Genesis 35:11

I am God Almighty

God’s arm sufficient

In like manner God has spoken to Abraham: He had said, “I am the Almighty God; walk before Me and be thou upright.

” The declaration of almightiness is, according to the sacred narrative, the first declaration of God concerning Himself. A sense of power is one of the first endowments to which we awaken. Almightiness is power without limit. God cannot lie, He cannot be tempted with evil, He cannot act contrary to His own nature, but He can do all that He wills to do.

1. God can create. He can create what He wills, when He pleases, as He will, and for His own pleasure. He has created all things--all matter, all spirit.

2. God can create, and He can make, that is, adapt, fashion, mould, and organise all these materials. We can make, but we cannot create; God can do both.

3. God can control all He makes and creates. God can over-rule; He can create, and make, and control, and He can over-rule. For example, He can permit His image on earth to be broken, and then repair the ruin, and make the ruined image much more glorious than the primitive likeness. This is over-ruling. He can allow sin to enter the world without Himself being chargeable with the entrance of that sin; and He can take it away by an all-sufficient sacrifice. He can suffer all nations to walk for a time in their own ways, and then He can restore them to the paths of righteousness.

4. God can destroy. He can blot out all races and classes of creatures, as He has done on our planet. He can reduce the world to chaos, or burn it with fire, and resolve it into its original elements. He can cause them to fly as vapours through space afterwards. Often has He destroyed cities, and their memorial has perished with them, and perhaps has He destroyed worlds.

5. God can retain His own life from everlasting to everlasting. “I am,” saith He, “that I am.” There is no limit put to God’s power by decay or by death, or by any prospect or fear of such dissolution. No plan is contracted, no work is interrupted.

6. Every attribute of God is a power. His infinity is the fulness of power; His eternity the continuance of power; His spirituality the highest kind of power, power inexhaustible and incapable of weariness. There is power in His knowledge. If there is power in our limited information, what power there must be in the knowledge that embraces all things. There is power in His wisdom, power in His love, power in His blessedness, power in the happiness, and power in the peace of God. There is power in God’s own sense of power. There is power in all that constitutes His goodness. God has no weakness, or shadow of impotency; none from the presence of any evil, and none from the absence of any good; no fear, no remorse, no doubt, no hesitance, no suspicion, no imperfection. To God all things are possible. Is anything too hard for Him?

7. God can redeem. Such was the sufficiency of God for this work, that He so loved the world as to give His only Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. And in the application of the provisions of this redemption, what do we see? We see men born again; so great is God’s power, that we find in connection with the Christian dispensation, there is new creation--old things passing away, all thing becoming new. This dispensation finds men dead in sin; it leaves them quickened. It finds them grovelling on the earth like wounded worms; and it fits them to fly in the heavens as with the wings of the eagle. Brethren, fear to rebel against this God Almighty. How vain is your resistance and your defiance. What if you set Him at naught! You may judge as to the issue; who will prevail--you, a mortal, dust and ashes, or this God Almighty; (S. Martin.)