The Apostles’ Creed declares faith in God the Father almighty. Does the adjective matter? Most definitely! “Almighty” points to the basic teaching of the Bible that God is the Lord, the King, the Omnipotent and Sovereign One who reigns over His world. Sadly today, men treat God’s sovereignty as a theme for controversy, but in Scripture, it is always a matter of worship. (Read Psalm 93, 96, 97, 99:1–5 and 103 for examples).
What does it mean that “God is almighty”? The Children’s Catechism asks in Q13: Can God do all things? Answer: Yes. God can do all His holy will. Note that this answer affirms two things: (a) all things that God intends to do, He actually does. “Whatever the Lord pleases, He does” (Psalm 135:6). “He spoke and it came to be” (Psalm 33:9; see Genesis 1). With men, “there’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip,” but not with God! (b) The “all things” He can do is bounded by His character. God has a perfect moral character and hence He cannot do what is evil. He cannot be capricious, unloving, random, unjust, or inconsistent. He cannot do what is self-contradictory or nonsensical, like squaring the circle. Nor (and this is vital) can He act out of character. Titus 1:2 declares that God cannot lie! Why? For God is holy!
How does “almighty” square with “free will”? (a) “Free will” in the sense of “free agency”— that is, the power of spontaneous, self-determining human choice—is real. As a fact of creation, an aspect of our humanness, it exists, as all created things do, in God. (b) As a created thing, “free will” cannot limit and can never resist God’s “almighty”. God’s power to fulfill His purposes is not and can never be limited by anything that He has made. (c) God is able to “accomplish all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11) without violating the nature of created realities or reducing man’s activity to robot level. How God sustains it and overrules man’s “free will” without overriding it is His secret; but that He does so is certain, both from our conscious experience of making decisions and acting “of our own free will,” and also from Scripture’s sobering insistence that we are answerable to God for our actions, just because in the moral sense they really are ours.
Why then does evil still exist? If God is All-Powerful, then surely He would and could remove all the evil (moral badness, useless pain and waste of good) in this world? Yes, He would, and He is doing so! Through Jesus Christ, bad folks like you and me are already being made good; new pain- and disease-free bodies are on the way, and a reconstructed cosmos with them! If God moves more slowly than we wish in clearing evil out of His world and introducing the new order, we can be sure that (a) He is working according to His timetable which He in His wisdom has set out and (b) He is not willing that any of His elect be lost but that all should come to the knowledge of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 3:3–9)
The truth of God’s almightiness in creation, providence, and grace is the basis of all our trust, peace, and joy in God, and the safeguard of all our hopes of answered prayer, present protection, and final salvation. It means that neither fate, nor the stars, nor blind chance, nor man’s folly, nor Satan’s malice controls this world. Instead, a morally perfect God runs it, and none can dethrone him or thwart his purposes of love. And if I am Christ’s, then
A Sovereign Protector I have,
Unseen, yet forever at hand,
Unchangeably faithful to save,
Almighty to rule and command …
If thou art my Shield and my Sun
The night is no darkness to me,
And, fast as my moments roll on,
They bring me but nearer to Thee.
Further Bible Study
Take time to read Genesis 50:15-26 & Acts 4:23-31, and then meditate on the wonderful truth of “God the Almighty Overruler”!!
WEI En Yi
[Adapted from and based on J.I. Packer’s Growing in Christ]