Hey, it's Shelby and Paul.

We're walking through the book of Exodus, and we are in chapters 32 through 34 today.

There's a well-known narrative in these chapters.

Moses is up on the mountain, but he's taking a long time and the people get anxious.

They create a golden calf. And in response to this, God says that he is going to bring judgment

on the people. Moses then praise and God relents of his judgment. There's a lot going on here in the story, but we also might

have questions about what God's doing here. Is he changing his mind? Is Moses changing his mind?

Can you break some of this down for us, Paul? Yeah. Yeah. So this is a passage that comes up in

conversations about God's sovereignty a lot and about prayer specifically.

And so this question about like, did God change his mind? You know, it's tough because, you know, we know that God is immutable, which means that he doesn't change, right?

But, you know, it kind of makes us wonder, like, is God changing by deciding to relent?

And I want to point us, I think, so theologian Wayne Grudom, he has a really, really good take on this, I think.

And he essentially points out that God responds differently to different situations within his unchanging character, right?

And so God declared he was going to pour out his wrath on the Israelites, and that was a true statement,

assuming that the situation stayed the same, but the situation didn't stay the same because Moses prayed, right?

And so, you know, the prayer of Moses is a part of this new situation that God is responding to,

right? And so I think when we think about God's sovereignty, you know, what we can, what we can

say for sure is that God is

sovereign and prayer also makes a difference. Both of those things are true. Yeah. And we know that God

will always act consistently within his character and that his character won't change. And so we should

pray to ask God to act within his character, right, to be merciful in situations where we need mercy

and to be good in situations where we need goodness in the face of evil, right? And God will

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