Although the Bible cannot be said to stress the divine omnipotence more strongly than it stresses such divine attributes as holiness and love, the truth that God is almighty looms exceedingly large in his self-revelation. So it does also in that confession of the faith of the historic Christian church which is known as the Apostles’ Creed. Significantly, of all the divine attributes omnipotence is singled out for specific mention and it is named, not once, but twice. The church confesses belief in “God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” and in his Son Jesus Christ, who “sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.”

By now, however, the doctrine of divine omnipotence has fallen on evil days. Not only is it being neglected, there are those who distort it, and not a few deny it. The present generation needs to be reminded of it.

The following paragraphs are a summary statement of the Scriptural teaching of divine omnipotence.

                   

1. Omnipotence belongs to God alone. Only God is powerful to the point of being almighty. Time and again the Bible speaks of him as “the Almighty.” In such Hebrew names as El and El Shaddai the idea of might is prominent. According to one etymology the same may be said of the name Elohim, and in this case the plural form brings out the fulness of divine power. The Old Testament tells us that nothing is “too hard for Jehovah” (Gen. 18:14; Jer. 32:17), and in addressing Jehovah, Job said: “I know that thou canst do everything” (Job 42:2). The New Testament denominates God “the only Potentate” (I Tim. 6:15) and affirms that nothing is impossible with him (Luke 1:37). Before God the statesmen, soldiers and scientists of earth, yea all nations, also the United Nations, are “as nothing, and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity” (Isa. 40:17). All the forces of the universe, atomic and hydrogen bombs included, are completely under his control. So are the sun and its planets, the moon, the stars in their courses, and the galaxies, vast beyond human imagination (Isa. 40:26). And the influence exerted by the grim prince of darkness on the affairs of men and nations is wielded by divine permission and divinely overruled for the good of God’s people and the coming of his kingdom (Rom. 8:38,39).

2. God exercises his power in creation (Ps. 33:6, 9) and in providence (Heb. 1:3 ); in the creation of the universe out of nothing, “so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Heb. 11:3), commonly called immediate creation, and in the creation, for example, of man’s body from “the dust of the ground” (Gen. 1:7), sometimes called mediate creation; in such natural occurrences as the sending of ruin (Mat. 5:45) and such supernatural events, known as miracles—the concurrence of natural factors not necessarily being excluded—as the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites with “the waters a wall unto them on their right hand and on their left” (Ex. 14:22); in the resurrection of Christ from the dead (Rom. 1:4) and in the entire process of redemption (Eph. 1:19, 20; Eph. 3:20; I Pet. 1:5; II Pet. 1:3, 4). In each of his works and in all of them God manifests his omnipotence. It is worthy of special note that throughout Scripture salvation is ascribed to the power of God as well as to his mercy, grace and love.

3. Scripture ascribes to God, not only all might, but also all authority, all right, all competence, to exercise that might. It speaks of God’s exousia (Mat. 28:19) as well as his dunamis (Mat. 6:13) and kratos (Eph. 1:19). To employ Latin terminology, it defines the divine power not only as potentia. but also as potestas. That fact bears directly on the proper understanding of the divine sovereignty. The sovereignty of God, which is hardly a divine attribute in the usual theological sense of that term, but a relation of God to his creatures and, according to some, a “relative attribute,” is primarily a matter of unrestricted right. The notion that might is right is not only foreign to Scripture, it is abominated by Scripture.

4. The sentence Deus potest qtud vult* embraces a pointed definition of the divine omnipotence. It is also a very exact statement of fact. God can do without any exception what he wills to do. To say that God cannot in the present or the future do whatever he wills or that he could not do in the past whatever he would is to detract from his omnipotence, and, obviously, to detract from omnipotence is to deny it. God declares: “My counsel shall stand and I will do all my pleasure” (Isa. 46:10). “Our God is in the heavens; he bath done whatsoever he hath pleased” ( Ps. 115:3). According to the regula Scripturae Nebuchadnezzar was completely right when he declared of the God of Israel: “He doeth according to his will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say unto him, What doest thou?” (Dan. 4:35).

5. Unassailable as the statement is that God can do whatever he wills to do, God cannot will what is contrary to his nature. William of Occam and his fellow-nominalists erred grievously when, divorcing omnipotence from the other divine attributes, they taught that God can err, sin, suffer and die. Thus, after the manner of Islam, they reduced the power of God to sheer arbitrariness and welcomed the pagan tenet that might is right. Scripture states explicitly that “the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent” (I Sam. 15:29), that “God cannot be tempted with evil” (Jas. 1:13 ), that with him is “no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (Jas. 1:17). It is obvious that the power of God is not thus restricted. The simple meaning is that the will of God in every instance reflects his perfection and is never contrary to his intrinsic excellence. When it is said of God, “He cannot deny himself” (II Tim. 2:13), this is to assert that he cannot cease being God, which means, among other things, that he cannot cease being omnipotent. To quote Augustine: “The power of God is not diminished when it is said that he cannot die and cannot sin; for if he could do these things, his power would be less” (De Civitate, V, 10). William C. T. Shedd says: “God is not able to become non·existent. This would be finite weakness, not almighty power” (Dogmatic Theology, 1, 360). In short, the omnipotent God wills all that he wills and does all that he does because he is who he is.

6. On the other hand, the divine omnipotence is not exhausted by that which God does. Plato, Plotinus, Abelard, Spinoza, Schlciermacher, Schweizer and others to the contrary notwithstanding, the actual is not co-extensive with the possible. To say that it is, amounts to confusing God and the universe, which is the essence of pantheism. To hold that God’s power extends no farther than his will, is to make him no greater than his finite creation. God could have sent more than twelve legions of angels to prevent the Saviour’s capture in Gethsemane (Mat. 26:53), but it was not his will so to do. Scripture makes the amazing assertion that God is able of stones to raise up children unto Abraham ( Luke 3:8). Although there is no record of God’s having done such a thing, he could have done it if he had so willed. In his standard work on Dogmatics Herman Bavinck says: “God is not exhausted in the world, eternity does not empty itself into time, infinity is not identical with the sum of the finite, omniscience is not the same as the content of thought embodied in the creatures. Thus omnipotence is infinitely exalted above the boundless power revealed in the world” (II, 252 f.). Again it becomes clear that the power of God is unlimited, that God is truly omnipotent, that absolute omnipotence belongs to God. “With God all things are possible” (Mat. 19:26; Mark 10:27; Luke 18:27).

7. That the power of God extends beyond the will of God must be maintained in the interest of his sovereignty. While God’s power is limitless, in the exercise of his power God is free. It is no less important to maintain that the free exercise by God of his power does not spell arbitrariness. Nothing can be more certain than that God will exercise his omnipotence in harmony with his nature. When the Saviour was hanging on the cross, the chief priests with the scribes and elders mocked him, saying: “He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross” (Mat. 27:42). They thought that he lacked the power to come down from the cross. In that they were mistaken. As the almighty Son of God he was abundantly able to do that. Yet, in a very real sense he who saved others could not save himself. He could not save himself precisely because he would save others. His determination to accomplish the task assigned to him by the Father and willingly assumed by himself fastened him to the cross. What made it impossible for him to come down from the cross was his love for sinners, his being what he was, namely love incarnate. It was not lack of power. In fact, his loving determination not to exercise the power which be had was itself an act of boundless power. Small wonder that he said: “I lay down my life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10:17, 18). His dying was an act of power as much as was his rising from the dead. That church-father was altogether right who imagined himself at the foot of the cross looking up to the dying Saviour and then exclaimed: “Who is this that dies when he wills? To die is weakness; to die thus is power.”

8. Scripture teaches unmistakably the divine necessity of the atonement. This is not to say that the sovereignty of God is restricted. Nor does it mean that God is deficient in power. The Scriptural teaching of the divine necessity of the atonement detracts precisely nothing from the Scriptural teachings of absolute divine sovereignty and absolute divine omnipotence. The very nature of God demanded the sacrificial and substitutionary death of God’s Son on the accursed cross. The Heidelberg Catechism says: “By reason of the justice and truth of God, satisfaction for our sins could be made no otherwise than by the death of the Son of God” (XVI, 40). If one may quote oneself, “The God of infinite love is also a God of absolute justice and boundless wrath. At the dawn of human history the justice of God decreed that the wages of sin would be death (Gen. 2:17; Rom. 6:23), even death eternal. For God to depart a hairbreadth from the path of perfect justice would be to deny himself. But that is the one thing which God cannot do” (God-Centered Evangelism, p. 136). However, as was previously observed, God’s inability to deny himself, instead of being impotence. spells omnipotence. Small wonder that Scripture ascribes salvation to the power of God and describes the gospel of Christ crucified as “the power of God unto salvation” (Rom. 1:16; I Cor. 1:18,24).

9. The divine omnipotence comes to expression signally. although by no means solely, in such supernatural events as Christ’s virgin birth and his bodily resurrection, together with the other miracles of the Bible. To deny those miracles as actual historical events, which is done by and large by both the older liberal theologians and the proponents of the dialectical theology, is to do violence to the divine omnipotence as revealed in the Word of God. On the question whether God today performs miracles in the realm of nature there exists considerable difference of opinion. Many Protestants answer that, special revelation having been concluded in the canon of Holy Scripture, God no longer works miracles. The Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, teaches that special revelation is continuous and so is the occurrence of miracles, particularly miracles of healing. Pentecostalists insist that the charisms, including the gift of miracles, operative in the apostolic church, endure in the church of succeeding ages. Every once in a while some individual laying claim to the power of miraculous healing is proved to be a charlatan, performing counterfeit miracles or, in Biblical terminology, “lying wonders” (II Thess. 2:9). The Bible tells us that in the troublous days which are to harbinger the second coming of Christ God will work wonders in nature (Mat. 24:29). The visible return of his Son upon the clouds will itself be supernatural. Nor can it be gainsaid that the hand of the Lord is not shortened; he can perform miracles whenever he wills; and he alone can do wonders (Ps. 72:18).

10. When the Arminian, although accepting Christian supernaturalism generally, tells the sinner that God is impotent to save him without his consent, he too does violence to the Scriptural teaching of omnipotence. If he were to content himself with saying that it is not God’s will to save sinners by external force or compulsion. he would not only be quite right; he would be stating a profound truth. As it is, he denies the Scriptural doctrine of efficacious grace. The grace by which the Holy Spirit quickens him who is dead in trespasses and sins is irresistible (John 3:3–6; Eph. 2:1). By the power of the Holy Spirit, operating within him, the sinner is rendered willing to be saved. His willingness, then, is a saving gift of God. “It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy” (Rom. 9:16).

11. We human beings, even when we have put on “the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Col. 3:10), do not know all about God. We cannot know all about God for the obvious reason that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. God being infinite, we finite beings must beware of speculating on his attributes, that of omnipotence included. For example, it has been said that the Son of God could have become incarnate without being conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. To be sure, here too it must be maintained that Cod could have done whatever he would. To deny that is to deny the divine omnipotence. Yet, what mortal has the right to assert dogmatically that the Word could have willed to become flesh in a way other than that in which he actually became incarnate? One safeguard against theological speculation is to refrain from isolating the divine attributes from one another. As a ray of white light, on passing through a prism, is broken up into the colors of the spectrum, so all God’s attributes are manifestations of the one all-embracing divine attribute of perfection. In Calvin and Calvinism B. B. Warfield lauds the great Genevan for refusing in his Institutes of the Christian Religion to speculate on the divine attributes. He says: “The divine power, righteousness, justice. holiness, goodness, mercy and truth are here brought together and concatenated one with the others, with some indication of their mutual relations, and with a clear intimation that God is not properly conceived unless he is conceived in all his perfections” (p. 170).

12. In the conclusion of his article “Omnipotence” in the International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia Geerhardus Vos makes the practical observation that the contemplation of the divine omnipotence ought to sustain our trust in God and evoke within us reverence for God. Rather than attempt to say the last word concerning omnipotence, it behooves us to accept in childlike faith its manifestations as related in the infallible Word, to trust God fully, also and especially in these turbulent times, for its exercise in the salvation of his own, the casting down of his enemies and the consummation of his glorious kingdom, and to adore God for this excellency, which, like all tho divine excellencies, is infinite (Westminster Shorter Catechism, 4).