Changeable God?

I had a big post written and it kind of went off topic, so I will save it as a draft and see if I want to use it later. I was reading something today about God not changing yet he does things differently from time to time. That elicited a thought, that it is not God that changes, but man that changes. God is the same yesterday, today and forever, but fallible man forces him to adjust his plan to suite our needs.

Many people will cite the fact that God does not change to criticize changes within the church. The post I read earlier specifically mentioned polygamy. Other topics could be Blacks and the priesthood, changes in the temple ceremony, reorganization of church leadership structures and most of all perceived changes in doctrine. All of these can be explained another way, man has changed so God must adapt.

The first hurdle is determining exactly what God want to say to us. Strangely, that really isn't always easy. Even in the scriptures their are things that sometimes seem to contradict each other. As men, we sometimes don't listen or understand. God calls holy men as prophets, but even they are subject to the weaknesses of mortality. They do their best and seek to better understand God. God has promised that he will not let them lead us astray, but he does not promise that they will tell us everything or even that they will be told everything all at once.

While we should listen to the prophets and heed their counsel, we should not abdicate our responsibility to seek communication with God. The prophet is not there to be our go-between, that is Christ's role and we should seek truth from God through Christ under the direction of his prophets.

Sometimes, people will attribute things to the unchanging laws of God that really aren't a part of them. They will say that something cannot be changed because it is God's law, but in reality it is not. It is simply our finite, mortal, flawed human understanding of the eternities. A good example is the changes in the temple ceremonies. They teach eternal principles and have eternal consequences, but the exact practice of them is being tweaked on a fairly regular basis. In many ways the mechanics are changed to make it more accessible to more people while the principles taught remain unchanged.

The biggest problem is that man is not constant. We change our minds and wills throughout our entire life. We are learning and growing. We do not have the wisdom and eternities of experience, in our mortal state, that God does. Though we lived before we were here and we will live again after death, we started this mortal experience with almost nothing. We are learning from scratch here. We cannot hope to obtain the Godlike wisdom and perfection in the mere 80 or so years we live here. Thus, we are in need of constant direction.

That direction changes to our needs. It guides us to help us live the eternal principles and even to help us learn what those principles are. Our limited ability to perceive the will of God makes life a circuitous path rather than a straight one. God has allowed us to live the eternal principle of agency, that means he has to deal with that choice. So we won't be perfect. God knows this and has planned for it already. We should not despair, rather celebrate that we have the chance to learn by our experience, even if God has to change his instructions to meet our needs once in a while.