Power In The Word Series

George Faull once wrote fact that “atheists, agnostics, or skeptics will often try to stump us with a question about our God. These skeptics think they are being clever and they take pride in their great intelligence. They will say (for example)

“If God is all powerful, can He create a rock so big He cannot lift it?”

In other words, if God is all powerful He should be able to create any size rock He wanted, but if He could create a rock that was too big for Him to lift… that would prove He wasn’t all powerful. Skeptics love to mock us with these kinds of challenges because they believe it shows the lack of logic in worshipping some supposed God.

So George came up with a few responses you might try out if one of these skeptics tries that question on you:

1. Why would He want to lift it? And… do you need a rock like that for something?

2. Not right now. Right now He is seeing if He can make a square circle for another skeptic.

3. By definition, a rock is only a small fragment of a larger piece of the same substance. Therefore, your question is illogical and flawed from conception.

4. Well, I assume the rock would need to be created where you could see Him create it and lift it, or you would not believe. Since He already created the earth and hung it upon nothing with all the other heavenly bodies, your question ought to be “Can God create and hang a planet bigger than any other than I can already see?”

The answer to that is “Yes, but I doubt if would do it just so you could believe.”

5. Someone told me you were witty and I have concluded they were only half right.

Our God is an awesome and powerful God.

There is nothing He can’t do.

Nothing He can’t create.

And nothing He can’t lift.

In fact, some people refer to God as the “higher power”

In Isaiah 55, God says… “You got that right!”

“That’s exactly what I am.”

“I AM higher than you not just in My power, but in My ways and in My thoughts.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9

In fact, even God’s WORDS have power.

“… my word that goes out from my mouth… will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” Isaiah 55:11

Now just to prove His point, God does something fairly clever here. He slips in a little science lesson that the people of that day wouldn’t have understood. Back in those days many people worshiped gods of water and sky and fertility because that ‘god’ controlled the elements of this world that they could not understand.

But here in Isaiah 55 God says: “I’ll help you understand some of those things in this world”

And in Isaiah 55:10 God revealed the principles of evaporation, the ecosystem, and the earth’s process of conserving its resources that have puzzled people for centuries.

Notice what it says: “… the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater.”

1. In the 1600’s Isaac Newton came up with the “Law Of Conservation” which said that energy (such as the water cycle) is conserved over time. It can be neither created nor destroyed, but can change form (such as water, vapor, ice)

2. In the late 1700s Antoine Lavoisier discussed “The Principles Of Evaporation” in his landmark book, “The Elements of Chemistry.”

3. And in the 1930’s, scientist Roy Clapham came up with the term “Ecosystem” and he showed how the earth’s recycling of water was important to the life of plants.

(from a sermon by Timothy Darling at sermoncentral.com)

All three of those scientific principles are laid out in this single declaration by God in Isaiah 55:

• The rain comes down, and the waters the ground… but it doesn’t disappear/ not destroyed. It is “conserved.”

• The water “evaporates” and goes back up into the atmosphere to come down as rain again.

• And the rain serves a purpose: it causes plants to grow. It’s a vital part of our ecosystem.

You see, no other ancient writing ever told mankind anything of the sort. And that’s because no other ancient writing is as scientifically accurate as the book you hold in your hands.