God Dwells In the Impossible

The power of God dwells in impossibility. Is it any wonder then that He would found His family on two unlikely people, well past their prime? Abraham and Sarah would birth a nation but when Sarah laughed at the mere thought of this miraculous development God responded with a word that would set the trajectory for the entirety of His activity throughout the story of the biblical narrative:

 "Is anything too difficult or too wonderful for the Lord?"

My Dad, the Pastor, has always said, “God doesn’t back my word but He backs His.” The scriptures testify to this truth.

Moses faces a Red Sea.
Daniel is thrown into a lion’s den.
David stares down Goliath.
Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego walk into a blazing furnace.
Jonah waits inside of a whale.
Lazarus is tucked away in a tomb.

Long before news cycles illuminated the problem of good versus evil and the reality of our human limitations in real-time, the Bible was telling the story of all of us. 

We are finite; God is infinite. We exist in the natural and God overshadows the natural with His supernatural power.

We are subject to the laws of time and space. God stands outside of those limitations as all powerful, all knowing, and all present.

There is a war between good and evil. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s conclusive answer to this problem in a definitive, eternal sense.

This is all incredibly good news because the Kingdom of God will be this homesick world’s final exhale. And yet, if you’re breathing Post-Eden air, you are fully aware that we are still somewhere in the middle. We live, move, and breathe in the tension of our burning questions and our dimly lit line of sight. We struggle to look beyond the lens of the “not yet.”

But here in the tension of impossibility and the reality of our limitations, God offers to us what we truly need: more of Himself. The Psalmist wrote, “I wait for the Lord like watchmen wait for the morning” (Psalm 130:6). As I consider the whole counsel of God’s word and His character, I don’t believe the Psalmist was just waiting on God to move on his behalf. I believe He was waiting with God. A subtle, but powerful, relational difference.

Because the truth is, the hand of God is attached to the heart of God. And this is a holy comfort because ultimately, our hearts long for so much more than a genie-in-a-bottle faith. On a soul-level we will never be satisfied by outcomes, detached from the face and the heart of the One who formed us in our mother’s wombs. We desire deep relationship with a God who knows the number of our days, who created the curve of our noses and the timbre of our voices. We want to experience His palpable, personal nearness split the dark with the light of His Presence.

What did each of the biblical stories mentioned above have in common? Each of the fathers and mothers of our faith opted into the process of developing a real-time friendship with God. And over a quantity of quality time with Him, God dispensed the necessary internal resources they needed to trust Him, obey and co-author a better story when the day of trouble came to visit their doorstep. External resources often prove powerless in the face of impossible mystery, but the Presence of God is the well that never runs dry.

“May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

Tanya Godsey 
Freedom Movement's Spiritual Director