Chapter 18

God's Temporal Actions in the Old Testament

Covenant, Repentance, Judgment, and Salvation History

Introduction: A God Who Acts in the Flow of History

Think about your own life story for a moment. You were born at a particular time and place. You grew up. You made choices. People came into your life, and some left. Things happened to you — some wonderful, some painful — and you responded to each one as it came. Your story is not a still photograph frozen in a single moment. It is a story, with a beginning, a middle, and chapters still being written. It unfolds across time.

Now here is the remarkable thing about the Old Testament: it tells the story of God in much the same way. The God we meet in the Hebrew Scriptures is not a distant, motionless deity sitting outside the flow of events, watching everything from a timeless perch. He is a God who acts. He calls Abram out of Ur at a particular moment in history. He strikes Egypt with plagues in a specific sequence. He parts the Red Sea on a definite day. He gives the law at Mount Sinai at a fixed point in time. He makes promises and then — years, decades, even centuries later — He keeps them. He warns nations, and when they repent, He changes His announced course of action. When they refuse to repent, He carries out judgment. The God of the Old Testament is not timeless and static. He is dynamic, responsive, and deeply involved in the unfolding drama of history.

This chapter explores that dynamic involvement. Our thesis is straightforward: the Old Testament is saturated with accounts of God acting temporally — making covenants, responding to prayer, changing His course of action in response to human behavior, executing judgment, and unfolding a salvation history that develops over centuries — all of which make far better sense on a temporalist reading than an atemporalist one. If God truly exists outside of time in a frozen, changeless "eternal now," then much of what the Old Testament tells us about Him becomes difficult to explain. But if God genuinely experiences temporal sequence — a real "before" and "after" in His own life — then the Old Testament portrait of Him is exactly what we would expect.

We will trace three major threads of evidence. First, we will examine God's covenant-making, which is inherently temporal. Second, we will do a detailed study of the nacham (נָחַם) passages — those remarkable texts where God is said to "relent," "repent," or "change His mind" — and wrestle with what they tell us about God's relationship to time. Third, we will trace the broad sweep of salvation history — the exodus, the conquest, the exile, the return — as a story of God acting at particular times in response to particular situations. Along the way, I will engage fairly with the atemporalist response and explain why I find it ultimately unsatisfying.

Before we begin, a word about what this chapter does not do. The creation narrative of Genesis 1–2 was treated in depth in Chapter 17, so we will not revisit it here. The Psalms and Wisdom Literature are the focus of Chapter 19, and the prophetic foreknowledge passages belong to Chapter 20. This chapter's task is to focus on the vast middle section of the Old Testament story — from Noah through the end of the pre-exilic and exilic period — and to show that God's engagement with Israel and the nations is profoundly, irreducibly temporal.

Part One: God the Covenant-Maker — A God Who Binds Himself in Time

If there is one theme that ties the entire Old Testament together, it is covenant. The Hebrew word berit (בְּרִית) appears nearly three hundred times in the Old Testament, and the concept shapes everything from Genesis to Malachi. A covenant, in its simplest form, is a binding agreement between two parties — a solemn promise, often sealed with a ceremony, that creates a lasting relationship with obligations on one or both sides. In the ancient Near East, covenants were the glue that held societies together, governing relationships between kings and vassals, between clans and families, and — most importantly for our purposes — between God and His people.¹

Here is what matters for the God-and-time question: covenants are inherently temporal. A covenant is made at a point in time. It looks backward to a relationship that led up to it, and it looks forward to a future that the covenant is meant to shape. A covenant involves promises, and promises take time to fulfill. A covenant involves obligations, and obligations are carried out over time. A covenant can be kept, broken, renewed, or expanded — all of which are temporal actions. If God exists outside of time in a changeless "eternal now," the very concept of God making a covenant becomes deeply puzzling. A timeless God does not have a "before the covenant" and an "after the covenant." He does not wait to see whether His covenant partner keeps faith. He does not respond to covenant-breaking with grief or judgment. All of these are temporal realities.

Let us trace the major covenants of the Old Testament and note how each one reveals a God who acts in time.

The Noahic Covenant: A Promise After Judgment

The first explicit covenant in Scripture comes after the flood. God had observed the wickedness of humanity (Gen 6:5), experienced grief (Gen 6:6 — a passage we will examine in detail below), and acted in judgment by sending the flood. Then, after the waters receded, God made a covenant with Noah and with every living creature:

"I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth." And God said, "This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth." (Genesis 9:11–13, ESV)

Notice the temporal markers. God establishes the covenant — an action that occurs at a particular moment. The covenant includes a promise about the future: "never again." It includes a sign — the rainbow — that will serve as a reminder across time. And God Himself says, "When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant" (Gen 9:14–15). The language of "remembering" is striking. A timeless God does not "remember" anything, because remembering involves retrieving something from the past. But a temporal God can look at the rainbow and recall His promise — not because He might forget it, but because the act of remembering is itself a temporal act that reconnects the present moment with the past commitment.²

The Abrahamic Covenant: A Promise That Unfolds Over Centuries

The covenant with Abraham is perhaps the most foundational covenant in the entire Bible. It begins with a call — "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you" (Gen 12:1) — and develops in stages over the course of Abraham's entire life. God does not hand Abraham a complete blueprint all at once. Instead, God reveals His plan progressively, adding detail over time.³

In Genesis 12:1–3, God promises Abraham a great nation, blessing, and a name. In Genesis 15, God appears to Abraham again, promising him innumerable descendants and giving him a land. In one of the most remarkable scenes in the Old Testament, God enacts a covenant ceremony: animals are cut in half, and a "smoking fire pot and a flaming torch" — representing God Himself — pass between the pieces (Gen 15:17). This is an ancient Near Eastern covenant ritual in which the party passing between the pieces invokes upon himself the fate of the slain animals if he breaks his word. God is binding Himself — in time, through a physical ceremony, at a particular historical moment — to keep His promise.⁴

Then in Genesis 17, God adds the sign of circumcision and reaffirms the promise, changing Abram's name to Abraham and Sarai's name to Sarah. Later still, after the near-sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah, God swears by Himself: "By myself I have sworn, declares the LORD, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you" (Gen 22:16–17). Each of these moments builds on what came before. The covenant develops. It has a history. It unfolds sequentially. A timeless God does not progressively reveal a covenant in stages. A temporal God does.

The Mosaic Covenant: Law Given at a Particular Moment

The Mosaic covenant is established at Mount Sinai, after the exodus from Egypt. Its temporal character is unmistakable. God had promised Abraham that his descendants would be enslaved in a foreign land for four hundred years — and then God would bring them out (Gen 15:13–14). The exodus is the fulfillment of that promise, arriving at the appointed time. At Sinai, God speaks the Ten Commandments directly to the people. He gives Moses the detailed law. He establishes the priesthood, the sacrificial system, and the tabernacle. All of this happens in a definite sequence of events spread over a period of time.⁵

The Mosaic covenant is explicitly bilateral and conditional. God promises blessing for obedience and cursing for disobedience (Deuteronomy 28). This conditionality is deeply temporal — it depends on what Israel does in the future. God's response is contingent on Israel's behavior. As we will see when we examine Jeremiah 18:7–10, this conditional structure is a fundamental feature of how God relates to nations across time.

The Davidic Covenant: A Promise That Points Forward

In 2 Samuel 7, God makes a covenant with David, promising that David's dynasty will endure forever and that one of David's descendants will build a house for God's name. "Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever" (2 Sam 7:16, ESV). This covenant is forward-looking. It creates an expectation, a hope, a messianic promise that will not be fulfilled for a thousand years. The entire trajectory of the Old Testament from this point forward is shaped by this covenant. The prophets look forward to the coming Davidic king. The exile is understood as a crisis for the Davidic promise. The return from exile is a partial but incomplete restoration. And ultimately, Christians confess that Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Son of David — the final fulfillment of this covenant, arriving "in the fullness of time" (Gal 4:4).⁶

The Davidic covenant, perhaps more than any other, reveals God as a being who plans across time. He makes a promise in one century and fulfills it in another. He sustains a purpose through exile, dispersion, and near-extinction. He is not timelessly decreeing all things from eternity; He is actively guiding a plan that unfolds through the twists and turns of real history.

The New Covenant: Promised Through the Prophets, Fulfilled in Christ

The prophet Jeremiah, writing in the darkest days before Jerusalem's fall, speaks of a coming "new covenant" that God will make with His people:

"Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD." (Jeremiah 31:31–32, ESV)

Notice the temporal language: "the days are coming" — this is a future event. "I will make" — future tense. God contrasts this new covenant with the old one "that I made" — past tense. The old covenant was broken — a past event. The new covenant will be different — a future reality. The temporal structure of this passage is unmistakable. God is a being who looks back on what has happened, evaluates it, and announces what He will do next. This is not the language of a timeless deity viewing everything in a single eternal instant. This is the language of a God who acts in time and across time.⁷

The Atemporalist Response to Covenant

How do atemporalists explain the temporal character of biblical covenants? The standard response appeals to divine accommodation: God describes His timeless actions in temporal language so that we can understand them. On this view, God does not really make covenants in time; He timelessly wills that certain covenant-like arrangements obtain in creation. What appears to us as a sequence of events — promise, waiting, fulfillment — is really a single, timeless divine act that manifests itself across different points in our creaturely timeline.⁸

Paul Helm, one of the most rigorous defenders of divine timelessness, has argued that divine accommodation is the necessary framework for understanding God's interactions with temporal creatures. On Helm's view, the "dialogue" between God and human beings is real, not make-believe, but the language of change in God is accommodative — it reflects how things appear from our temporal perspective, not how they are from God's timeless vantage point. Helm even acknowledges that this accommodative language is "not dispensable but necessary" — without it, a timeless God could not communicate with temporal creatures at all.⁹

I appreciate Helm's honesty about the necessity of accommodation, but I think the accommodationist strategy faces a serious problem when applied to covenants. Here is the issue: a covenant is not just language about God. A covenant is a relationship. It involves two parties. It involves mutual obligations. It involves trust, faithfulness, and the possibility of betrayal. If the temporal character of a covenant is merely accommodative — if God does not really enter into a covenant relationship with Abraham at a particular moment in time — then the covenant is not a genuine relationship at all. It is a divine monologue dressed up in relational language. And that seems to undermine the very heart of what the Old Testament is about: a God who genuinely relates to His people across time.¹⁰

As argued in Chapter 16, the accommodationist strategy proves too much. If we dismiss the temporal character of God's covenant-making as mere accommodation, we have no principled reason to stop there. God's love, His grief, His anger, His faithfulness — all of these are presented in temporal terms in the Old Testament. If temporal language is always merely accommodative, then virtually everything the Bible says about God becomes metaphor. We are left with a God about whom we can say almost nothing with confidence. I find this theologically unacceptable. The better reading — the one that takes the text at face value — is that God genuinely enters into covenant relationships in time, because God is genuinely temporal.¹¹

Part Two: The Nacham Passages — When God "Changes His Mind"

We come now to what may be the most important set of texts in the entire Old Testament for the God-and-time debate: the nacham passages. These are the texts where God is said to "regret," "relent," "be sorry," or "change His mind." They are theologically explosive because they seem to describe genuine change in God — and if God genuinely changes, then God is temporal, because change requires a before and an after.

Let me be clear about why these passages matter so much. On the classical atemporalist view, God does not change. Period. He cannot change, because He exists outside of time in a state of absolute, immutable perfection. Any language about God "changing His mind" must therefore be metaphorical, anthropomorphic, or accommodative. But if these passages describe something real about God — if God genuinely adjusts His course of action in response to human behavior — then divine timelessness is in serious trouble.

We will examine four key nacham passages in detail, and then engage with the crucial tension within 1 Samuel 15, where the text says both that God "regretted" making Saul king (vv. 11, 35) and that God "does not change His mind" (v. 29).

The Hebrew Word Nacham (נָחַם): Getting the Meaning Right

Before we look at specific passages, we need to understand the Hebrew word at the heart of this discussion. The root nacham (נָחַם) appears in the Old Testament in two main verb stems: the Niphal and the Hithpael. As Garrett DeWeese explains in his careful study of these texts, the root falls into four main semantic categories when used in these stems: (1) "to experience emotional pain or weakness" — for example, Genesis 6:6–7; (2) "to be comforted" or "to comfort oneself" — for example, Genesis 24:67; (3) God "relenting from" a course of action already underway — for example, Deuteronomy 32:36; and (4) God "retracting" or "deviating from" an announced course of action — for example, Exodus 32:12.¹²

The first category — emotional pain — is crucial for understanding Genesis 6:6, where God grieves over the wickedness of humanity. The third and fourth categories — relenting and retracting — are crucial for the passages where God "changes His mind." In a landmark study, Old Testament scholar Robert Chisholm has shown that categories (3) and (4) need to be further distinguished based on the type of divine speech involved. Some divine statements are decrees or oaths — unconditional declarations that bind God to a course of action. Others are announcements — conditional statements that retain a conditional element, even when the condition is not explicitly stated. Chisholm's conclusion is important: God can and often does retract announcements, but He never retracts decrees.¹³

This distinction will prove essential when we tackle the tension in 1 Samuel 15. But first, let us look at the individual passages.

Genesis 6:6 — God Grieving Over Humanity

The first occurrence of nacham in the Old Testament is one of the most moving passages in all of Scripture:

"The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted [nacham, וַיִּנָּחֶם] that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him ['atsav, וַיִּתְעַצֵּב] to his heart. So the LORD said, 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry [nacham, כִּי נִחַמְתִּי] that I have made them.' But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD." (Genesis 6:5–8, ESV)

Two Hebrew words carry the emotional weight of this passage. The first is nacham, appearing twice — once in the narrator's voice (v. 6) and once in God's own voice (v. 7). The second is 'atsav (עָצַב), which means "to be grieved, to be in pain, to be hurt." The word 'atsav is the same word used of the pain of childbirth in Genesis 3:16 — it denotes real, deep, emotional anguish. Together, these two words paint a portrait of a God who is not merely disappointed but heartbroken over what His creatures have become.¹⁴

David Lamb, in his excellent study The Emotions of God, highlights several remarkable features of this passage. First, the text emphasizes God's emotions by repeating the word nacham twice and adding 'atsav — three expressions of divine sorrow in just two verses. Second, two of these descriptions come from the narrator, and one comes from God Himself. As Lamb observes, "While humans often hide or cover up emotions like grief or sorrow, here neither the narrator nor God himself were embarrassed about divine expressions of emotion."¹⁵

Lamb also notes what the text does not say. When people ask, "How could an omniscient God regret doing anything?", Lamb points out that the text has "no interest in answering, or even addressing" that question. The passage is not concerned with divine omniscience but with divine emotions. Genesis 6 emphasizes that God is emotional — specifically, that He is grieved. And the cause of God's grief is clear: human sin. "When God saw the sin of the people of Noah's day, he was sorrowful and grieved."¹⁶

The atemporalist response is to treat this language as anthropopathic — attributing human emotions to God metaphorically without implying that God really feels them. But as I argued extensively in my companion book The Heart of God, the anthropopathic reading faces enormous difficulties. If God does not genuinely grieve, then the text is simply false — not metaphorical, but misleading. The text does not say "it was as though God grieved." It says God was sorry, and it grieved Him to His heart. If we cannot take this language at face value, then we have no warrant for taking any emotional language about God at face value — including His love, His compassion, and His faithfulness. The anthropopathic strategy, consistently applied, strips God of every emotional attribute the Bible ascribes to Him.¹⁷

R. T. Mullins has developed this point philosophically in his important work God and Emotion. Mullins argues that if God is impassible — unable to be affected emotionally by anything external to Himself — then God's "emotions" are not really responses to anything. They are eternal, unchanging states that never had a beginning and never shift in any way. But a grief that is not a response to anything is not really grief. An anger that is not provoked by anything is not really anger. The very concept of an emotional response requires temporal sequence: something happens, and then God responds to it. If there is no "then," there is no genuine response.¹⁸

Exodus 32:14 — God Relenting After Moses' Intercession

Our second nacham passage occurs in one of the most dramatic scenes in the entire Pentateuch. While Moses is on Mount Sinai receiving the law, the people below have fashioned a golden calf and are worshiping it. God's anger burns hot, and He tells Moses:

"I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you." (Exodus 32:9–10, ESV)

But Moses intercedes. He reminds God of His promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. He appeals to God's reputation among the nations. And then comes the astonishing statement:

"And the LORD relented [nacham, וַיִּנָּחֶם] from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people." (Exodus 32:14, ESV)

This passage falls into Chisholm's fourth category: God retracting or deviating from an announced course of action. God had announced judgment — "let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them." Moses interceded. And God changed His announced course of action. The temporal sequence is crystal clear: God announced judgment (step one), Moses prayed (step two), and God relented (step three). This is a genuine before-and-after. It involves real interaction between God and a human being, with God genuinely adjusting His course of action in response to prayer.¹⁹

Lamb captures the emotional dynamics of this scene beautifully. He notes that the people had just formalized their vows of faithfulness to God in the covenant ceremony at Sinai — the blood had literally been sprinkled on them (Exodus 24:8). And now they were worshiping a golden calf. "To return to the marriage analogy, it is like the Israelites were committing adultery on the honeymoon. And they were still wearing their 'wedding clothes,' their blood-stained covenant garments." God's anger in this passage is not arbitrary or irrational. It is the justified anger of a betrayed covenant partner. And His relenting in response to Moses' prayer is the merciful restraint of a God who is willing to listen to an advocate for His unfaithful people.²⁰

How does the atemporalist explain Exodus 32:14? The most common response, going back to Thomas Aquinas, is that God's "relenting" is metaphorical. Aquinas argued that "when we regret what we have made we throw it away. Yet this does not always argue second thoughts or a change of will, for we may intend in the first place to make a thing and scrap it afterwards. By similitude with such a procedure we refer to God having regrets." For Aquinas, God's will never changes; what changes is God's action, and the language of repentance or relenting is metaphorical.²¹

Calvin adds a different nuance. He acknowledges that accommodative language "is not dispensable but necessary" — not just for simple people, but for all of us — because a timeless God must represent Himself in temporal terms to communicate with temporal creatures. Calvin writes that "the description of him that is given to us must be accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it." The language of divine repentance does not mean God literally changed His mind; it means God "changes with respect to his actions" while His eternal plan remains unchanged.²²

I find Helm's honest assessment of this atemporalist reading illuminating. As Helm himself notes, "On the theory of divine accommodation, statements such as 'God repented' are in a sense false, false if taken literally. For God does not literally repent and cannot do so." But Helm then asks the crucial question: "If such words are false when taken strictly, why is such language needed in the first place? Why is the Bible so full of such language about God, language that implies change in God and therefore suggests that God is in time?"²³

That is exactly the right question. And I believe the simplest and best answer is: the Bible is full of this language because it is true. God really does respond to prayer. He really does adjust His announced course of action in response to human behavior. He really does relent from judgment when people repent. And all of these things require genuine temporality — a real before and after in God's experience.

1 Samuel 15 — The Tension of God Regretting Saul While "Not Changing His Mind"

We come now to what is arguably the most challenging nacham passage in the entire Old Testament — and the one that matters most for the God-and-time debate. In 1 Samuel 15, we encounter an extraordinary tension within a single chapter. At the beginning and end of the chapter, the text says God regretted making Saul king. But in the middle of the chapter, the text says God does not change His mind. All three statements use the same Hebrew word, nacham.

Here is the full story. God had commissioned Saul to carry out judgment against the Amalekites, who had attacked Israel's most vulnerable people during the wilderness journey (cf. Deut 25:17–19). Saul partially obeyed — he defeated the Amalekites but spared their king, Agag, and the best of the livestock. God speaks to Samuel:

"I regret [nacham, נִחַמְתִּי] that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments." And Samuel was angry, and he cried to the LORD all night. (1 Samuel 15:11, ESV)

Samuel then confronts Saul, rebukes him, and delivers the stunning verdict that God has rejected Saul as king. And then comes the verse that seems to contradict what we just read:

"And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret [nacham, יִנָּחֵם], for he is not a man, that he should have regret [nacham, לְהִנָּחֵם]." (1 Samuel 15:29, ESV)

And then, at the chapter's conclusion, the narrator returns to the earlier note:

"And Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the LORD regretted [nacham, נִחָם] that he had made Saul king over Israel." (1 Samuel 15:35, ESV)

How are we to make sense of this? In verses 11 and 35, God regrets (nacham) making Saul king. In verse 29, God does not regret (nacham). The same word is used for both assertions. Are we dealing with a flat contradiction?

The key to resolving this tension lies in Chisholm's distinction between decrees and announcements, which DeWeese also highlights. In verse 29, Samuel is telling Saul that God's decision to reject him as king is final — it is a decree, an irrevocable determination. God is not like a human being who might vacillate, change His mind under pressure, or go back on a firm decision. The "Glory of Israel" — God Himself — does not lie or reverse His settled decrees. This is a statement about God's faithfulness and reliability. It is not a philosophical claim about metaphysical immutability.²⁴

In verses 11 and 35, by contrast, God is expressing genuine grief — emotional pain — over the outcome of having made Saul king. Here nacham falls into the first semantic category: experiencing emotional pain. God is not saying "I wish I had done something different" in the sense of admitting a mistake. He is saying, "The outcome of this decision grieves me deeply, because Saul has turned away from me." The regret is relational and emotional, not a concession of error.²⁵

Lamb makes this point well. He notes that God's regret is specifically linked to Saul's behavior: "I regret that I have made Saul king, because he has turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions" (1 Sam 15:11). The cause of God's regret is Saul's rebellion. "It wasn't merely disobedience, but a rejection of Yahweh, which explains why Yahweh would have an emotional response to it. Once again, human action prompted divine emotion, in this case sorrow." Lamb further notes that the narrator bookends the chapter with the divine regret (vv. 11, 35), "emphasizing the importance of divine grief in this story."²⁶

Here, then, is the resolution I believe best fits the text. Verse 29 tells us that God's essential character does not change. He does not lie. He does not reverse His settled decrees. His fundamental purposes and moral nature are constant. But verses 11 and 35 tell us that God genuinely responds to what His creatures do. He grieves when they rebel. He feels sorrow when things go wrong — even when He knew they would go wrong. God's foreknowledge of Saul's failure does not cancel out God's genuine grief when that failure actually occurs. Knowing something will happen and experiencing it when it happens are different things. A parent may know that a child is heading toward a terrible decision, but the grief when that decision is actually made is still real.

This resolution makes perfect sense on a temporalist view. God is constant in character but dynamic in relationship. He does not change in who He is, but He genuinely responds to what happens in the world — and this responsiveness requires temporality. On an atemporalist view, by contrast, the resolution is much harder to sustain. If God is timelessly immutable, then He cannot "genuinely respond" to anything, because response implies temporal sequence. The atemporalist must say that God's grief over Saul is eternally, timelessly present — God has always been grieved over Saul and always will be. But that seems to drain the grief of its meaning. Grief that is not a response to anything is not really grief.²⁷

Jonah 3:10–4:2 — God Relenting from Judgment on Nineveh

The book of Jonah gives us one of the most vivid examples of God changing His announced course of action in response to human repentance. After Jonah's reluctant preaching, the entire city of Nineveh — from the king to the livestock — puts on sackcloth and ashes and turns from evil. And then:

"When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented [nacham, וַיִּנָּחֶם] of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it." (Jonah 3:10, ESV)

The temporal sequence is striking. God saw (first) what they did — they turned from evil. Then God relented of the disaster He had announced. Then He did not carry it out. This is a genuine before-and-after. God observed a change in human behavior, and He responded to that change by altering His announced plan. This is Chisholm's category four: God retracting an announced course of action.

Jonah himself makes the theological implications explicit in chapter 4. He is furious that God spared Nineveh, and he explains why he had tried to flee from the original commission:

"O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting [nacham] from disaster." (Jonah 4:2, ESV)

Jonah knew God would relent. He knew that if Nineveh repented, God would show mercy. And he was angry about it — because Nineveh was Israel's enemy, and Jonah wanted judgment, not mercy. But notice what Jonah identifies as a core attribute of God's character: God is one who relents from disaster. This is not a one-time aberration. It is a description of who God is. God is the kind of God who changes His announced course of action when people repent. Joel 2:13–14 says the same thing: "Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster."²⁸

Chisholm's conclusion is worth quoting in summary: "Two of the passages [Joel 2:14 and Jonah 4:2] even regard this willingness to change His mind as one of His most fundamental attributes." This is not accommodative language that can be dismissed as metaphorical. It is a description of God's settled character — He is the kind of God who relents when people repent. And this kind of responsiveness requires temporality.²⁹

Jeremiah 18:7–10 — The Potter and the Clay

Our final nacham passage is perhaps the most theologically significant, because in it God Himself articulates the general principle underlying His "changes of mind." God sends Jeremiah to the potter's house, and there God delivers this declaration:

"If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent [nacham] of the disaster that I intended to do to it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build up and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent [nacham] of the good that I had intended to do to it." (Jeremiah 18:7–10, ESV)

This is God establishing a general principle of how He relates to nations across time. Notice the explicitly conditional structure: "If I announce X, and then the nation does Y, then I will do Z." God's response is contingent on what the nation does. This is not a timeless decree. It is a relational principle that operates across time. God watches what nations do. He evaluates their behavior. And He adjusts His course of action accordingly. The temporal structure is built into the very logic of the passage: announcement (first), human response (second), divine adjustment (third).³⁰

DeWeese draws the crucial conclusion from these texts: "The natural reading of the texts supports a temporal God." He adds that while it is technically possible to read the texts anthropomorphically, "not all language about God is anthropomorphic, and a natural understanding of these texts is quite plausible, once a commitment to strong immutability is abandoned."³¹

I agree completely. The Jeremiah 18 passage is not describing a God who timelessly decrees everything from eternity. It is describing a God who genuinely interacts with nations in real time, watching their behavior and responding to it. This kind of dynamic, responsive interaction requires temporality. A timeless God cannot "wait to see" what a nation does and then respond accordingly, because "waiting" and "responding" are temporal activities.

Part Three: The Atemporalist Counter-Arguments and Our Response

We have now laid out the positive biblical evidence from the nacham passages. Before moving to the salvation-history argument, it is important to engage fairly with the strongest atemporalist responses to this evidence. I want to present these responses in their best light — to "steel-man" them, as philosophers say — before explaining why I find them ultimately unpersuasive.

The Accommodation Argument

The most common atemporalist response, as we have already noted, is the argument from accommodation. Calvin states it clearly: "We ought not to understand anything else under the word 'repentance' than change of action, because men are wont by changing their action to testify that they are displeased with themselves." On this view, when Scripture says God "repented" or "relented," it does not mean God's internal state changed. It means God's external actions changed, and the language of internal change is an accommodation to human understanding.³²

Aquinas puts it somewhat differently: the language of divine repentance means that "God wills change" — not that God's will changes. God timelessly wills that certain things happen in a certain temporal sequence, and from our perspective, it looks like God changed His mind when in fact He was always going to do what He did. The threat of judgment against Nineveh, on this view, was always going to be followed by Nineveh's repentance, which was always going to be followed by God's mercy. Nothing changed in God; only the temporal outworking of God's eternal plan gave the appearance of change.³³

Here is why I find this response unsatisfying. First, it turns the Jonah narrative — and indeed all of the nacham passages — into a kind of divine play-acting. On the Aquinas-Calvin view, God was never going to destroy Nineveh. He knew from eternity that Nineveh would repent. The threat of judgment was not a genuine threat but a scripted part of a predetermined drama. This makes Jonah's flight look irrational (he was fleeing from a threat that was never going to be carried out), and it makes God's relenting look empty (He was always going to relent). The drama, the tension, the interplay between divine announcement and human response — all of it becomes theater. I believe the text presents it as something more real than that.

Second, the accommodation argument has the serious consequence identified by Helm himself: it means the nacham statements "are in a sense false, false if taken literally." I think we should be very cautious about any hermeneutical strategy that requires us to say that large portions of the Bible are literally false about God. The Bible is our primary source of knowledge about God. If we cannot trust its language about God's emotional life and temporal responsiveness, what can we trust?

Third, as Chisholm's study shows, the willingness to relent is presented in Joel 2:13 and Jonah 4:2 as a fundamental attribute of God's character. It is not occasional, metaphorical language that can be explained away. It is a core description of who God is. A God who relents from disaster when people repent is a God who responds — and genuine response requires temporality.³⁴

The "Anthropopathic" Argument

Closely related to accommodation is the argument that the nacham passages are anthropopathic — they attribute human emotions to God for communicative purposes without implying that God really has those emotions. On this view, Genesis 6:6 does not mean God genuinely grieved; it means the situation was such that a human being in God's position would have grieved, and the text describes God's disposition using human emotional categories.

I addressed this argument in connection with Genesis 6:6 above, and I have dealt with it extensively in my companion book The Heart of God. Here I will simply note that the anthropopathic reading faces a devastating dilemma. Either God genuinely has emotional responses, or He does not. If He does, then the language is not anthropopathic — it is literally true, and God's emotional life requires temporality. If He does not, then we lose any meaningful doctrine of divine love, compassion, anger, or grief — and we end up with a God who is emotionally indistinguishable from a computer. I believe the biblical portrait — a God who genuinely loves, genuinely grieves, and genuinely responds — is far more theologically adequate than the impassibilist alternative. And as we have argued, genuine emotional response requires temporal sequence.³⁵

The "Eternal Simultaneity" Argument

A more sophisticated atemporalist response argues that what appears to us as a temporal sequence of divine actions is, from God's perspective, a single, eternal act that encompasses everything at once. God does not first threaten judgment and then relent; rather, God's one eternal act includes both the threat and the mercy as aspects of a single, timeless whole. This is essentially the Boethian view developed by Stump, Kretzmann, and others (treated in detail in Chapters 5 and 6).

The problem with this response, as it applies to the nacham passages, is that it requires us to say that the temporal ordering presented in the text is illusory — that the "before" and "after" of announcement, repentance, and relenting are not a genuine sequence but a human projection onto an atemporal divine reality. But as R. T. Mullins has argued, this creates a fundamental incoherence: if all of God's actions are eternally simultaneous, then God's "response" to Nineveh's repentance is not really a response at all. It is an eternal state that happens to correspond to a temporal event. The relational, interactive character of the nacham passages is lost. God is no longer genuinely interacting with His creatures; He is timelessly doing something that looks like interaction from our perspective. I find this deeply unsatisfying theologically, because it empties God's relational engagement with His people of its genuineness.³⁶

Part Four: Salvation History — God Acting at Particular Times in Particular Ways

Beyond the specific nacham passages, the Old Testament presents something even bigger: a sweeping salvation history — a story of God acting at particular times in particular ways in response to particular situations. This is the Heilsgeschichte — the "holy history" or "salvation history" — that German theologians of the early twentieth century identified as the backbone of the biblical narrative. And this salvation history is thoroughly, irreducibly temporal.³⁷

The great Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim has argued persuasively that "the God of the opening chapters of Genesis is portrayed as a relational God. Most basically, God is present and active in the world, enters into a relationship of integrity with the world, and does so in such a way that both world and God are affected by that interaction." Fretheim, along with Walter Brueggemann, Bruce Birch, and David Petersen, emphasizes that God has "chosen not to remain aloof from the creation but to get caught up with the creatures in moving towards the divine purposes for the world."³⁸

This insight is crucial for the God-and-time question. A God who "gets caught up with the creatures" is a God who is in the flow of events, not above or outside of it. He is not watching from a timeless vantage point; He is engaged, involved, and active within history. Let us trace some of the key moments of this salvation history to see how deeply temporal they are.

The Call of Abraham: God Initiating a New Plan

In Genesis 12, God calls Abram to leave his homeland and go to a land God will show him. This call comes at a particular point in the biblical narrative — after the tower of Babel, after the scattering of the nations, after the narrowing of the genealogical line. God is not timelessly decreeing all of history at once; He is initiating a new phase of His plan. He is choosing one man through whom He will bless all the families of the earth. The call of Abraham is a temporal act — it happens at a moment in time, and it sets in motion a chain of events that will unfold over millennia.

The Exodus: God Acting in Response to Suffering

The exodus from Egypt is perhaps the single most important event in Old Testament theology. It is the event that defines Israel's identity, shapes its worship, and provides the template for understanding God's character. And it is deeply, irreducibly temporal.

Consider the sequence. Israel is enslaved in Egypt for centuries. God hears their groaning (Exod 2:24). God remembers His covenant with Abraham (Exod 2:24). God sees their suffering and knows their affliction (Exod 3:7). Then God appears to Moses in the burning bush and announces: "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them" (Exod 3:7–8, ESV).

Every element of this account is temporal. God sees — He observes what is happening in the present. God hears — He receives the cries of His people in real time. God remembers — He connects the present situation to His past covenant. God comes down — He acts, intervening in history at a specific moment. God delivers — He carries out a rescue that unfolds over time, through the ten plagues, the Passover, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the journey to Sinai.

As R. T. Mullins has argued, "God brought about the exodus of the Israelites. This story involves God acting in special ways at specific times, and any Christian research program will need to be able to account for this epoch of history and many others like it."³⁹ The exodus is not a timeless decree unfolding mechanically. It is a rescue mission — a God who hears suffering, is moved by it, and acts to stop it. This kind of responsive action is exactly what we would expect from a temporal God.

The Giving of the Law at Sinai: God Speaking at a Particular Moment

At Sinai, God speaks the Ten Commandments directly to the assembled people. "And God spoke all these words, saying, 'I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery'" (Exod 20:1–2, ESV). Notice that God identifies Himself not with a timeless philosophical description but with a temporal act: "I am the one who brought you out of Egypt." God's self-identification is tied to what He did — a specific action at a specific point in time. This is not the language of a timeless deity. This is the language of a God who acts in history and defines Himself by His actions.⁴⁰

The great Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel captured this beautifully. Heschel argued that the God of the prophets is not the "Unmoved Mover" of Greek philosophy but the "Most Moved Mover" — a God who is deeply affected by what happens in the world and who acts in response to it. For Heschel, the heart of biblical religion is not the human quest for God but God's quest for the human being — and this quest unfolds in time, through history, in a series of divine initiatives that respond to specific human situations.⁴¹

The Conquest and the Period of the Judges: God Raising Up Deliverers

The book of Judges presents a cycle that repeats itself multiple times: Israel sins, God allows an oppressor to afflict them, Israel cries out to God, and God raises up a deliverer (a "judge") to rescue them. This cycle presupposes that God is watching what Israel does, evaluating their behavior, and responding to their cries. The text makes this explicit: "And the LORD raised up judges, who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them" (Judg 2:16, ESV). And when the judge died and the people returned to sin, "the LORD was moved to pity [nacham, וַיִּנָּחֶם] by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them" (Judg 2:18, ESV).

This is not a timeless decree playing out mechanically. This is a God who watches, grieves, acts, rescues, and then watches again as the cycle repeats. The temporal character of the Judges cycle is impossible to reduce to a single, timeless divine act. It is a story of genuine interaction between God and His people across time.⁴²

The Monarchy and the Prophets: God Sending Messengers at the Right Moment

Throughout the monarchic period, God sends prophets to Israel and Judah at specific moments to deliver specific messages. "The word of the LORD came to Nathan" (2 Sam 7:4). "The word of the LORD came to Elijah the Tishbite" (1 Kgs 21:17). "In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord" (Isa 6:1). Each prophetic commission has a temporal location. God speaks to specific people at specific times about specific situations. This is inherently temporal. A timeless God does not "send" a prophet at a particular moment, because "at a particular moment" implies temporal location — and a timeless being has no temporal location.

The prophets also reveal something about God's emotional engagement with His people across time. Through the prophets, God expresses love, anger, grief, hope, and frustration — all in response to what Israel is doing or failing to do. In Hosea, God's love for Israel is compared to a husband's love for an unfaithful wife. In Isaiah, God weeps over Moab's destruction (Isa 15:5; 16:9, 11). As Lamb notes, the prophetic books speak "frequently of God's compassion toward his people," and even describe God as "broken" and "crushed" over Israel's unfaithfulness (Ezek 6:9).⁴³

This kind of emotional engagement — expressed through prophets at specific moments in response to specific events — is exactly what we would expect from a temporal God. It is deeply awkward for an atemporalist model, which must treat all of these prophetic encounters as the timeless outworking of a single eternal divine act.

The Exile and Return: God Judging and Restoring in Time

The exile of Judah to Babylon in 586 BC is presented in the Old Testament as God's judgment on centuries of covenant unfaithfulness. But notice: it is judgment that comes — at a particular moment, after a long process of warning. God had sent prophet after prophet, century after century, calling Israel back to faithfulness. He had been patient, as Jeremiah emphasizes: "From the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt to this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day. Yet they did not listen to me" (Jer 7:25–26, ESV). The language of persistence — "day after day" — is profoundly temporal. God's patience is not a timeless attribute; it is a posture maintained across time in the face of repeated rejection.

And when judgment finally comes, it is not the end of the story. God promises restoration — a return from exile that will come at the right time. "For thus says the LORD: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place" (Jer 29:10, ESV). A specific timeframe. A specific promise. A specific fulfillment. God is not timelessly decreeing the exile and return as a single, undifferentiated eternal act. He is guiding history through a sequence of judgment, exile, waiting, and restoration — a sequence that makes sense only if God is genuinely temporal.⁴⁴

Walter Brueggemann has argued that the exile is the defining crisis of Old Testament theology — and what makes it a crisis is that it seems to contradict God's earlier promises. The Davidic covenant promised an everlasting throne. The Mosaic covenant promised the land. And now both seem to be lost. The prophetic response is not to deny the crisis but to reaffirm that God is working through it — that the exile is not the last word, that God will restore and renew. This prophetic reaffirmation only makes sense if God is a temporal agent who can guide history through its darkest chapters toward a future redemption.⁴⁵

Part Five: The Temporal God and Divine Emotion — A Mutual Reinforcement

Before we close, I want to draw out an important connection between the evidence in this chapter and the broader case for divine temporality. The nacham passages and the salvation-history narrative both reveal a God who is emotionally engaged with His world. God grieves over human sin (Gen 6:6). God is angry at covenant-breaking (Exod 32:10). God is moved to pity by groaning (Judg 2:18). God weeps over the destruction of nations (Isa 16:9). God is "broken" over Israel's idolatry (Ezek 6:9). God rejoices over His people (Zeph 3:17). The emotional range of the God of the Old Testament is breathtaking.

And this emotional engagement requires temporality. As I argued in my companion book The Heart of God, and as Mullins has demonstrated philosophically, genuine emotional response involves temporal sequence. An emotion is a response to something — and response requires a before (the triggering event) and an after (the emotional reaction). A timeless God cannot have genuine emotional responses, because there is no before and after in a timeless existence. The classical doctrine of divine impassibility — the view that God cannot be emotionally affected by anything external to Himself — is the logical consequence of divine timelessness. If God is timeless, He is impassible. If God is impassible, the nacham passages are all merely metaphorical. But if the nacham passages are describing something real — and I believe they are — then God is passible, which means God is temporal.⁴⁶

Mullins makes this argument with particular force in his treatment of divine wrath. If God timelessly and immutably has wrath toward sinners, then God is wrathful toward them before they sin — which is unjust. A just God's wrath is a response to sin — it comes after the sin, not before. But "after" implies temporal sequence. So just wrath requires temporality. This is the connection between divine passibility and divine temporality: a God who genuinely feels and responds is a God who exists in time.⁴⁷

This argument also illuminates why the 1 Samuel 15 tension is not a contradiction. God's character does not change (v. 29) — He is always loving, always just, always faithful. But God's emotional responses do change (vv. 11, 35) — because emotional responses are, by their nature, responses to things that happen in time. The constancy is in God's nature; the variability is in God's relational engagement with creatures who act freely across time. Both constancy and responsiveness are real. And both require a God who is temporal.

Part Six: Prayer, Intercession, and the Temporal God

The Exodus 32 narrative raises an important question that deserves brief treatment here (the topic of prayer and divine temporality will be explored more fully in Chapter 35). When Moses intercedes for Israel and God "relents," what does this tell us about prayer?

On a temporalist view, the answer is straightforward. God genuinely hears Moses' prayer at the moment it is offered. God considers Moses' arguments — the appeal to His promises, the concern for His reputation among the nations — and God genuinely responds by changing His announced plan. Prayer is a real factor in the divine decision-making process. This does not mean prayer "forces" God to do anything; God is perfectly free to say no. But it does mean that prayer is a genuine form of interaction between God and human beings, with God taking our prayers into account as He governs history. This is a deeply encouraging vision of prayer — our prayers matter, they reach God in real time, and God responds to them.⁴⁸

On an atemporalist view, prayer is more difficult to explain. If God timelessly knows everything — including all future prayers — then God has already "taken our prayers into account" from eternity. Nothing changes when we pray, because God's timeless plan already incorporates everything that will ever happen. This is coherent in a certain philosophical sense, but it strips prayer of its relational character. If God has already done everything before we pray, then prayer is not a real interaction — it is, at best, a spiritual discipline that benefits us, but it does not genuinely affect God or His decisions. I find this a profoundly impoverished view of prayer, and I do not think it does justice to the biblical portrait of a God who hears, responds, and sometimes relents in response to intercession.⁴⁹

Now, I should be careful to clarify my own position. I believe God has exhaustive foreknowledge — He knows everything that will happen, including every prayer that will ever be prayed. But I distinguish between foreknowing a prayer and hearing a prayer. God's foreknowledge of Moses' prayer did not make the prayer unnecessary or the divine response predetermined. God genuinely heard Moses in the moment, genuinely considered the intercession, and genuinely responded to it. Foreknowledge and temporal responsiveness are not in conflict — they are both features of the God I have called "dynamically omnitemporal." God can see the entire timeline and still genuinely interact with creatures at each point along the way. This is the position developed more fully in Chapter 25.⁵⁰

Conclusion: The Old Testament Portrait of a Temporal God

What has this chapter shown? Let me summarize the evidence.

First, the covenant structure of the Old Testament — from Noah through Abraham, Moses, David, and the promised New Covenant — reveals a God who makes promises at particular moments, sustains them across time, and fulfills them at the right time. Covenants are inherently temporal. A timeless God cannot make, keep, or fulfill covenants in any straightforward sense.

Second, the nacham passages — Genesis 6:6, Exodus 32:14, 1 Samuel 15:11, 29, 35, Jonah 3:10–4:2, and Jeremiah 18:7–10 — present a God who genuinely grieves over human sin, genuinely responds to prayer, and genuinely adjusts His course of action in response to human repentance. The resolution of the 1 Samuel 15 tension is that God does not change in essential character (v. 29) but does genuinely respond to events in time (vv. 11, 35). The atemporalist alternatives — accommodation, anthropopathy, eternal simultaneity — all face serious difficulties and ultimately drain these passages of their theological force.

Third, the sweeping arc of salvation history — from Abraham's call through the exodus, the conquest, the monarchy, the prophets, the exile, and the return — presents God as a temporal agent who acts at particular moments, responds to particular situations, sends messengers at the right time, judges when judgment is due, and restores when the time for restoration arrives. This salvation history is not a timeless decree playing out mechanically. It is a genuine story of divine-human interaction across time.

Fourth, God's emotional engagement with His world — His grief, anger, compassion, weeping, and joy — requires temporal sequence, because emotional response is inherently temporal. A timeless God cannot genuinely respond to anything, because response requires a before and an after.

Taken together, this evidence presents a powerful case that the God of the Old Testament is genuinely temporal — a God who acts in time, responds in time, grieves in time, and fulfills His promises in time. This is not the timeless, static, immutable deity of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. This is the living God of Israel — dynamic, responsive, emotionally engaged, and profoundly temporal.

In the next chapter, we will turn to the Psalms and Wisdom Literature and examine what the great poetry of the Old Testament tells us about God's relationship to time — including the famous declaration that God is "from everlasting to everlasting" (Ps 90:2). As we will see, even this language supports everlastingness, not atemporality. The God who endures forever is a temporal God — a God who persists through time without beginning or end — not a God who exists outside of time in a static eternal instant.