I also want to explore a further possibility: that God grows in the depth of how He engages His creation—in perspective and relationship, not in power or holiness. This isn't a hill I'm prepared to die on. But it might be one I'm willing to live on. A responsive Father makes sense of encounters that a frozen philosophical picture of perfection explains away.

Let the conversations be real

Moses pleads for Israel, and God changes His announced course. Amos intercedes against two judgments, and twice the Lord relents. Nineveh turns from evil, and the destruction Jonah announced does not happen. Hezekiah weeps after being told he will die, and God grants him fifteen more years.

Abraham bargains over Sodom. God does not merely tolerate Abraham talking while an unalterable script runs in the background. He agrees to the terms of the conversation.

These accounts form a pattern. Relationship affects what happens next.

The Hebrew nāḥam includes changing one's mind, being moved to reconsider, regret, and reversing course. Rendering it “relent” must not become a way of protecting a theology from the plain force of the response. God cares enough to listen and loves enough to change course.

That does not make Him fickle. Responsive love and instability are different things.

What about the passages saying He does not change?

First Samuel 15 holds both claims in the same chapter. Verse 29 says God will not lie or change His mind like a man. Verse 11 records His regret at making Saul king.

Samuel is not giving Saul a philosophical definition of God. He is announcing that Saul's removal will stand. Bargaining will not undo it. God is not a politician who wavers under pressure. Yet that same account presents real divine regret. We have to hold both: steadfastness and response.

Malachi supplies another important context:

“For I, the LORD, do not change; therefore you, the sons of Jacob, have not come to an end.”

— Malachi 3:6

Despite Israel's failures, God has not abandoned His covenant commitment. His mercy has held back destruction. That is the unchanging thing in view—not a rule forbidding Him to respond to people.

God is steadfast toward relationship, not static within it.

Covenants move the relationship forward

Jesus tells His disciples, “No longer do I call you slaves,” but friends. “No longer” marks a before and after. This is movement toward intimacy, trust, and shared life.

The same movement appears elsewhere: punishment gives way to restoration; external law to internal guidance; an exclusive covenant to global inclusion. These are not cosmetic changes. They change how God engages humanity.

Hebrews makes the covenant question unavoidable:

“If that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion for a second.”

— Hebrews 8:7

God meets people where they are, then moves the relationship forward. His faithful love and purpose to bless do not waver. His posture, approach, and terms of engagement do change to bring us deeper into union.

The incarnation brings this closer still. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. He learned obedience through suffering. In Christ, God entered human limitation from the inside—not as theater, but as participation. His holiness and love did not change. He chose the vulnerability of learning through our condition.

That is the ground for exploring divine growth, not an excuse to imagine a God becoming less trustworthy.

Who taught us that perfection cannot move?

The demand that divine perfection mean frozen sameness did not come from watching God negotiate with Abraham or respond to Moses. It came through philosophical categories that became embedded in Western Christian theology, particularly through Augustine.

I am not giving a complete account of Platonism. Its long tradition allows growth and becoming in creatures. Nor did Augustine accept every part of it without criticism. The issue is what happened when categories of an immutable first principle became the controlling description of the living God.

Augustine carried forward timelessness, impassibility, and immutability. In City of God, he describes God's will as eternal rather than something that can be new or subject to change. In Confessions, yesterday and tomorrow are present to the God who remains the same.

That framework became more than an abstract theory. It shaped how generations imagined prayer, covenant, worship, and friendship with God. Scripture's real dialogue could be recast as the appearance of response from a God who could not truly be moved.

This is the practical problem. If nothing we say can genuinely affect His response, prayer starts to resemble reciting a decree rather than talking with a Father. If covenant cannot develop, relationship becomes an eternal bureaucracy.

Recovering divine responsiveness is not abandoning faithfulness. It is recovering the God whose love speaks, listens, and moves toward people.

Maturity, not immobility

In Matthew 5:48, teleios points toward wholeness and maturity brought to its intended fullness. Jesus calls us into mature love, not frozen stillness.

Perhaps God's perfection is better understood through that fullness of relationship. Perhaps deepening engagement is not a defect in God, but something profoundly divine.

The distinction remains essential: God changes, but never in His heart for people. He adjusts means, timing, and terms to draw us toward the end He has always wanted—union.

We do not have to trust Him because He is incapable of being moved. We can trust Him because His faithful love is precisely why He moves toward us.

Discussion

• How does the whole of 1 Samuel 15 change the way you read divine regret and steadfastness?
• What changes in prayer when God's responsiveness is real rather than staged?

Adapted from Chris Drake's Dismantling Religion, Chapter 3, “The God Who Grows.”