"If You SAY So, God" - March 21
What can God do?
Hopefully this sounds like a kind of stupid question for me to be asking. I say "hopefully", because I hope that you're someone who easily answers this question by saying "God can do anything - He's God!" And yet so often, in our human arrogance, we do try to limit God by saying that He can only do something if we can understand how it's possible! We try to put God "in a box", and the walls of that box are made-up of human reason and logic.
Let me give you an example of how many Christians do that from today's Scripture reading from Luke 21-22 (ESV).
Here, as Jesus is eating His last meal with His disciples, He gives them some bread and He says, "This is my body, given for you...". And then, He gives them some wine and He says, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you." "This is my body..." "This cup is the new covenant in my blood..." Not "this bread and this wine just symbolize my body and blood", which is what many Christians teach about The Lord's Supper. And the worst part is that they teach this about the Lord's Supper because they feel that it "just doesn't make sense", according to human reason, that Jesus could really mean what He says. That Jesus body and blood could actually be present in bread and wine when you can't see them or taste them at all. That's a dangerous precedent - saying that things in the Bible can only be true if they "make sense".
Whether or not God can or can't do something is not, in the least, contingent upon whether or not we human beings can understand how He does it! Do you really want to be somebody who goes through life always asking God "How could you do that?". Do you want a God who's that small - who you believe has to fit inside a box that's limited by human reason and logic? Or do you want a God who is eternal, all-powerful and perfect?
I guess it doesn't much matter... whatever kind of God we may want, we're stuck with the one we've got! And thank God for that! Because it just so happens that our God is an all-powerful, merciful and loving God!