The Omnipotence of God - Holy One of Israel Part 3

You know, if I were to ask you what is the most powerful force in the universe today in our world, I wonder what you would say. I would think most people would say it was nuclear weapons. I mean, the power of these weapons is almost beyond description. For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, destroyed everything within a one mile radius of where it detonated, but did you know that today we have some modern hydrogen bombs that are 4,000 times more powerful than that weapon, that first atomic bomb.

What this means is, if you were to take a map of the Washington area and you were to put a string with its center right here at our church and then stretch it out to Camden Yards up in Baltimore and may use that as the radius for making a circle, one of these more powerful weapons would kill every living thing inside that circle that you had just drawn. Thanks to Albert Einstein and E equals MC squared, mankind now has more power at its fingertips than in all of human history combined. And yet, when we open the pages of the Bible, my friends, we find a being inside of here who is so powerful that he makes our thermonuclear weapons look like sparklers. And that's who we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about God and his awesome power because we're in a series of messages entitled The Holy One of Israel. We're going through the attributes of God one at a time, and so far we've covered two. We've covered the fact that God, first of all, is eternal. And then last week we talked about the fact that God is holy.

And if you missed either one of those two messages, I urge you to buy the CD, to buy the tape, to podcast it, to keep up with us as we're doing this study. But today, we want to go on and we want to talk about the third attribute of God in our list, and that is the omnipotence of God, the fact that God is omnipotent. Now, what exactly does it mean to be omnipotent? Well, the word omnipotent comes from two Latin words, the word omnis, which means all, and the word potens, which means powerful. Therefore, to be omnipotent means simply to be all powerful, to have unlimited power, unlimited strength, unlimited might, to be all mighty, as the Bible says of God, a being who is omnipotent can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants, to whomever he wants, and for whatever reason he wants.

Now, I know there's no such word as why ever, but I needed to get why in there, you know, so that's what we did. Now, in the Bible, God declares that he and he alone is the omnipotent being in this universe. Genesis 17 one, God said to Abraham, I am God almighty, that is, I'm the God that's omnipotent. In Jeremiah 32, then the Lord said to Jeremiah, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh is anything too hard for me. When Sarah laughed at the prospect of having a child at the age of 90 years old, God's response to her was very simple. Genesis 18, he said, is anything too hard for the Lord? After getting a crash course in the omnipotence of God, King Nebuchadnezzar said Daniel chapter four, he said, this is what I've learned. I've learned that God is the one who does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth, and no one can hold back his hand.

When Mary reacted with shock at the announcement by the angel Gabriel that she was going to have the virgin birth, Gabriel was unfazed. He simply said to her, Luke chapter one, nothing is impossible with God. Jesus said, Luke 18, what is impossible with men is possible with God. And finally, I suppose Revelation 19 sums it up as well as any with these words that Handel put to music, of course, when the angels scream out in Revelation 19, hallelujah, they scream for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Now, as followers of Christ, we live in a tough world.

We live in a lock and load world every day. And I believe in order for us to be able to face this world successfully, the most important truth about God that we need to remember is that God is omnipotent. You say, well, what about all the other attributes of God?

Aren't they important? Yeah, but think about it for a moment. Okay, so God is eternal. But what good is this if he lacks the power to direct eternity? Okay, so God is holy. But what good is this if he lacks the power to provide a solution to our sin problem?

Okay, so God is merciful. But what good is that if there's some disease that's too hard for him to heal, or some obstacle that's too big for him to solve? And what good are any of the promises of God, my friend, if there's no omnipotence to back them up? If God is not omnipotent, it means that he may be a God who means well, but without omnipotence, he's lame, he's helpless, and he's of no real assistance to anybody. Now, there are a lot of people in our world who have this view of God, namely that he's a nice person, but he's not omnipotent, and therefore he really can't help us sometime.

One person that comes to mind immediately is Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote the famous book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In a chapter entitled God Can't Do Everything, here's what Rabbi Kushner says, and I quote, he said, God wants people to live peaceful, happy lives, but he cannot always arrange it. God does not want you to be sick or crippled.

He didn't make you to have this problem, and he doesn't want you to go on having it, but he can't make it go away. That is something which is too hard even for God. Later, Kushner says that what his book proves is that, quoting now, we have a good God, but one who is not totally powerful, end of quote. Now, I'd like to respectfully differ with Rabbi Kushner about what his book proves. In my mind, what his book proves is that you can sell almost any kind of theological trash if you just come up with a catchy title. That's what I think his book proves.

You say, but Lon, yeah, but wait a minute, wait a minute. I mean, maybe the rabbi's right. I mean, what proof do we really have that God is as omnipotent as he says he is in the Bible? I mean, is there any proof at all? Well, yes, there is, and I'm just going to give you three proofs.

There are more. Three proofs of God's omnipotence. The first is creation. As human beings, you know, for us to create anything, we need something to start with. Wood, steel, concrete, silicon, but the amazing thing about God in Genesis chapter one is that six times God said, Let there be, and he spoke it to nothing and that nothing became something. Isaiah chapter 40. God says, Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens. Who do you think created all these things?

Well, friends, guess what? Not you and me. We didn't create it. Neither did evolution or chance or the Big Bang or the Little Bang. God goes on to say it is I who made the earth and created man upon it. My own hands stretched out the heavens.

I marshaled up the stars of the sky. I am God, and there is none other. I am God, and there is no one, no one like me. Creation alone, my friend, should be enough to prove to any thinking person that there must be an omnipotent God somewhere who did all of this. In fact, in Romans chapter one, Paul says that. He says that creation, verse 20, demonstrates God's eternal power, which is why Romans one goes on to say there is no excuse for any human being in the world not to look around at creation and immediately know there has got to be an omnipotent God. Now the second proof of God's omnipotence is all the omnipotent deeds that He's done on our earth over the thousands of years that the earth has existed.

You say like what? Well like Noah's flood and the parting of the Red Sea and providing manna from heaven for the Israelites, like shutting the mouths of lions for Daniel and making axe heads float for Elijah, like sending down fire from heaven for Elijah and Jonah and the fish, like the virgin birth and Jesus healing the sick and raising the dead and walking on water and turning water to wine and feeding 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, not to mention His own rising from the dead. God's miraculous deeds through the ages demonstrate that He has an omnipotent power that is unmatched anywhere in the cosmos. You remember what the disciples said after Jesus stilled the storm with just a word on the Sea of Galilee. They said, who is this man that even the winds and the waves obey Him?

Well He wasn't a man, He was God in the flesh, but the omnipotent God of the universe who runs this whole creation and commands it and it listens. Finally, want a proof of God's omnipotence? The third proof friends is our human bodies, these things we live in.

Psalm 139 verse 14, David writes and says, I am fearfully and wonderfully made. You want proof there's an omnipotent creator God in our universe, friend, then all you and I have to do is just take a good look at the complexity of these bodies that we live in. You know, in the summer 1965, I was between my junior and senior year in high school and I had the privilege of going to a summer seminar sponsored by the National Science Foundation at Virginia Tech for six weeks and we spent every afternoon working on individual research projects, but in the morning we all studied a subject and it just so happened that year the subject was enzymes. Now in case you don't know, an enzyme is a protein molecule in your body that speeds up the chemical reactions in your body. You say, well how important are enzymes?

Well friends, they're real important. You know that Big Mac you had last Thursday? Well if it wasn't for enzymes, you'd be still trying to digest it this morning. You say, Lon, what is this? Biology 101? I mean, what's the point? Friends, the point is that there are literally thousands of enzymes in your body and the most amazing thing is each one of them is code specific, meaning each one of them will only do one job and if there's an enzyme missing, no other enzyme will take over and do the job that that missing enzyme was supposed to do.

These things have a union contract. Do you understand what I'm saying? Far more serious than that, if you're missing an enzyme or it's broken and there's some reaction therefore that doesn't get done, you and I will be very sick people or we may be very dead people. Now without these enzymes flying around in our bodies and doing their jobs, you and I couldn't breathe, we couldn't see, we couldn't move, we couldn't digest food.

In short, life on this earth would be impossible without the enzyme system that operates in your body and that whole system is so complex and so specifically organized that it defies imagination and I'll never forget one morning walking out of class there in Blacksburg, bright sunny day and I walked outside and I stood still and I remember saying out loud based upon learning everything I've just shared with you, I said, you know what, there has got to be a God. Now what convinced me was not some theological lecture I had just walked out of or some sermon I had just heard, I was a scientist. What convinced me was just taking a good hard look as an honest scientist at the complexity of the human body and I was only looking at one system in the human body, that's all, but it was so complex I said there's no way this could happen by chance. It's impossible. There has got to be a God.

Now it was seven years later before I met this God by a street preacher in Chapel Hill, but I knew there had to be a God because the complexity of our human body just couldn't have happened and you know what, let me say if you're here today and you never trusted Christ in a real impersonal way, I'm telling you, you go outside and look at the creation, I'm telling you, you read about all God's done in our world, I'm telling you, you look at the complexity of the human body that defies imagination and there is no other place to land if you're an honest broker than there must be an omnipotent God running this whole show. This couldn't happen by evolution. This couldn't happen by chance. I love what one man said about evolution. He's a doctor who taught at Oxford in England. He's not a believer, but he's a scientist and here's what he said, he said, believing that evolution is responsible for all of this is like believing that a tornado blew through a junkyard and when it left the result was a Boeing 747. That's how impossible this is. And so if you've never trusted this God in a real impersonal way, I urge you to acknowledge His presence and then to embrace what He did on the cross for you so that you can come into personal relationship with Him something to think about.

Well, let's summarize. This is the omnipotence of God. God's unlimited power to do whatever He pleases, always, everywhere and forever. Nothing can stop Him. No one can thwart Him. No force on earth can withstand Him. God is omnipotent.

His word declares it and folks, His actions prove it. Now, that's as far as we want to go in the passage theologically because now we want to stop and we want to ask our most important questions. So, everybody ready? Yes, yes? Here we go. Nice and loud.

One, two, three. Yeah. You say, Lon, so what? Say, this is great. I mean, really it is, but what does this really mean for me? I mean, you know, put some handles on it for me.

Make it practical. Okay, I'd love to. What this really means, my friends, is that you and I can trust God with any issue that there is no problem you and I will ever face that God cannot handle. You and I will never come across a problem that God is incapable of dealing with because God is omnipotent and there is nothing, I don't care how impossible the situation looks, nothing He can't deal with.

I mean, how many times have we seen Him prove it right here at McLean Bible Church for us? If you've been around for a while, you know how many times we've run into situations where somebody said, this will never happen. You'll never get this passed.

This will never go through. And what did we do? We said, don't tell us what an omnipotent God can't do. And we got on our face and we prayed and we trusted God. And you know what? God removed every obstacle and He's going to remove the rest of them we're facing with these campuses.

It doesn't matter, friends. Greater is He who is in us than He who is in the world. But I believe God did those things for us as a church corporate because He wants to encourage us as individual believers in Jesus to remember that He's the same omnipotent God for us personally. Not just for the church at large, but the things we've seen Him do, we need to extrapolate that back and say now if God can do that for the church, He can do it for me.

He wants to make it personal. And it's when we get to the place that we really believe this, not just in our heads, but we believe it in our hearts and in our souls and in the deepest part of our being, that's when we begin to see God's power unleashed in our lives. In fact, as a follower of Christ here today, if you are one, I want to challenge you with this question. My question is, what are you believing God for right now that no one else can do so that when He does it, you can give Him the glory and give Him the credit? Listen, as followers of Christ, we should always have something on this list, something we're trusting God for that looks impossible, but we believe God has led us to trust Him for it anyway, whether it deals with work or with school or with our family or with our children or our grandchildren, doesn't matter.

Something ought to be on this list. If we don't have something on this list, we are insulting the omnipotence of God. We are dishonoring God and we're robbing Him of the chance to display His omnipotence in our lives so that He can get glory. But I want to go on and tell you something else I've discovered 37 years as being in the ministry. I've discovered that most followers of Christ do a much better job of trusting God in the crises of life. They do a much better job of trusting God in the big impossible looking things than we do in trusting God in the little things, in the everyday things. It's like we rally to the crises, but then we live our everyday lives as though there were no omnipotent God in the universe.

The average Christian doesn't limit God in the crises of life nearly as much as I've found they do in life's everyday affairs. You know, recently, Brenda and I were up in Boston visiting my oldest son Jamie who's up there and my wonderful daughter-in-law Julia and our two grandchildren. And one day Jamie was at work at the hospital so it was a beautiful day and we said, let's go somewhere with the grandkids. And there was a Nordstrom that had just opened in Boston just a couple days before, maybe a week before. And so we said, well, let's just kind of drive over there and we'll kill some time walking around in Nordstrom.

So we put the grandkids in the car and we drove over. Now what I didn't know is that this was the hottest thing to open in Boston and who knows how long. I mean, the place was absolutely mobbed.

I've never seen so much traffic. It was ridiculous. Well, there was a big parking deck kind of way off on the side where we could have tried to park but it was a long walk with two small children. And then there was this itsy-bitsy little parking lot right up next to the store.

Most of it was handicapped parking. There were a few non-handicapped spots so I pulled in there and we started cruising around with about 10,000 other people looking for a spot. And so I turned to Julie and Brenda and I said, you know what, we need to pray. We need to pray. So I said, let's pray. So little Tyler, my grandson, put his hands together like this and I said, here's what I prayed. I said, now Lord Jesus, you are the omnipotent God of every single parking space in this parking lot. And Lord, you know how much easier it would be for us if we didn't have to go over and park in that parking deck somewhere. So right now, Lord, I am asking you by your divine omnipotent power to open up a parking space just for us and we'll be careful to make sure every time we tell this story you get the credit. Amen. My little grandson goes, amen. I said, that's right.

Well, you said, Lon, wait a minute, wait a minute. What makes you think that God is interested in trivial stuff like parking spaces at Nordstrom's? Well, what makes you think he isn't? I mean, I got to tell you, I love my children. If something is important to them, I don't care how trivial it may look. It's important to me. We are God's children by faith in Jesus Christ.

So why wouldn't he be the same? Well, all I can tell you is about 30 seconds later, we come around the corner and immediately right smack dab in front of us, this car's backup lights go on. I'm sitting in the perfect spot. I put my blinker on. This lady backed out. I pulled into her sweet little old parking space and then I put the car in park. I turned off the car. I raised my hands and I said, thank you, Jesus, for this parking space.

You're right. You say, Lon, I can't believe you do this. I can't believe you do this.

Well, friend, I can't believe you don't do it. That's why you don't get parking spaces. I mean, if we've got an omnipotent God, why is it we only trust him with the big stuff in life? Why can't we trust him with the little things in life and let him show his power? I've trusted God for parking spaces. I've trusted God to help me find lost keys. I've trusted God that there'll be sale items in my size when I go to the store.

I have. I've trusted God for base hits when my boys needed one badly. I trust. Listen, this is the omnipotent God of the universe. And I've tried to teach my boys never to limit God just to the big crises of life. I've tried to teach them to understand that there is no crisis too big and no crisis too small that we can't trust God and his omnipotence for. And that when we do this, we please God and we honor God and we exalt God because we give him a platform to show his power.

You trust him for parking spaces and you watch what happens. Now, he said, Well, Lon, I got to ask you, does this mean that are you saying that God will do everything I want him to if I just ask him because he's omnipotent, because he can do it? No, I'm not saying that at all.

No, no, I'm not saying that at all. You know, my little girl, Jill, who is, of course, as you know, disabled and mentally retarded, she loves to go out on walks. She loves to be outside and she loves to pick up sticks.

And by the time we're done walking around the neighborhood, she's got handfuls of sticks. The problem is that when Jill overheats, she has seizures. And right now she's wearing a plastic body brace that helps correct some scoliosis in her back. We're hoping and praying that this will help us avoid back surgery for her.

And this brace is solid plastic. So in the summertime, in the heat, it causes her body temperature to really rise rapidly. So Jill will often go and stand at the front door and beg to get out. So I hope you understand what I'm saying here, friends. I am omnipotent enough at that moment that I'm capable of opening the door and letting her out.

But I'm also loving enough to tell her no when it's 95 degrees out at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on an August day, because I know if she goes out walking right then, she's going to have a seizure and she's going to get hurt. Friends, the same is true with God. God is omnipotent enough to do anything, but he's also loving enough to tell us no when he knows that something we're asking for is not good for us. So will God automatically do everything we ask Him to do just the way we want Him to do it?

No. But God will solve every issue you bring to Him and trust Him for, and He'll solve it sometimes the way you and I ask, and sometimes better than the way you and I ask. But He is the omnipotent God. He will never leave us hanging, my friends.

So let's conclude. Knowing that I have an omnipotent God gives me quiet confidence, my friends, with which I can face every obstacle in life with utter peace and without fear. It should give you that same confidence. You know, over 60 times in the Bible, God uses a phrase. He says, Fear not. Fear not. Fear not.

Why not? Because Jeremiah 32 26, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh, is anything too hard for me. Fear not. And I have a quote that I keep in my Bible I'd like to share with you. It says, It is impossible for that man to despair who remembers that his helper is omnipotent.

I look at that quote at least once a day almost. And when I find myself despairing, which sometimes I can do, when I find myself a little discouraged, which sometimes can happen, when I find myself feeling intimidated by the obstacles facing us as a church or facing me as a person, I always go back to that quote and I read it. It is impossible for that man to despair who remembers his helper is omnipotent. And if I'm despairing, you know what that means?

It means I have forgotten who my helper is. I have forgotten who my God is. And once I remind myself of who my God is, that despair just melts away. My friends, you cannot remember that your helper is omnipotent and have despair at the same time. And for many of you here who have a lot of trouble and a lot of difficulty in your life, challenges in your life, I'm here to say to you the solution to the despair and the worry and the anxiety is very simple. It's to remember who your God is.

To remember who your helper is. He is the omnipotent Creator God of this universe. There is nothing impossible with Him and He will answer every prayer you pray and He'll answer it with His power. And if He's got to change the laws of nature to answer your prayer, He'll do it. He'll do it. And so, maybe you ought to write this quote down and you ought to keep it in your Bible.

Maybe you ought to keep it on your refrigerator. The important thing is we need to keep it in our hearts and in our minds and in our souls. It is impossible for that man or woman to despair who reminds themselves every day that their helper is omnipotent. Friends, I pray that what we've talked about today will change the very way you face the crises of life. You plus an omnipotent God is a majority no matter where you go.

So, I hope that's how you'll learn to see your world. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, I thank you for what you said. The things that are impossible with man are possible with God. I thank you, Lord, that you told Abraham there's nothing too hard for the Lord. I thank you, Lord Jesus, that everything in this world, from parking spaces to zoning officials, are in the hand of Almighty God and that you are omnipotent in every area of this universe. Lord Jesus, help us to remind ourselves of this great truth each and every day, every moment of every day. And Lord Jesus, may our hope in life be the omnipotence of Almighty God. Teach us, Lord, that when we are focused on the omnipotence of God, it is impossible for us to despair or have anxiety. So, change our focus, Lord, off of our problems, off of our challenges, and on to the omnipotent power of Almighty God.

And may that give us the strength and the confidence and the calm that we need to face everything this world throws at us. Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you are the omnipotent God of the universe. And thank you for those of us who are in Christ. You are our helper. We thank you and praise you in Jesus' name. And God's people said amen. Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you are omnipotent in every area of this universe. And may that