might be praying against God’s final will.

So, how does all of this reconcile with God’s unchanging nature? It actually does so in a beautiful way. The Bible reveals emphatically that God desires to bless us but that His greatest blessings are contingent upon our behavior. As Christians, we may, “come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need,” knowing that a God who “is the same yesterday, today, and forever” will always be there, waiting to help. (Hebrews 4:16; 13:8). What a blessing!

-Patrick Swayne  
patrick@tftw.org