In today’s sermon text, Yahweh tells Moses that He performs signs so that Israel can recount His works in the ears of “sons and sons of sons.”  A few verses later, Yahweh says that He brings more locusts than “your fathers and the fathers of your fathers have seen.”  God is eternal, and that means His acts are not confined to the present, but affect the past for the sake of the future.

Past and future don’t have the same status for Yahweh.

When He talks about sons, He emphasizes that His works in Egypt will be recounted in the future.  When He talks about the fathers, He emphasizes that He is doing something no one has seen before.  His works in the present echo and reecho unto ages of ages.  But by those same acts, He demonstrates that His creativity is infinite, and that He possesses inexhaustible capacity to surprise.

To know Yahweh the Creator is know that He is a destabilizing power in the world.  This doesn’t mean He is arbitrary.  But His non-arbitrariness is not a continuation of what He has done in the past.  It is His unwavering commitment to the future.  God’s immutability is not immobility, but His unswerving determination to fulfill His promises, no matter what.  Yahweh is not bound by the past; rather, He has bound Himself to a future of His own choosing.

This may seem like an abstract piece of theology, but nothing could be more practical.  Because God is eternal, He can make a new covenant with the house of Israel.  Because Yahweh is not bound to the past, He can forgive sins.  Because He is this kind of God, He can turn creation to chaos, and then call the dead back to life.  To confess the eternal God is to confess the God of the gospel.