Thoughts for another day

July 25, 2011

Today's verse: 2 Kgs. 3:16, 17. And he said, Thus saith the LORD, Make this valley full of ditches. For thus saith the LORD, Ye shall not see wind, neither shall ye see rain; yet that valley shall be filled with water, that ye may drink, both ye, and your cattle, and your beasts.  (KJV)

(Pls. read the above before you read further. Thanks)

One great aspect of our God that always rings clear in my ears is, 'Is there anything impossible for the Lord to do?'  We human beings have many things we can't do which we extrapolate to God too. This I'll propose in a classic illustration.  Once while taking catechism class for 14-year olds, I asked about God and what He could do.  I began asking, do you believe God can give you a big chocolate?  All put their hands up.  Then I asked whether they felt God can give them the toys they always wanted, now a few hands stayed down.  I then progressed to more expensive things and with each progression, more hands stayed down.  Finally I asked whether they believed God will give them a huge car like a Mercedes Benz; not a single hand went up. 

Then I asked the kids how they felt God would answer their prayers and they answered, through that uncle, or aunt, or an elder sibling, etc.  This made me see that all along they equated God's greatness to how fond their friends and relatives were of them and what things they felt they could get from them. It doesn't need much thinking on my part to deduce that they had brought God down to the level of humans.  Now, how did these children, answer this way?  Obviously, under influence of their parents, priests, pastors and other influencers in their lives.  They were conditioned to believe God can do only so much and not more.  That's the sad story of most Christians, in whose lives God has become nothing but what their imaginations want Him to be.  I remember asking a physically challenged colleague whether she believed God can make her whole and she just shut me up saying she's happy the way she was and that she believed was God's will for her and therein I saw how impotent a caricature she had made of God.  And it's sad how we shun God's power by thinking such a way as to make Him a human like us, bereft of His great power and awesomeness. 

But is God that?  No way, for God is the awesome, mighty and powerful God Who knows no impossibility.  A Word and the greatest can happen.  God is above every difficulty and we see in the part prior to our Scripture today, where the kings of Judah, Israel and Edom have run out of water and through the prophet Elisha, God works the marvelous deed of filling the ditches with water, with no rain or wind whatsoever!  Similarly if we give a free rein to God in our lives believing He can do the impossible for us, sooner or later, God will stretch His magnificent hand and make possible that impossibility we always thought was possible with God.  Amen.