On the joy and anger of our changeless God

God is good, and passionless, and immutable. If a man accepts it as right and true that God does not change, yet is puzzled how (being such) He rejoices at the good, turns away from the wicked, and is angered with sinners and shows them mercy when they repent, the answer to this is that God does not rejoice and is not angered, for joy and anger are passions.

It is absurd to think that the Deity could be helped or harmed by human deeds. God is good and does only good; He harms no one and remains always the same. As to ourselves, when we are good we enter into communion with God through our likeness to Him, and when we become evil, we cut ourselves off from God, through our unlikeness to Him. When we live virtuously, we are God's own, and when we become wicked, we fall away from Him.

This does not mean that He is angry with us, but that our sins do not let God shine in us, and that they link us with the tormentors - the demons. If later, through prayers and good deeds, we obtain absolution of our sins, it does not mean that we have propitiated God and changed Him, but that through such actions and our turning to God [repentance] we have cured the evil in ourselves and have again become able to partake of God's goodness.

Thus, to say that God turns away from the wicked is the same as to say that the sun hides itself from those who lose their sight.

- St. Anthony the Great. "170 Texts on Saintly Life," number 150. 

Early Fathers from the Philokalia, translated by Kadloubovsky 

and Palmer. Faber and Faber, London and Boston, 1954.