Mainstream Christianity teaches that God is all-knowing, all-wise, and cannot make a mistake in judgment, knowledge, or morality. He never has to reconsider a decision because every one of them is made with a purpose and is perfect. The idea that God is infallible is comforting, but what does the Bible have to say about it?
Over and over, the Old Testament describes God regretting his decisions, changing his mind, and being talked out of his plans. Sometimes, it’s the narrator saying so, but sometimes it’s God himself.
The strongest evidence comes straight from God’s mouth. Before the flood, he says, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth… for it repenteth me that I have made them” (Genesis 6:7). After he created humanity, he saw how it turned out and regretted it. He had made a mistake, and his solution was to destroy it and start over. He does it again with Israel’s first king: “It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king” (1 Samuel 15:11).
In Jeremiah, God changes his mind so many times he’s tired of it. In Jeremiah 15:6, he says, “I am weary with repenting.” Judah had kept turning away from God, so he threatened punishment, then spared them. This happened multiple times. It got to the point he was tired of changing his mind, so he stuck with his plan of destruction. God sent Babylon to lay waste to Judah, and the people were terrified. However, after it happened, he says, “I repent me of the evil that I have done unto you” (42:10). He comes to a final decision, and afterward, he’s sorry. An infallible god wouldn’t look at the result and be sorry for it.
To repent is to regret something you have done and then change your course. You don’t change course unless the one you were on was wrong. While God isn’t confessing a sin in these verses, he is admitting to a decision he made that didn’t turn out the way it should have. That’s a mistake.
God Regrets His Decisions
The biggest do-over in the Bible is the flood. God looked down on his creation and saw that “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). He regretted making humans and wiped out all but eight of them.
Then, after the water goes down and Noah offers a sacrifice, God promises never to do it again, “for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). It’s the same reason he gave for the flood. Nothing about humans has changed. God had. He left himself a loophole: he specifically says he will not destroy the world by flood (Genesis 9:11). If he changes his mind again, and some sources say he will (2 Peter 3:6–7), he has plenty of other ways to do the deed.
God destroyed the world because people were evil, then decided that people being evil wasn’t a reason to destroy the world after all. Doesn’t sound like a god who has it all together to me.
He made the same kind of mistake with Israel’s first king, and that one wasn’t even his idea. God thought he should be good enough and that a human king like the other nations had was unnecessary. However, the people demanded one so that they could be like everyone else, and God took it personally.
He told Samuel, the prophet leading Israel, “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me” (1 Samuel 8:7). He gave them a king anyway, and he picked Saul himself (9:16–17). A god who doesn’t make mistakes would know who to choose. He chose Saul, and it didn’t work out the way he wanted.
Saul disobeyed, and in 1 Samuel 15, God says he regrets making him king (verse 11). The story gets stranger. Samuel tells Saul that God “is not a man, that he should repent” (verse 29). Then, six verses later, the narrator says, “The LORD repented that he had made Saul king over Israel” (verse 35).
The same chapter says God regretted it, says God doesn’t regret things, and then says he regretted it again. Those aren’t the actions of an infallible being.
God Can Be Negotiated With
Some of the most striking passages have humans talking God out of his plans.
When the Israelites build the golden calf, God tells Moses, “Let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them” (Exodus 32:10).
Moses argues back. He tells God that the Egyptians will mock him, and reminds him of his promises to Abraham. He says, “Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people” (32:12).
It worked: “The LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (32:14).
It happens again in Numbers 14. God threatens to wipe Israel out with a plague and start over with Moses. Moses argues, and God answers, “I have pardoned according to thy word” (14:20). That was Moses’s word, not God’s own decision.
Abraham does the same thing over Sodom. God hears that the city is wicked and tells Abraham he’s going down to see whether it’s as bad as he’s heard, “and if not, I will know” (Genesis 18:21). A god who has to go on a fact-finding mission doesn’t fit the all-knowing narrative.
Abraham’s nephew Lot lives in Sodom, and Abraham is probably thinking of him when he negotiates with God. He asks God if he would spare the city if there were fifty righteous people, and God agrees. But Abraham knows that this might be an impossible task, so he asks about forty-five, and again God agrees. Abraham continues to negotiate the number down to ten, and God agrees to the deal (Genesis 18:23–32).
A human, thinking about his own family, talked God down from fifty to ten and won every round. God never named his limit. Abraham did. He stopped at ten, and God had agreed to every number Abraham offered. If Abraham had kept going, would Lot alone have been enough? Maybe Abraham didn’t want to seem too greedy.
God Changes His Course
The most troubling example comes in 2 Samuel 24. God is angry at Israel, so he “moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah” (24:1). David takes the census, then admits it was a sin (24:10). And God punishes Israel for it. He sends a plague across the country, which kills seventy thousand people. As the angel reaches Jerusalem, God stops him: “the LORD repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people, It is enough” (24:16).
Only after seventy thousand people were dead did God decide he was sorry. It wasn’t really a change of heart, but a clean-up job after God realized his mistake.
Then there’s Jonah, a story almost every Christian knows, and one Jesus mentions in Matthew and Luke. In the story, God sends Jonah to tell Nineveh it will be destroyed. Instead of following instructions, Jonah runs the other way. When he finally delivers the message, the city repents, and so does God (Jonah 3:10). Nineveh is spared.
Jonah is furious and tells God that this is exactly why he ran. He knew God “repentest thee of the evil” (Jonah 4:2). God’s own prophet didn’t want the job because he knew God would back down. By then, changing his mind was God’s reputation.
And Jonah wasn’t a fluke. Amos pleads for Israel twice, and twice “the LORD repented for this” (Amos 7:3, 6). God tells King Hezekiah he’s going to die, then reverses it after Hezekiah prays and cries, adding fifteen years to his life before Isaiah even leaves the palace (2 Kings 20:1–6). In Judges, God relents simply because the people complain: “it repented the LORD because of their groanings” (Judges 2:18). These examples aren’t even all of them. God changes his mind often, and in at least one case, he pushed a man into sin and then punished seventy thousand people for it.
Common Objections
The Hebrew word translated “repent” doesn’t mean mistake. The word is nacham, which can mean to regret, relent, or be grieved. That’s true, and it’s why this isn’t about sin. But regretting a decision, as with humanity and Saul, means the decision didn’t turn out right. Even the NIV, translated by scholars who believe God is infallible, says God regretted making humanity (Genesis 6:6) and making Saul king (1 Samuel 15:11). Call it what you want, but it’s still a mistake.
It’s anthropomorphism. Theologians say that these passages describe God in human terms so people can understand him. But in Genesis 6:7, 1 Samuel 15:11, and Jeremiah 42:10, God is the one speaking. If God describes himself as regretting something, insisting he didn’t is overruling him. And if regret is just a figure of speech, so are his love, his anger, and his mercy. You can’t keep the feelings you like and explain away the ones you don’t.
God doesn’t change. Defenders point to Numbers 23:19 (“God is not a man… that he should repent”) and Malachi 3:6 (“I change not”). Those verses exist, but so do all the others. The Bible says both, sometimes in the same chapter, as 1 Samuel 15 shows.
And look at the context of those verses. In Numbers, the prophet Balaam is saying God won’t take back his blessing on Israel. In Malachi, God is promising not to wipe Israel out. Both are about God keeping his word, not about changing his mind.
Even then, the very next verse in Malachi has God saying, “Return unto me, and I will return unto you” (3:7). In Jeremiah, he lays it out as policy: if a nation turns from evil, he’ll “repent of the evil” he planned, and if it turns bad, he’ll “repent of the good” (Jeremiah 18:8–10). God doesn’t just change his mind; he tells you how to make him do it. If God changes when people change, then God changes.
God knew all along and was testing Moses. Nothing in the text says so. The narrator doesn’t say God pretended. He says, “The LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (Exodus 32:14). God even made Moses an offer: wipe out Israel and “I will make of thee a great nation” (32:10). If that was a bluff, then God lied to Moses to see what he’d do, which raises bigger problems than the one it solves.
Relenting is mercy, not a mistake. That works for Nineveh. It doesn’t work for the flood or for Saul. Mercy doesn’t explain regretting that you made people in the first place. And in 2 Samuel 24, stopping the plague may have been mercy, but God was the one who started it.
Final Thoughts
The god of the Old Testament is not the distant, flawless being of later theology. He gets angry, grieves, regrets, listens, argues, and changes his mind. People could talk to him and, apparently, persuade him to relent.
This doesn’t have to threaten anyone’s faith. In fact, it shows a god who has a relationship with people, rather than one who’s acting from a set script. Many believers might find this god more accessible and easier to relate to. But it means that the infallible god most churches teach isn’t the one described in the Bible. Instead, he is a god who makes mistakes and shows regret. He says so himself. Perhaps it makes him a little more honest than sceptics give him credit for being.
In the New Testament, we see in Jesus the representation and demonstration of God who is perfect in all He did but also extremely relatable and easy to understand.
Take, for example, the moment when Jesus began to pray in the garden of Gethsemane that he would prefer that the cup be taken away from him so that he would be spared the death on the cross.
One would expect the Old Testament version of God to repent and look for an alternative, as he did with Abraham when he told him to sacrifice Isaac, and the way He did with Ezekiel when he told him to make a fire with human dung, and Ezekiel claimed he was a Jew who kept the law of Moses and had never defiled himself by touching human dung, so God told him to use the dung of an animal instead, but this time God didn’t change his mind.
The salvation of mankind was not something God was going to toy with, and he proved this by the death of Jesus on the cross.