We live in a world that is constantly revising its moral and ethical norms, usually in favour of progressivism. We’ve even come to a point where it is contentious to offer a definition of the word “woman.” While society celebrates its insistence that everything is plastic, malleable, and in flux, God’s standards don’t change with the times. He is and forever will be just and holy, to pick just two of his attributes. Therefore even if the world continues down the road of increasingly skewed ethics, especially around sexuality, we can be sure that what God finds pleasing and consistent with his will hasn’t changed.

We live in a world that is continually changing, even our moral standards are changing. Change is part of life. It is part of what it means to be human. Without change we cannot progress. Simultaneously, because of it we all have the potential to regress. This is one of the biggest distinctions between God and us. For God doesn’t change. He is what theologians call immutable. And this is what I will be reflecting on in this article.  
Reflecting on the distinction between God and creation, one psalmist writes: “Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end” (Psalm 102:26-27; Hebrews 1:10-12). This passage shows the unchanging nature of God contrast with creation. It shows that unlike everything else, which will perish and fade with time, God isn’t subject to change.
How Does an Immutable God Relate to Changing Beings?
The Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) says that God is “working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory” (3.5).
Read More
Related Posts:

Over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining “reasonably foreseeable” death. Then, last year, the government amended the original legislation, stating that one could apply for MAiD even if one’s death were not reasonably foreseeable. This second track of applicants simply had to show that they had a condition that was “intolerable to them” and could not “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.”

On September 7, Margaret Marsilla called Joshua Tepper, the doctor who planned to kill her son.
Marsilla is 46, and she lives outside Toronto with her husband and daughter, a nursing student. She had known that her 23-year-old son, Kiano Vafaeian, was depressed—he was diabetic and had lost his vision in one eye, and he didn’t have a job or girlfriend or much of a future—and Marsilla asked her daughter to log onto Kiano’s account. (Kiano had given his sister access so she could help him with his email.) He never shared anything with his mother—what he was thinking, where he was going—and Marsilla was scared.
That was when Marsilla learned that Kiano had applied and, in late July, been approved for “medical assistance in dying,” aka MAiD, aka assisted suicide.
His death was scheduled for September 22.
In a September 7 email from Tepper, the doctor, to Kiano and Tekla Hendrickson, the executive director of MAiDHouse, the Toronto facility where Kiano’s death would take place, Tepper mapped out the schedule:
“Hii,” he emailed. (Apparently, Tepper did not use spell check.) “I am confirming the following timing: Please arrive at 8:30 am. I will ask for the nurse at 8:45 am and I will start the procedure at around 9:00 am. Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.”
The procedure entailed administering two drugs. First, a coma-inducing agent. Then, a neuromuscular blocker that would stop Kiano’s breathing. He would be dead in five to ten minutes.
Apparently, Kiano wanted to bring a dog with him. In an email to him that same day, Hendrickson said: “Dogs are welcome in the space as long as there is someone there who will be responsible for them during the time at MAiDHouse.”
Marsilla was terrified. She had tried to do everything for her son, but it had been rough for him. She and his dad had gotten divorced when Kiano was still a kid. On his sixteenth birthday, she had given him a BMW. When he was 17, he had been in a bad car accident. He wasn’t up to college. He smoked a ton of weed. He’d lived with his dad, then with his mom, and now with her sister, Kiano’s aunt.
Wherever he went, whatever he did—he was unhappy. Going blind in his left eye, this past April, was the tipping point.
The day after she discovered the email, Marsilla called Tepper. She pretended to be a MAiD applicant. She called herself Joann and said she “wanted to go through the whole process in general, from A to Zed, before the Christmas holidays—if you know what I mean.” Tepper indicated he understood.
Tepper, sounding matter of fact, ran through the list of requirements: “You have to be over 18. You have to have an OHIP card.” (He was referring to her Ontario Health Insurance Plan.) “You have to have suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that’s acceptable to you.”
Marsilla, who recorded the conversation and shared the five-and-a-half-minute recording with Common Sense, told Tepper that she was diabetic and blind—more or less, her son’s condition. Tepper said he’d “had patients a lot similar to you.”
Then, the doctor said, “If you wanted, I could do a formal assessment with you.” Marsilla asked if she should come in. Tepper replied: “We do them remotely, often by video of some type: WhatsApp, Zoom, FaceTime, something like that.”
A few minutes later, Marsilla hung up. She had just over two weeks to stop her son from dying.
“Poised to Become the Most Permissive Euthanasia Regime in the World”
When we think of assisted suicide or euthanasia, we imagine a limited number of elderly people with late-stage cancer or advanced ALS in severe pain. The argument for helping them die is clear: Death is imminent. Why should they be forced to suffer?
In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional. In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act. MAiD was now the law of the land. Anyone who could show that their death was “reasonably foreseeable” was eligible. In this respect, Canada was hardly alone: The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, allow assisted suicide. So do ten states in the U.S.
In 2017, the first full year in which MAiD, which is administered by provincial governments, was in operation, 2,838 people opted for assisted suicide, according to a government report. By 2021, that figure had jumped to 10,064—accounting for more than 3 percent of all deaths in Canada that year.
There have been a total of 31,664 MAiD deaths and the large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died.
Read More
Related Posts:

When the angel stirred the waters, the only person healed was the first person to enter the water. And the sicker a person was, the less likely he would be able to enter the water first. These limitations point to the fact that the ministries of the Old Testament were shadows pointing to a coming greater ministry, the ministry of Jesus Christ.

The passage John 5:1-16 is one of those rare instances where some translations include and some translations omit an extended portion of a passage. The words at issue are the last phrase in verse 3 and the entirety of verse 4, where we read, “waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had.” This text is included in the Geneva Bible, the King James Bible and the New King James Version. Most modern translations, however, omit these words, and most people just accept this omission. The reason commonly given is that the latter half of verse 3 and all of verse 4 are missing in the oldest and best manuscripts. In my opinion, that statement is not totally correct. Some early manuscripts do omit the latter half of verse 3 and all of verse 4, but I don’t think that they are all among the better manuscripts. On the contrary, let me share with you what Bruce Metzger, perhaps the foremost authority on ancient New Testament manuscripts, says about one of these early manuscripts that omit verse 4 of our passage for today (D, Codex Bezae). He says, “No known manuscript has so many and such remarkable variations from what is usually taken to be the normal New Testament text. [This manuscript’s] special characteristic is the free addition (and occasional omission) of words, sentences, and even incidents.”[i] Some of the other “oldest and best” manuscripts that omit verse 4 have some serious irregularities as well.
Now what is at issue here? As to our understanding of the event recorded in the text, even those who omit verse 4 tend to recognize the verse as an uninspired record of an ancient tradition. They tend to acknowledge that they can’t understand verse 7 without the information that is found in verse 4. In verse 7, the lame man talks about the stirring of the water and about others stepping into the stirred water before he is able to do so. Verse 7 doesn’t make any sense apart from the information that we find in verse 4 about the occasional supernatural angelic activity at the pool. Everyone needs verse 4 in order to understand what verse 7 is talking about. Those who accept verse 4 as part of the inspired text believe that an angel actually did on occasion stir up the waters and heal someone at that pool. Those who regard verse 4 as merely an uninspired ancient tradition often agree with this, but not always. They may regard the ancient tradition as merely a superstitious myth that drew people to this pool. If verse 4 is only an uninspired record of an ancient tradition, then they are free to regard the account of the angel that way as well.
What is of greater concern is that this dispute about the reliability of the latter half of verse 3 and all of verse 4 of our text might cause some to question the reliability of the New Testament in general. No, the Greek New Testament is by far the best attested ancient writing in existence. There are over 5,000 ancient Greek documents, 8,000 ancient Latin documents that are translations of the Greek and many other ancient documents that are translations into other languages.[ii] In addition, there are many quotations from the New Testament in the surviving writings of early Christian leaders. No other ancient writing comes anywhere near such a vast array of surviving manuscripts and witnesses. Just to give you a basis for comparison, consider Caesar’s Gallic Wars, a classic Latin text which I had to struggle with when I took high school Latin. There are only nine or ten good ancient manuscripts that have survived, and the oldest was copied about 900 years after Julius Caesar wrote the book.[iii] I could give you other similar examples. Again, there is no other ancient document with a surviving textual record anywhere near like that of the Greek New Testament.
Also, in the vast multitude of these hand copied documents, there is a strong overall consensus as to what is the original text of the books of the New Testament. God has preserved the text not by making every copyist infallible but by providing us with a vast multitude of documents with “a high degree of textual uniformity.” And this high degree of textual uniformity increases significantly when we limit ourselves to the vast majority of the documents that are in large agreement with each other.[iv] Yes, there are those accidental slips that occur when someone copies any long document by hand, but these tend not to be an obstacle to discerning the original text, especially when multiple copies of the document are available.
If that is the case, then you might wonder why there is some question about verse 4 in our text for today. The majority of the copyists did a good job in faithfully copying the content of earlier copies. Yet early on there were a few copyists in certain regions who felt free to expand the text here and there, to add an occasional something that was not in the text that they were copying from. In response to these few early expanded manuscripts, there were some copyists in Egypt who tried to purge the text. Too often these Egyptian copyists left the extraneous expansions in and took out instead portions of the true text. Yet even these manuscripts with this occasional foolish unauthorized editing tend to agree in large part with the consensus text that is in the majority of the manuscripts. And these manuscripts where the text has been inappropriately changed in some places can often be identified because they do not agree with one another in the changes that have been made. For example, the vast majority of the manuscripts containing our passage for today call the pool Bethesda. Yet in a few older manuscripts, the pool is called Bethsaida or Bethzatha or Belzetha. These few texts agree in changing the name of the pool but can’t agree on a replacement name. Disagreements such as that are a good indication that some copyists did indeed make some changes in the text that they were copying. Contrary to what many today claim, these few manuscripts which leave out verse 4 are not among the better manuscripts.
Let me give you one interesting piece of evidence for the reliability of Bethesda, which is the majority text reading, as the name of the pool. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the mid-twentieth century, and among these ancient scrolls is a scroll made out of copper. This copper scroll is dated between A.D. 35 and 65, which would be sometime after the death of Jesus and before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. This very ancient copper scroll existed long before the surviving Greek New Testament manuscripts were copied, and it confirms that the name of the pool was Bethesda, the name that we find in the majority of the ancient Greek manuscripts.[v]
Most of these ancient manuscripts do include verse 4 of our passage, but there are a few early manuscripts that omit verse 4. Yet a manuscript can be an early copy and also be the work of a less than reliable copyist. Age does not necessarily guarantee reliability. In addition, verse 4 has its own early witnesses. Tertullian in the third century wrote about the water stirred up by an angel in John chapter 5 and thus testified to the validity of verse 4. Verse 4 is also included in the translations of the Gospel according to John into Syriac and Latin that date back to the second century. So there is ample ancient testimony for the inclusion of verse 4.
Read More
Related Posts: