With God, there is no room for improvement. He has always been, and always will be, utterly and delightfully perfect in every way.

I recently watched a short film that still haunts me. It was actually from a comedy show, but it had such a sense of sadness to it.
A man goes into a train station. At the counter, he holds up a photo for the ticket agent and says, “This is a bit of a strange question, but can you tell me how to get there?”
The ticket agent looks at the photo and she says: “Oh yes, that’s Millport. What you’ve got to do is get the train to a place called Largs, then you get the ferry . . .” And the man says: “No, I know how to get to Millport. But can you tell me how to get to there?” And he points to the photo again.
He says: “I took that photo when I was about 16; that’s me there. That summer was amazing. Hanging out with friends all day, not worrying about tomorrow, just laughing, having a great time, jumping off the pier, swimming around, and it was like summer seemed to go on forever.” And after he reminisces about it for a while, he goes quiet. And then he says: “I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to be there. So can you tell me . . . how do I get there?”
And she looks at him and says, “You can’t do that; I’m sorry.”
So he says, “Ah, just give me a return to Largs then.”
Places never stop changing. People too. They can’t stay the same, and neither can we. Often, that simple fact is enough to break our heart.
But there is One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
When we talk about God like this, we’re talking about His immutability. Immutability is the biblical idea that God is unchanging in His character, will, and His promises.
James chapter 1, verse 17 puts it like this: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”
Numbers chapter 2 says, “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.” In Malachi chapter 3, God says, “I the Lord do not change.” Hebrews talks about “the unchangeable character of his purpose,” and in 2 Timothy we read that “if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for [God] cannot deny himself.” (In other words, God cannot deny His own immutability. His unchangeability is unchangeable.)
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It’s also not an error that the gospel writers sometimes order their events differently. The authors make no claim to include all the events of Jesus’ life or to put those events in strict chronological order. In fact, each writer wrote with a slightly different purpose in mind and deliberately arranged the material to that end. Matthew, for example, wrote for a Jewish audience, so he emphasizes the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. Mark, on the other hand, wrote for a non-Jewish audience and deliberately leaves out many of those details. 

Theologians call it inerrancy. The idea that the Bible is completely without error in everything it says. Whether it speaks of geographical, historical, or theological details, it is completely trustworthy.
Now, some folks have a problem with the idea of the Bible’s inerrancy. They think they’ve spotted errors in Scripture. And very often, it’s because they’ve not understood some important, commonsense clarifications of what an “error” actually is.
Firstly, it’s not an error if it’s not in the original documents. Especially where numbers are concerned, there are some errors in every Hebrew and Greek copy of the Bible. Unlike the original writers of Scripture, the copyists weren’t guided into “all truth” by the Holy Spirit. Copy out the forty chapters of Exodus, and chances are you’ll have introduced one or two errors into the text. (Hopefully it wouldn’t be a major blunder, like the 1631 edition of the King James Bible that commanded its readers, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”) Thankfully, comparing the truly vast number of surviving copies of Scripture enable textual critics to reconstruct with tremendous accuracy what the original documents said before they were copied. Inerrancy relates to what the biblical authors actually wrote, and we’re able to discern what that was even though all we have are copies of what they wrote.
Second, It’s not an error if we misunderstand the author’s intention. When you open up a newspaper, you’ll see many different kinds of writing. Appearing alongside factual reports of world events, there may be celebrity gossip, infographics, stock market gains and losses, football statistics, book reviews, cartoons, and weather forecasts. Instinctively, few of us read a cartoon in the same way we read a war correspondent. In the same way, biblical authors write in a number of different genres, and they expect us to read each one accordingly. If we read a war correspondent as if he were a cartoonist and wonder why his writing isn’t funny at all, the mistake will be ours rather than his.
Also, biblical authors sometimes use metaphors and similes that aren’t intended to be taken literally. When the newspaper’s sporting correspondent informs us that a particular player is currently “on fire,” we shouldn’t become alarmed and call the fire department.
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We sometimes talk about kings and queens “ascending to the throne,” and this—the ascension of Christ—is the supreme example. It’s nothing less than the visible demonstration that Jesus Christ is now enthroned in heaven. So when we talk about the ascension, the word isn’t simply referring to the physical “rising up” of Christ. He is also ascending to the throne. The ascension is the coronation, the crowning, of the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords.

In many countries, Ascension Day is considered to be so important that it is celebrated as a national holiday—though not in the U.K. (where I’m from), and I think that’s contributed to the fact that the ascension seems to have slipped off the radar for many people, even professing Christians, many of whom don’t quite know what to do with it.
And yet the great church father Augustine said that Ascension Day should be the greatest of all Christian festivals. He said, “Unless the Savior had ascended into heaven, His nativity would have come to nothing.” What did he mean?
The ascension is described like this at the end of Luke’s gospel:
[Jesus] led [the apostles] out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.
Luke adds more detail at the start of the book of Acts:
When [the apostles] had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
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As the late Professor John Murray of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia put it: “The work produced by the Westminster Assembly has lived and will permanently live. The reason is obvious. The work was wrought with superb care, patience, precision, and above all with earnest and intelligent devotion to the Word of God and zeal for His glory. Sanctified theological learning has never been brought to bear with greater effect upon the formulation of the Christian Faith. 

Let me take you back to seventeenth-century England—1643, to be precise.
King Charles I was increasingly hostile to the Puritans and their Reformed theology. And members of Parliament—many of whom were Puritans and Puritan sympathizers—were becoming increasingly aggrieved by the king. They were convinced that there was still a lot of work to be done in the Church of England, that it still needed to be reformed in light of Scripture.
Although the English Church had separated itself from Rome during the English Reformation more than one hundred years earlier, the Puritans felt it hadn’t gone far enough. So, with that in mind, Parliament called upon Reformed theologians to meet at Westminster Abbey. Their job was to advise Parliament on issues of worship, doctrine, government, and discipline in the Church of England.
Despite a royal proclamation prohibiting its meeting, the assembly first met on 1st July, 1643, at the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey, before later moving to the abbey’s Jerusalem Chamber.
This Westminster Assembly consisted of 151 men, which included twenty laypeople from the House of Commons and ten from the House of Lords.
The assembly lasted officially until 1649, although it continued to meet occasionally until 1652. And those present certainly did not slack during that time. Over the course of the six years between 1643 and 1649, they met 1,163 times.
The documents they produced are known as the Westminster Standards, namely:

the Westminster Confession of Faith
the Larger and Shorter Catechisms
the Directory for the Public Worship of God (which is a sort of liturgical manual)
and the Form of Presbyterial Church Government (which describes how churches ought to be structured and governed)

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 It can sometimes seem as if Christians don’t have permission to be unhappy, to have regrets, to feel broken, to express deep sorrow, or to lament. Which would have been news to the writers of Scripture. The major giveaway being that there is literally a book of the Bible called “Lamentation”. The Psalms – the Bible’s very own songbook – has an entire genre called “Psalms of lament”. There are more psalms of lament than there are psalms of any other kind – in fact, a whole third of them are lamentation of one kind of another.

Like many teenagers who had a lovely upbringing in a safe suburb with kind parents and many friends, I was often miserable.
I spent many evenings with my cassette walkman, just the two of us, listening to doomy  English music like Depeche Mode, and thinking that no one else understood, or could possibly understand, just how deep I was. I specifically recall one of my friends’ mums looking at my miserable face and saying, “Cheer up, it might never happen.” To which I responded, “Too late. It already has.” And I was so pleased with this response that I probably would have smiled, had smiling not already become physically impossible for me.
There is a kind of sadness or melancholy which is delicious and addictive, which can make us feel special and, yes, even superior to others. A kind of misery that, if we give ourselves over to it, tips into self-indulgence and self-pity.
But you can also fall off the horse the other way. You can mistake “being chipper” for being godly. You can start to believe that Christians have no right to be sad about anything, because everything will be okily dokily in the end.
I’m afraid this poor theology has infected many of our churches, and it’s nowhere more obvious than in the songs we often sing. Some songs have so little gravity that NASA could use them to train astronauts in.
It’s not we that shouldn’t sing songs of joy, of course we should. But where are the songs of lament? It can sometimes seem as if Christians don’t have permission to be unhappy, to have regrets, to feel broken, to express deep sorrow, or to lament. Which would have been news to the writers of Scripture. The major giveaway being that there is literally a book of the Bible called “Lamentation”.
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The Athanasian Creed, following the teaching of Scripture, calls Christ “perfect God and perfect man.” It beautifully affirms that in the incarnation there was a “taking on” of a human nature rather than the divine nature somehow mutating into a human one.

Athanasius was one of the early church’s most significant theologians.
He was born at the end of the third century in the city of Alexandria, which was a cultural hot spot in the Roman Empire.
Not much is known about Athanasius’ upbringing or education, but he started working for the bishop of Alexandria (who was called Alexander, confusingly) and eventually became bishop of Alexandria himself.
When Athanasius was about twenty years old, a dangerous heresy arose. And it was a heresy he would famously oppose for the rest of his life—at great cost to himself, given how popular the teaching became. It wasn’t until the very end of his life that the false teaching was finally put to death. In fact, Athanasius is often depicted in paintings as standing over a defeated heretic.
The heretic in question was an Alexandrian deacon called Arius, forty years the senior of Athanasius, whose teaching became known as Arianism. Arianism taught that although Christ was without doubt an exalted creature, He was nevertheless only a creature. According to Arius, the Son of God was made by God the Father, and therefore was less than God. That is, the Son of God did not exist as a coeternal member of the Godhead from all eternity.
The popularity of this teaching compelled early church leaders to assemble in Nicaea (in modern-day Turkey) in 325 AD. There they formulated the Nicene Creed, which clearly set out a biblical answer to Arianism: Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, has the same substance or essence as the Father (the key word they used was homoousios, a Greek word meaning “of one substance”). The Son of God is (quote) “begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.” In other words, the Bible teaches that all three persons of the Trinity—Father, Son and Spirit—are equal in being and eternality.
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