Nothing Is Too Hard

             “Ah, Sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you”…“I am the Lord, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me?” (Jeremiah 32:17 & 27)

Well, God can’t make a square circle, two to equal zero (or a google). God can’t make the universe cease to exist while simultaneously causing it to exist. It could be said that it is too hard for Him to hand His godhood over to someone who is not His equal or better. This isn’t sacrilege.  It’s simple logic. These are illogical, nonsensical, and simply definitional. There are some who try to claim that if God cannot do these things, then He is not actually omnipotent. In other words, they’re saying this verse is a lie because they raise questions about what God can’t do. Not only do they violate simple logic, but they also ignore the context in which this verse is found.

In fact, after asking this question, Jeremiah lists a number of things God did in the past. If God did all of those things, surely it couldn’t be too difficult for God to rescue Israel from its dire situation. Ten verses later, God challenges Jeremiah with his own idea. Instead of taking care of the situation as it is and proving His power, God told Jeremiah that He was going to make things worse from Jeremiah’s point of view, and show that His power was great enough even to handle the worse situation.

The story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal from I Kings 18 comes to mind. Elijah lets the prophets of Baal build an altar and sacrifice a bull, but challenges them to call on Baal to burn the sacrifice himself. They failed. Elijah then builds an altar, sacrifices the bull, and has people dig a trench around the altar and pour water over the bull so that it runs into and fills the trench. After one simple prayer, fire falls from heaven, burns the bull, the wood, the stones of the altar, and the soil, and licked up (dried) the water in the trench.

Sometimes, we have a certain level of faith that God can do something because He’s done it before. But sometimes, when we ask for a repeat, God chooses to make things worse rather than better, to teach us that our view of Him is too small or too weak. He's like the coach or the mentor who demands that we stretch farther, lift more, or dig deeper. He’s capable of doing more than we think and it's to our benefit that He makes us deal with more than we think we can, so we can learn that He is.