Eternal Equivalence Theorem
God is unchanging
God tells us throughout Biblical and modern scripture that He is unchanging. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.
And if there were miracles wrought then, why has God ceased to be a God of miracles and yet be an unchangeable Being? And behold, I say unto you he changeth not; if so he would cease to be God; and he ceaseth not to be God, and is a God of miracles.
For I know that God is not a partial God, neither a changeable being; but he is unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity.
Eternal attributes taken together
This is profound when taking it with God’s time transcendence. Why?
What is change? Change is to transform from one state to another across time. You need time to displace one state from another. Without time, you cannot have two states for an object. You need time to change your mind. You need time to learn something, to do something, to go somewhere. All change requires time.
How can a living being such as God not change? Change is part of life. A being that does not change is a dead being. Yet God claims to be unchanging now and never will change. How can that be?
I’m going to go out on a limb now and speculate that I have come to believe that unchanging is an eternal attribute that is equivalent to the attribute of transcending time. A being who transcends time is no longer subject to time and therefore cannot change. Now, I cannot fathom what life without time is really like any more than I can imagine what life without change is like. But the two strike me as equivalent states because once time isn’t your master, change (which takes time) has stopped as well.
Learning also takes time. A being who literally has all the time in the universe before Him can be described as all-knowing to time-bound creatures such as ourselves because anything we can or may possibly know is already observable to someone who dwells outside of time. We take time to learn something, while He doesn’t. We can faithfully ask God anything, and He can tell us truthfully, and we have full confidence that He is correct because He sees it.
Change requires time, and time guarantees change. Learning requires time, and being subject to time guarantees you’ll learn something.
This leads me to define what I call the theorem of eternal equivalence, which states that a being must either have all of these attributes or none of them: omniscience, time transcendence, and unchangeability.
omniscience === time transcending === unchanging.
Eternal Equivalence Theorum
I might one day add omnipotence to that theorem, but I haven’t figured out the arguments to get there yet.