Nothing Is Impossible with God

When the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would give birth to the One who would be the Savior of the world, he gave her assurance by telling her, “With God nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)

From this, we have the common saying, “Nothing is impossible with God.”

Typically, we interpret this verse to mean that anything that can be conceived within the mind of an infinite, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient God can be accomplished by Him. He is only limited by His nature and His holiness, such that He can neither die nor tell a lie. (1 Tim. 1.17; Num. 23:19)

That is why anything we request in prayer will always meet with success as long as it is circumscribed by the boundaries of His will. For whatever God wills, He will do. (Ezekiel 24:14)

Yet there is another way of expressing the relationship between “nothing” and God. The idea is not original with me, but it is an interesting perspective on the power and the authority of God.

From the Common Book of Prayer:

Eternal God,
protector of all who put their trust in you,
without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy;

The prayer affirms our belief that the world offers nothing that is strong and holy apart from God. But C.S. Lewis took expressed this thought from a different perspective.

C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters

And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why...

I also read a sermon from the pastor of The Parish Church of St. Michaels’ Cornhill in the city of London that reflected this same sentiment. Read or download the entire message here.

Reflect on how strong nothing actually is. For nothingness, denial, the void, the abyss is the very strong and potent force of evil.

In practice our society operates on the basis that there are no moral absolutes. You are, as the saying goes, free to make up your own mind. This leads to the dereliction of reason, to depravity and to moral and social chaos.

…poisonous intellectual posturing and satanic destruction of all values has produced the vicious society in which we all now live. This is the society without God. It is bound to be a culture of death.

When there are no real values, when there are no absolute standards of judgement, then we must expect our education system to collapse too. And that is just what has happened.

When God created Adam, He breathed into him the breath of life and Adam became a living soul, made alive by the indwelling Spirit of God. When Adam chose to rebel against God, he died – he lost the indwelling Spirit and left a void – a “nothing” – within man’s soul.

Satan has multiplied the strength of that “nothing” to create a world where God is rejected and where the dominant themes are tolerance and even the promotion of evil as if it were good.

Nature abhors a vacuum. It cannot tolerate “nothing,” and thus seeks to fill it with something else. Man may confess that there is no God or that he does not need to worship God, but God has place eternity in the hearts of men and thus there is a desire to worship.

Man has attempted throughout his existence to fill the void left by the departure of the Spirit of God following the fall of Adam. Yet eternity is a driving force within his being, and man will forever seek to replace that which was lost with something that is worthy of his worship – something that man deems worthy of the sacrifice of his time and health and fortune – even his very life. Man will worship.

Nothing is strong, but with God, nothing is impossible. He is infinite, eternal, transcendent, and perfect in all of His ways, expressing His love for His creation through inconceivable gifts and ultimate sacrifice.

Thus, even when the world is at its worst, the child of God can join Jeremiah in his song, “This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: 22 The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; 23 they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness (Lam. 3:21-23).