What God Cannot Do

WHAT GOD CANNOT DO

“Behold I am the Lord, the God of all flesh.  Is there anything too hard for Me?” (Jeremiah 32:27).

Yesterday I shared with you Dr. Woodrow Kroll’s devotional on “What God Can Do.” Today we look at “What God Cannot Do!”

Does this mean that God will do anything you ask?  Probably not.

God’s omnipotence is His ability to do all His character will permit Him to do.  You can be thankful there are some things God just won’t do because they are out of harmony with His moral nature. 

God will not look on your sin with approval.  Habakkuk 1:12-13 says, “Are You not from everlasting, O Lord my God, my Holy One? ... You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness.”    God’s power won’t approve of your sin because His character won’t permit Him to do so.

Also, God will not be tempted to do evil Himself.  James 1:13, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone.”  God doesn’t have the power to be tempted to do evil.  That’s why you can trust His character.  When you want God to do something that is out of character for Him, He won’t do it, and that should encourage you.

Besides this, God cannot lie.  To Titus the apostle Paul wrote that he was an apostle “according to the faith of God’s elect and the acknowledgement of the truth which accords with godliness, in hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began” (Titus 1:1-2).  That means you can trust God and His Word to always tell you the truth.  You may not like what He tells you, but you can be certain it will always be true.

God is not hampered by inability but sometimes He is deterred by His character.  If He delays in solving your problems, it’s not because He lacks the power to do something about them.  Rather, it’s because He possesses the wisdom to care for them in the right time and in the right way, neither of which may be evident yet.

Rejoice that God is omnipotent, but be equally glad that He is omniscient, all-knowing.  Without the combination of the two, you would have a God with strength but no character, power with no convictions.  Fortunately, our God has both.  Thank Him for who He is today. 

Dr. Woodrow Kroll is President of Back to the Bible and a friend of America’s Keswick

Digging Deeper: Proverbs 9; Daniel 11-12; Jude

Dig This Quote: “We should always keep Christ before our eyes. The devil continually tempts us to abandon Christ and seek the Father, saying to ourselves, ‘This or that will please him’. Meanwhile we ignore Christ—the One the Father sent—so that we might listen to Him alone. We respond as the Pharisees did and reject Christ. We wonder, ‘Where is the Father?’ That is the question that world asks. This is the greatest temptation to your faith. You must devote yourself to the Word of Christ and train yourself to hold on to it so that you never lose sight Jesus.” Martin Luther, Faith Alone.

Determined Digging: Level 1: John 15:5; Level 2: Matthew 6:30-34

Determined Praying: Prayer is possession by anticipation!