Attributes of God (Series 2): The Omnipotence of God — A.W. Tozer

The Omnipotence of God in Scripture

Tonight I am to speak on the omnipotence of God. I want to read four texts. Genesis 17, 1. When Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram and said unto him, I am the almighty God.

After 1926, Jesus said unto them, With God all things are possible. Luke 1 .37, the angel said, With God nothing shall be impossible. Revelation 19 .6, And I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.

Out of a shining jewel case of luminous texts, many of them, thousands of them there are, but I have chosen four tonight. To Abraham, to them called Abram, God said, I am the almighty God. And our Lord Jesus said positively, All things are possible with God.

And the angel turned it around and said it negatively, Nothing shall be impossible with God. Then the voice of the great multitude, Alleluia, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. If I am to speak on the omnipotence of God, I suppose the thing to do would be to define omnipotence.

I know that mobs don't come to hear you when you do that. But there are always enough sincere, earnest, God-hungry people to give any man a good hearing who will talk about these good things. So I want to talk a little about omnipotence and point out that by definition it means potent.

It comes, of course, omnipotent, meaning potent, all, o-m-n-i meaning all, and potent meaning powerful, able to do and to have power. And then omnipotent means to be able to do all and to have all power.

There is a romance of words. Somebody, I think, wrote a book by that name. But if you fall in love with words, you'll never be bored again as long as you live. That is not by yourself. I admit that there are people who are bores, and they would bore you if you were in your coffin.

But you'll never be bored by yourself, because you can always think about a big word, and that will help you. That's what the word potent means, omnipotent. It means all potent. It means having a potency, all the potency there is.

We talk about potent meaning powerful, and we talk about omnipotent, omnipotent. And then we come to a second word, and that is the word almighty, which is also here. Almighty. Now, that means exactly the same thing as omnipotent, only that it's from the Anglo-Saxon, and omnipotent, if you know, is from the Latin.

And I have noted that in the Bible, the word almighty is used 56 times of God, and it's never used about anybody else but God. In our English Bible, the word omnipotent is only used once, and that refers to God.

And in the English Bible, I repeat, the word almighty is used 56 times, and it's never used of anybody else but God, and there's a reason for this. Almighty, you know, means having an infinite and absolute plenitude of power.

And when you use the words infinite and absolute, you can only be talking about one person, and that is God. There's only one infinite, because infinite means without limit. And it's impossible that there should be two beings in the universe without limit, so there being only one, you're referring to God.

So, almighty is having an infinite and absolute plenitude of power, and you know that philosophy has to admit this, and human reason, as little as I think of it. I read a review of a book of mine the other day written by a doctor of philosophy, and he was in favor of it, but he's not wholly so.

He said a number of things that I was against scholarship, which I am not, I'm just against big wins. And that's all, I'm just against fellows whose heads are inflated. I'm not against real scholars such as Augustine or Paul or Luther or Wesley, but I'm just against men who think they're scholars.

But reason has to come down and kneel and declare that God is omnipotent. Now, if you can't prove a thing, if a thinker don't know a thing except by reason, you don't have it. If you have it by revelation, the holy men of God speak as they're moved by the Holy Ghost, then you have it.

But once you have it by revelation, then reason sometimes is forced to come and kneel down and say, The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, and admit that it's true. So I give you three propositions briefly here.

Proposition One: God Has Power

One of them is Proposition 1, that God has power. Now that God has power is declared, of course everybody knows that. David said, I heard once that God has power, and twice I heard that power belongs unto God.

And the man Paul, one of the greatest intellects the world ever knew, said this, For the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.

You look up at the starry heavens above and see the eternal power of God there. God's power and Godhead are found there. We used to sing a song, in some places they still sing it, the spacious firmament on the high and all the blue ethereal sky, the spangled heavens a shining frame, their great original proclaim.

Then wearied son from day to day does his creator's power display and publishes in every land the work of an almighty hand. As soon as the evening shades prevail, the moon takes up the wondrous tale, and nightly to the listening earth repeats the story of her birth, while all the stars that around her burn, and all the planets in their turn confirm the tidings as they roll and spread the truth from pole to pole.

And reason's ear they all rejoice and utter forth a glorious voice, for ever singing as they shine, the hand that made us is divine. So God has power, and whatever God has is without limit. God has power, and God's power is without limit.

Therefore God is omnipotent since he has power, and since God has no limits, since God is absolute, whatever touches God or God touches is absolute, and therefore God's power is infinite and God is almighty.

So we come to the omnipotence of God. Proposition 2 is that God is the source of all the power there is. There isn't any power anywhere that God isn't the source of it, whether it be the power of intellect, the power of spirit, the power of soul, or the power of dynamite, or the power of the storm, or the power of magnetic attraction.

Wherever there is any power at all, God is the author of it. And the source of anything has to be as great or greater than that which flows out of it. Isn't that so? For example, if you pour a quart of something, say a quart of milk, out of a can, that can has to be equal to that quart of milk.

It's got to be anything that comes out of the can has to be as big as the can, and the can, or the can has to be as big as that which comes out of it, is what I'm trying to say. And it can be very much larger.

You can have a can with several gallons and only pour a quart of anything out of it, but the source has to be as big or larger than that which comes out of it. So all the power there is came from God, all the power there is.

And therefore God's power must be equal to all the power there is, and all the power there is must mean all power, all potency, all might. And God either is equal to that or greater than that. Proposition 3 is that God delegates power to his creation, but he never relinquishes anything of his essential perfection.

God gives power, but he doesn't give it away. When God gives power to an archangel, he still retains that power. God can't give anything of himself away. And when God gives power to the Son, he keeps that power.

When God pours power upon a man, he still keeps that power. God can't relinquish anything of his power, because if he relinquished his power, he would be less powerful than he was before. And if he were less powerful than he was before, he would not be perfect, for perfection means that he has to have all power.

I don't know whether you have followed me on that or not. Have you come along? Shake your head real hard and see whether we can't get the wheels turning. But that's a proposition. Anybody can see that.

God can't give away his power. When they say there is a battery, the battery has so many volts in it, so much power in it, and as that is slowly given away, the battery gets weaker and weaker. You have found that out of a cold morning sometimes, when you go out and step on the start and there is a discouraged moan from down there somewhere, but the thing won't turn over.

You have custed your battery and your battery has failed you. It has used up its power. It has given it away, it has relinquished it, so that little by little it has become less than it was before. When God gives power to archangels and angels and redeemed men and mountains and seas and stars and planets, he doesn't relinquish anything.

If he did, he would be less than he was before, and God's batteries would run down the same as your battery in your car runs down. So everything comes out from God and returns to God again. And the great God Almighty that will reign, that omnipotent God that will reign out yonder in the coming days that the Prophet tells us about, when the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, he has now the same amount of power that he had when he made the heaven and the earth and called the stars into being, and he will never have any less power than he has now, and he will never have any more, since he has all the power there is.

Now, that is the God we serve, my brothers and sisters, that is the God we serve. Therefore, I cannot for the life of me see any reason in the world why anybody should be fearful and timid and say, I'm afraid I can't make it, I'm afraid God can't keep me.

God can keep the stars in their courses, and God can keep the planets in their orbit, and God can keep his great heaven yonder, and God can keep all his vast display of might everywhere throughout his universe.

Surely God can keep you, surely God can keep you. It's like a fly perched somewhere on a seat in a jet airplane, moaning and tumbling for fear that plane can't carry its weight. It can't carry its weight, that thing weighs several tons, and it has several tons of people on it and several more tons of baggage on it, and one little fly weighing so much there isn't a pair of scales anywhere in Toronto, probably outside of a laboratory that could even weigh the little guy.

And yet we can imagine him sitting there flubbing his little wings and saying, I'm just afraid this plane won't hold me up. Of course it will hold you up, I wouldn't want to hold up a fly, I wouldn't want to be caught dead doing it.

But we're using it for an illustration and saying that the plane will hold up the fly all right, and so the great God Almighty when he stretches his broad wings there and moves out upon the wings of the wind, God will keep you, my friend, he'll keep you.

If you turn yourself over to him, he'll keep you, and he'll hold you and nothing can destroy you. So you see, God sustains and continues to sustain all things that there are. He upholds by his power, it says, by the word of his power, and so he perpetuates and holds together.

It is God that holds all things together. Do you ever wonder why you don't cave in from 14 pounds of pressure on every square inch of your body? Have you ever wondered why you don't blow up from internal pressure?

Some of you do. And then you say it's your nervous ancestors that made you act like that, when actually all that's happened is you've blown up. But I mean it literally, why don't you? Why don't we blow up?

Because the great God Almighty has spoken his power into his universe, and everything runs according to that power. Now, what about the laws of nature? I'm sure somebody will come to me and say, or at least you'll think if you're too courteous to come and say it, you will say, Now, wait a minute, that preacher said that all the power there is, God has it, and that it's all in God, and that nothing leaves God.

God’s Power and the Laws of Nature

Then what about the laws of nature? Well, let's look at that word, the law of nature, as the businessman says, Let's kick it around a little while. I like that one. They get together and smoke and eat ham and sweet potatoes, and somebody gets up at the head of the table and says, Now, I've got a proposition to kick around.

So, let us kick around this little proposition here about law. What is law anyway? Well, law is a word of two meanings, at least two meanings. It's an external rule imposed by authority. If you don't know it and if you don't think so, try parking by a water plug sometime and go whistling off to Eaton's or somewhere.

And when you come back, you'll go whistling off to pick up your car, or at least to tell the police why you did it. There is a law imposed by authority, and it has such and such a rule, a rule against murder and against assault and against robbery, all the laws that we make.

They make them in Ottawa. I wonder what they do with all the laws they turn out in Ottawa and Washington. Enough laws, you know, but a lot of them. Thank God we don't know one-third of them or one-tenth of them so we can live.

If we knew what all they were, we'd just die worrying about it. But anyhow, they turn out laws of all kinds, and those are the laws imposed by authority from the outside. They have what they call sanctions.

You either do it or else. And the or else part is what the judge says that you're supposed to suffer. You're sentenced to a fine or you're put in jail or something else. Well, now, that's one kind of law.

Then there's another way the word law is used, and that isn't properly used at all. Scientists use it and philosophers use it and we use it generally, but it's not properly a law. It's the path God's power and wisdom take through creation.

That's what we call the law of nature. It's the way things are. An eagle lays an egg and hatches it, and it's an eagle instead of a mud turtle or a frog. And we call that the law of nature now. There's no law there that I know anything about.

Nobody passed that law anywhere in any parliament or congress. It's just there. That's the way it is. If an eagle lays the egg, it'll hatch an eagle. But if a barnyard speckled bitty lays it, it'll hatch out another barnyard speckled bitty.

That's the way nature operates. But there's no law that I know anyplace that says it's got to be like that. It's a phenomenon rather than a law. Take the law, or we call it the electromagnetic field, or the law of gravitation, or the law of light, or the law of sound, or the law of the atoms.

We say they're a law. Nobody put any law there. It's just the way God's power runs through his creation. God moves through his universe. A free God moving through his creation in the path he takes. We call the laws of nature.

That's the way God works. And science studies those laws and these phenomena, studies them and all practical scientists based upon them, of course, two things all scientists know. And one is the uniformity of these phenomena.

They never change from year to year, from century to century, or from millennium to millennium. They never change. They're always the same. That is, God always acts the same way all the time. That's one reason I can sleep comfortably at night, and that's one reason why I can live in peace and I believe die in peace, because I serve a God who is always the same and acts according to himself with uniformity always.

So he takes the same path through the universe at all times, and the resultant ability to predict that path is what scientists call the law of nature. So we can have navigation and engineering. I heard of a sailor one time that was told by somebody in authority on a shipboard, now you keep that star yonder just a little off the port bow.

And a couple of hours later the officer came back and they were way off course and he said, I told you to keep the star off the port bow. And he said, we passed that star a long time ago. Well, the navigator, if the star could be passed, and if there were such a thing as the laws of God not being uniform, if God would work one way today, suppose that God were whimsical and the sun would come up in the east on Wednesday and then somebody would get up on Thursday morning and say, Mama, look where the sun is!

And it would be coming up from the south. And on Saturday morning about seven o 'clock that yellow ball would come up from the north. We'd say, what's happened in the world? Has the world gone drunk? Because the sun is rising and setting opposite to what it usually does.

But you don't need to expect that. God doesn't work that way. The great God who made the heaven and the earth works according to uniform laws or to the phenomena of the universe. That is, he always takes the same path through his universe.

And you can always predict where God will be and always know how it is with God. That's why the word of God stands secure. That's why when you meet certain conditions, you can always be sure that there will be certain results, because God is always taking that path through his Bible, always going by the same road through the scriptures, always.

God never backtracks or goes around or detours, but always goes the same way all the time. And that is, when God makes a promise, God can keep that promise. If the promise is over here and you're over there, it will be a dead promise.

But if you'll come over where it is, it will be a live promise. If God makes a promise and puts conditions and you don't meet conditions but plead the promise, nothing will happen. You can pray for a lifetime and nothing will happen.

But if you will meet the conditions and go where God is, you'll find God right there all the time. That's the way it works. That's why you can have faith in God and know absolutely that God is there. Engineering and astronomy and chemistry and navigation and all else can be because the laws of nature, as we say, the phenomena, are always predictable and uniform, and science studies these.

One fellow studies them, and he says that it's pure science. He doesn't care what you're going to do with it, he's going to split the atom, and he doesn't care what you do with the thing after it's split.

Then there comes along the applied scientist, and he takes the work of the pure scientist, the abstract scientist, and he applies it either for a bomb to blow up a city or for an engine to run a ship.

It doesn't make any difference to the pure scientist. That is, objectively, he should not care. He's simply finding out where God moves through his universe. He doesn't always call it God, I suppose usually he doesn't.

He calls it law and says that's the way the laws are. But we who are God's children say that's the way God works, that's the way God's dealings are, the way he does things in his universe. Religion goes back in time and goes further in and further down and further up and further on and says, I'm not stopping with the laws of nature, the phenomena of nature, the path of God through his material universe, but I'm going back to God himself, back to the source of it all, to the cause of it all, to the master of these phenomena.

So religion, Christianity, Christ, by the Holy Ghost, takes us back now to that vast mysterium tremendum, that mysterious wonder that fills his universe. You know, people like to use big words, and I suppose that the most horrendous expression that I've ever heard was used by the philosopher and the Christian theologian, Rudolf Otto, German philosopher.

He referred to the God in his world as being the absolute, gigantic, never-resting, active world stress. I thought the man would have to open his mouth to say that, an absolute, gigantic, never-resting, active world stress.

Well, now, what I'd like to be able to tell you is that this world stress once said, I am that I am, and took personality and said, I'm not an active, gigantic, undulating, ever-moving world stress, but I am I am.

And that is my name forever, and that's my memorial unto all generations. And the son of that gigantic, never-resting, undulating, active world stress once said, when you pray, say, Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Here is a man, and he sits on a throne and inhabits a palace and wears a crown and a robe and holds a wand, and they call him Your Majesty. And he's called a plenipotentiary and a potentate. There we have that word, potent, again, adding power.

Potentate is a tate with power, you know. And he has all that, and so he's called a plenipotentiary and a potentate and a Your Majesty and a king. But he has a little boy or girl out back, and when they see him, they run to him and yell, Daddy.

I remember when the present Queen Elizabeth was growing up, I followed her since she was a wee little tot, you know, followed her up. And pictures and magazines and papers followed her all the way up to her first pair of silk stockings and right on up to where she is now.

Pictures and the papers about it. And I remember hearing one time about dignified, although kindly, old George V, her father, her grandfather. And at one time they were about the house there somewhere, or whatever they call it, and the old king left the door open.

And little Elizabeth turned to him and said, Grandpa, go close that door. And the King of England went and closed the door at the voice of a little girl, the way it is, you know. He couldn't pull any of that potentate on little Elizabeth.

She was just his granddaughter. And so no matter how mighty these philosophers may want to call God, in what awful terms they want to apply to the power that rules this universe, you and I can say, Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

And we can come and get intimate with God. And God loves it. God loves it. They said that the old dignified king smiled and went and closed the door. And God Almighty is like that. He loves to have his people know that in spite of his greatness, his omnipotence and his power, he still said, Our Father which art in heaven.

And said, When you pray, say Our Father which art in heaven. He says he's a father to the fatherless and he's a husband to the widow, and that he is himself, knows all our troubles and that he makes our bed in our sickness.

Have you ever read that in the scripture? This mighty great God who fills heaven and earth, makes all our bed in our sickness, he said. Who is that who makes the bed and smooths the sheets and turns the pillow to keep it cool and gives you life when you're sick?

It's God who does it, if you only knew it. He is that God. And so that world stressed, said, I am. And said, When you pray, say Our Father. And God everywhere joyfully, everywhere joyfully God calls himself this.

Creation as the Work of Divine Power

Now, I read this one time and I memorized it, and I want to pass it on to you because I think it's well worth your hearing. This was a scholar preacher who preached this sermon and it was set like this by James Weldon Johnson, who was a great colored poet.

He said that God stepped out on space and he looked around and said, I am lonely, I'll make me a world. And as far as the eye of God could see, darkness covered everything blacker than a hundred midnights down the cypress swamp.

Then God smiled and the light broke. And the darkness rolled up on one side and the light stood shining on the other. And then God took the light that he had made and he took it in his hands and he rolled the light around in his hand until he made the sun.

And then he flung the sun against the blazing in the heavens and the light was left from making the sun. Then God gathered it up in his hand into a shining ball and he flung it against the darkness, spangling the night with the moon and the stars.

Then down between the darkness and the light, God hurled the world and God said, that's good. Then God himself stepped down and the sun was on his right hand and the moon was on his left and the stars were clustered about his head and the earth was under his feet.

And then God walked and where he trod, footsteps followed the valleys out and bowed the mountains up. Then he stopped and looked and saw that the earth was hot and barren. So God stepped over to the edge of the world and he spat out the seven seas and he batted his eyes and the lightning flashed and he clapped his hands and the thunders rolled and the waters above the earth came down, the cooling water came down.

Then the green grass sprouted and the little red flowers appeared and the pine trees pointed their finger to the sky and the oak spread out his arms and the lake cuddled down in the hollow of the ground and the river ran down to the sea.

And God smiled again and the rainbow appeared and curled itself around his shoulders. Then God raised his arm and he waved his hand over the sea and over the land and he said, Bring forth, bring forth!

And quicker than God could drop his hand, fishes and fowls and beasts and birds swam the rivers and the seas and roamed the forests and the woods and split the air with their wings and God said, that's good.

God walked around and God looked around and all that he had made, he looked at his sun and he looked at his moon and he looked at his little stars and he looked at his world with all its living things and God said, I'm lonely still.

Then God sat down on the side of the hill by a deep, wide river he sat down and God thought and thought until he thought, I'll make me a man. Up from the bed of the river God scooped the clay and up by the bank of the river he kneeled down and there the great God Almighty who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky, who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night, who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand, this great God like a mammy bending over a baby kneeled down in the dust, toiling over a lump of clay, till he shaped it in his own image and into it he blew the breath of life and man became a living soul, amen, amen.

I don't know what you think of that but I love it. Clarence Darrow was an atheistic American lawyer and he said that was the only fundamentalist thing he liked. That's fundamentalist, that's the way this brother believed God made the heaven and the earth.

Well, maybe he was a little bit materialistic in his viewpoint but God got him here nevertheless and it's all around about us and we had a good natured argument coming down whether that round thing out there was the moon.

It had been snowing 20 minutes before but it was the moon all right. It's up there, God set it up there and he set the sun down yonder and in between the two we made the earth and spangled the heavens with the stars and God made all this.

We go back, we go back of laws, we go back of science, we go back of matter, we go back to the God himself. Christianity calls you to the knowledge of this God himself. This is eternal life that you might know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.

This is eternal life. You can know God himself and salvation means the knowledge of God himself. I don't know the artist, I don't know the artwork, I know the artist. I happen as you know to be a lover of Beethoven.

I don't know Beethoven but I know Beethoven's works somewhat, a little bit. It would have been much better I suppose to know the man himself. They say he was a pretty rough customer but he was a genius that towered above the geniuses of generations.

Well, it would have been wonderful to know him. I just listened today while we had our dinner to the Sonata by Beethoven being played and it's beautiful, beautiful. But I suppose it would have been more wonderful if I could have shaken hands with the great Beethoven and said, I consider it an honor to shake your hand, sir.

I consider you one of the greatest composers that ever lived, a genius. He'd have shaken his great head and walked away. But I could have said and told my grandchildren and their grandchildren would have heard about it, my great grandfather shook hands with Beethoven.

It would have been wonderful. So with Michelangelo, the greatest artist of his day, the greatest sculptor of his day, the greatest poet of his day, if I could have shaken hands with Michelangelo or if I could have sat down and eaten with him and supped with him and talked with him and he'd have called me by my first name, I'd have called him by his first name and I'd have introduced him to my friends and said, I'd like to meet John Delica, I'd like to have you meet the great Michelangelo.

That would have been better than knowing his work. I have seen his tremendous piece of sculpture called Moses, that awful figure of that mighty man. But it would have been better if I could have seen the man himself.

So let men turn their telescopes on the heavens and their microscopes on the molecules. Let them probe and search and tabulate and name and find and discover. And I dare say to them, I'd like to tell you something.

I know the one who made all this. I'm personally acquainted with the one who made it. But what about the galaxies, reverend? What about the Milky Way yonder, don't you know what it is? Yes, I know what it is, much as you do.

I just read about it, same as you did. I would say to him, I know what it is. It's galaxies so far away that you can't see them, so they blur. Like looking at a city a long way off, you see a blur. When you get closer, you see the light.

That's what the Milky Way is. You know I know the one who put the Milky Way there. I know the one who put the ocean where it is and said, this is where you are, not one step farther. The ocean has never dared move out of its banks, so we know God for himself.

God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and Jesus Christ is only Son, our Lord. That's why I can't understand why the churches, the gospel churches in our days are such a bunch of playing children.

The Church Must Know the Almighty God

Jesus said to such as we are, he said, you don't like the way I do. He said, you're like children playing in the marketplace. First you decide to play a funeral and you all sit and cry and we walk by and pay no attention to you, and you don't like it because we don't cry with you.

Then you're going to play dance and so you pipe a tune and we're busy and we don't pay any attention to you, and you go on piping a tune and you get mad because we don't stop and dance. He said, you little children playing in the marketplaces, we're grown-ups, we're serious-minded people and we've got something to do, and we can't stop and turn around and play church or play funeral or play dance with you every time you get an ocean.

So said Jesus in effect to the people of his day. The gospel churches are like children in the marketplaces. Over the last 50 years they've become progressively worse, more and more like children in the marketplaces.

They want to pipe one day and dance another day and play funeral the next day and play church the next day. I refuse to play church, absolutely refuse to play church. I believe in the great God Almighty who made all this.

He's called me, I dare to call him my own. He has deigned to call me his beloved. He's deigned to say that you're accepted in the beloved. He's deigned and stooped to say that we're his children. How much vaster and bigger is it all if we were only as big inside as we are outside?

They used to say about a certain automobile it was bigger inside than outside. I don't believe it, but they said that about the Dodge. It said bigger inside than it is outside. I believe that all of God's children ought to be infinitely bigger inside than outside.

I think that you and I ought to live high up yonder. Somebody said he was on cloud nine the other night after the service. Well, that's where we belong. But our feet ought to be on the earth. We ought to come down and have a good hard core of earthly reality in us.

But we oughtn't to stay down here and play in the marketplaces. We ought to search by the power of God and the cleansing blood of the Lamb to get to know the great God Almighty. But I wandered from my sermon.

Omnipotence Applied to Faith, Redemption, and Resurrection

I've got to come back around and say, what does all this mean to us now? What does it mean that God Almighty has all the power there is? Well, it means that God has the ability always to do anything, everything he wills to do.

You see, nothing is harder or easier with God. Hard and easy can't apply to God because God has all the power there is. Hard or easy applies to me. Suppose I have 100 units of power. Now, we'll just break it down and say this toaster has 100 units of power.