Two Things That Cannot Change

Wherein God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us. (Hebrews 6:17-18)

God does not just make promises; He backs up all His promises with an oath. He does this because He wants you to have something so solid, so unshakeable, that nothing life throws at you could move you away from it. The writer of Hebrews mentions that these are two immutable things: the promise He made and the oath He swore.

Immutable means it cannot be changed or revised. It does not have an expiration date. Men may change their minds about something. Institutions are constantly changing their direction. How our government operates may change. But the Word of God never changes. If you can find where God said it in His Word, that settles it. It is not probably, maybe, or under the right conditions. It is settled.

Heaven and earth will pass away before one Word of it fails. Because we know that, we are called to have a strong consolation. The word strong there means stable. It is not a feeling that comes and goes depending on how your week is going. It is stable, immovable comfort that is anchored to something that cannot move. That is what the Word of God produces in a believer who actually stands on it.

Then the verse explains who we are: those who have fled for refuge. We left the world's system and its way of thinking about money, sickness, the future, and what is possible. And we came to God, and we laid hold of the hope set before us. And that hope, he goes on to say, is an anchor for the soul. The only reason people lose their stability in hard times is that their hope was built on something other than the Word. When whatever their hope was built on shifted, they shifted with it. But when your hope is built on the Word of God, on what God said and swore, you have something the storm cannot reach.

Practical Application

What is your current “biggest challenge”? Identify the promise of God that confronts that problem. Write it down. Speak it out loud as a declaration of what God said and cannot take back. Build your stability on the Word, not on how things look.

Hebrews 3:14; 2 Timothy 2:13