From the Pulpit: Is there anything God cannot do?

A favorite song that our preschool students sing contains these lyrics: “My God is so big, my God is so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do.” When sung with the faith of a child, these words are correct. When challenged by an atheist or an illogical question, they are not correct. A foolish question that unbelievers like to ask goes like this: “If God is all powerful, can He make a rock so big He can’t lift it?” The Christian apologist Sean McDowell has a great answer for that one. He gives his students a paper clip and challenges them to make “a square circle” with it. It doesn’t take long for them to realize that there is no such thing. McDowell concludes that God can do anything that is logically possible, not foolish things that are logically impossible. 

While he was on earth in the form of a man, Jesus did many things that people didn’t realize he could do. He stilled a storm, and walked on water. He healed people with illnesses that modern medicine today still can’t heal. He cast out demons, and raised the dead. The amazing thing about these miracles was that they were witnessed by crowds of people, like the crowds of over 5,000 and 4, 000 that he fed with a few loaves of bread and a few fish. People today are skeptical of the miracles recorded in the Bible, but when the Gospels were written it wasn’t hard to find living eye witnesses to these miracles, including people who talked to and touched Jesus after he rose from the dead. 

What really impresses me about Jesus is not just what he did that people didn’t realize he could do until he did it, but what Jesus didn’t do. When he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, he didn’t resist arrest. He told Peter to put away his sword when Peter tried to play Zorro and rescue him. Jesus said, “Do you not think I cannot call on my Father, and He will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matt. 26:53). That would be 69,600 angels, and if one angel put to death over 185,000 Assyrians in one night (see 2 Kings 19:35) these angels would be able to wipe out the whole world many times over. But as Jesus asked in Matt. 16:54, “But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?” 

So to fulfill Scripture, Jesus didn’t strike back at the soldiers who mocked him, or who blindfolded him and stuck him and asked him to prophesy who struck him. As the all-knowing Son of God he could have given them not only their names but their life histories! Nor did Jesus respond to the taunts to come down from the cross if he was the Son of God. If he had, we would still be dead in our sins. Instead, he fulfilled Scripture by showing his power by what he didn’t do. 

There are many more things than I have space to write about that Jesus can’t do, things that show his power as God. God can’t lie (Hebrews 6:18) or be unfaithful to those he has put his name on in baptism (2 Tim. 2:13). God is able to do “immeasurably more than we ask or imagine” (Eph. 2;20). I’ll stick to the faith of our preschool students and sing along with them, “There’s nothing my God cannot do-for you!”