Things God Cannot Do

Depending upon how you parse and classify, the list of things God cannot do varies. For some people, the list looks like this:

1. God cannot do anything against His nature.

And then they are done. If you are going to have a single-item list, I will concede that is a pretty good one. It does cover the items on my list if you stretch it a bit, so people who opt for the one-item-fits-all answer would consider the list below as one item with subheadings. I've given them all separate status, however, because (a) there are distinctions in responsibility, and (b) I believe that the three-item list below greatly expands our understanding; saying that God cannot do anything against His nature is a little like boiling down a logic argument to "A does not equal not A," which sounds rather profound, but does not explain very much.

So here is a 3-point list of things God cannot do.

1. God cannot do anything against His Word. 

In a sense, His Word and His nature are the same, but we've never seen God do anything in the scriptures without His Word in addition to not against His Word, so I think there is a distinction between 'His nature' and 'His word.'  The Word is living and active, cf Hebrews 4:12, it performs, creates, and penetrates. But sometimes it is God's nature to rest.

2. God cannot do anything without faith.

Comparing Matthew 13:58 with Mark 6:5, we have an account of Jesus not being able to do miracles because of the unbelief that he was encountering. I remember some debates from seminary days when one side would say that 'God has no faith' and argue that since for God, simply declaring it makes it true, that He doesn't need/use faith. At the time it seemed... something close to esoteric. I had a sense than that something was missing in their argument, and in the decades since,  I have come to believe that the 'God has no faith' premise is utterly false and only appears as if it could be true after also accepting the view that our 4-dimensional space, mass, time universe is all.   

3. God is (sometimes) limited by men.

We can use the same scripture for #3 as we did for #2, but draw a different aspect of truth from it.  The men's doubt and unbelief limited what God was able to do. In Ezekiel 22:30 we find that  God needed a faithful person to stand in the gap, so that He would not destroy the land.
John Wesley observed, "God does nothing but in answer to prayer." Wherever Satan is 'the god of this world,' see 2 Corinthians 4:4, the True God must be invited to act by a human representative who has an earth body that gives the human being authority on Earth. We "have not because (we) ask not," see James 4:3, (and yes, fights and wrong motives are often a cause, but also,) we must ask in faith and not doubt, see James 1:6.  A conundrum oftentimes arises here because God chose to give men freewill. That puts limits on God since He cannot violate His Word that gave mankind a free will in the first place.

Each of those three areas need to be understood in depth, but I am impelled to keep the focus on this blog's purpose of comparing real life with scripture. 

I have a print of M C Esher's Waterfall in my dining area. It shows a cascading aqueduct where the water appears to be "falling uphill" until it eventually spills over a waterwheel.  Escher used geometry and optical illusions to make a fantastical perpetual motion machine.

Although I am fairly certain that the artist did not have this in mind when he created his original lithograph, it effectively illustrates that God's "impossibilities" flow together.  God's word produces faith as it is heard and allowed to take root in a person's heart. But the person's heart must also be in agreement with God's word.  Any interruption will break the flow of the life-giving stream.

Remember Romans 10:17? So then the faith is by a report, and the report through a word of God.  We are used to the King James translation that uses hearing in place of report. The idea that Paul was expressing is not only about the 'hearer's ears' but includes what is being heard. It is a full concept that encompasses both the act of hearing and the thing heard— the preaching, the report.
 
The Lesson
 Contrary to Gwen's belief (she is the mother of the runaway bride, for those of you who have not been reading the earlier posts) that the engagement fell apart because the marriage was "not meant to be," the reason that the engagement fell apart was because KatieLyn chose to run away. The marriage was meant to be, but she did not want to trust God for it. KatieLyn placed herself in a position where God could not go against her own belligerent will.  Marriage was something God could not perform without KatieLyn's agreement.

Gwen needs to stop telling herself that the disaster that her daughter created was God's will. Gwen ought to quit accusing Joe and me of not hearing God.  I'm not holding my breath though because stubborn, controlling people often cling to their self-deception more strongly than they pursue the thoughts of God.    




  

In the World You Will Have Tribulation.

I have told you these things so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation.
John 16:33 

Can it get any clearer than this?  
  ✝  In Me you may have peace.
  ✝  In the world you will have tribulation.

KatieLyn was having tribulation. Her mom said that she was hysterical. Obviously, she was "in the world," meaning that her mind was not set on God.

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.
Isaiah 26:3, KJV

Or in modern English:
You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you!
NLT

Or my preference:
"The steadfast of mind You will keep in perfect peace, Because he trusts in You."
NASB 

How could she miss this? How can one grow up, living in a Christian family, going to church weekly, reading the Bible regularly, and yet miss this? 

God is not the author of confusion. Satan is. The night that KatieLyn ran home, she was under satanic attack. Gwen can be as dismissive as she wishes. Or she can spout off more nasty accusations. KatieLyn can dig in as stubborn as a mule. Or she can pretend to ignore it. Their codependent denial of the facts and their strenuous assertions that KatieLyn's flight middle of the night was the first time in six months that she was thinking straight does not make any of it true. All the cliches they spewed forth fly in the face of these scriptures. When your mind is thinking the thoughts that Satan told you, you are not doing the right thing.

A cross reference for this verse, Philippians 4:7, says,
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Look again at the part that I highlighted: which surpasses all understanding
The tendency on a first-read is to assume that the relative clause modifies the subject, peace. It does do that, but the assumption is that the peace of God is mind-blowing big—too big to understand. But if you focus on "surpasses understanding," then you have skipped over the "all." 

The "all" becomes important because it clues you in that this is a peace that cannot be understood with human reasoning—ALL human reasoning is surpassed. The thing that can be understood with human reasoning is the stuff that you should be trying to guard against. She should have set her mind on Christ and allowed His peace to guard her heart and mind. This, she did not do.

The Lesson
This is another one of those "why it wasn't the right thing to do" posts that I did not feel free to write about last August 28th. The real "KatieLyn" would have jumped to the mistaken conclusion that I was just being "mean" and trying to hurt her.  She really could not know my true motivation; she chose to not know when she chose to not talk. 

But the lesson here is that KatieLyn's heartache and distress were her own doing, prodded along by a mother who had very mixed "feelings" about the marriage (because, although a part of her wanted to be happy for her daughter, a greater part was jealous of losing her.) Still living at home, in the center of this toxic mix,  KatieLyn looked to the world for understanding and found tribulation instead. Because she did not keep her thoughts stayed on what the Lord had told her, she lost her peace. It was easy then for Satan to deceive her. He told her that she lost her peace because marrying Joe was the wrong thing to do. She believed Satan more than she believed the Lord.  


 

Abraham Receives the Promise

20Yet he did not waver through disbelief in the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, 21being fully persuaded that God was able to do what He had promised. 22That is why "it was credited to him as righteousness."  Romans 4:20-22

The "he" in verse 20 is Abraham. The promised blessings are secured by faith.

If KatieLyn had been living as a spiritual Daughter of Abraham instead of as a flesh-believing daughter of her parents, she'd be happily looking forward to her first anniversary this month.

These verses explain why KatieLyn turned from a spiritual Daughter of Abraham to a carnal-thinking Runaway Bride.  I will substitute some names and flip some antonyms so that you can see how this works.

Yet KatieLyn wavered in her disbelief in the promise of God, and was weakened in her faith and gave a judgmental assessment to God, not being fully persuaded that God was able to do what He had promised. That is why it was credited to her as perfidy.

I hope that reading a personalized flip side of what the scriptures teach will illuminate just how far away from God KatieLyn actually strayed. I am pretty sure that she did not know herself, for that is the nature of the enemy's deception.

Abraham did not waver through disbelief. KatieLyn wavered. Her mom was stirring a tempest of doubt and sent it swirling around her on a regular basis. Her dad apparently sat by like that trio of monkeys, not wanting to see, hear, or speak out about the evil.

Be assured, the codependency between KatieLyn and her mom is evil. It is evil because it caused KatieLyn to question God, and doubting God destroys faith. Faith is necessary to please God. A codependency that makes it impossible to please God is evil. KatieLyn is a perpetual child who needs her mother's approval before she can be happy. As long as she plays her mother's mini-me, the stress is minimal. And because KatieLyn hates stressful situations, she "goes along to get along" like a nice, compliant child. The more that she becomes like her mother, the calmer her home-life is. But the cost of not fighting with her mother was a broken engagement and a disastrous trail of wreckage that her Pollyanna side has chosen to ignore.

Theirs is not the happy Christian family that they wish to project to the public on Sunday mornings. Theirs is a deeply dysfunctional relationship that God was leading KatieLyn out of until she wavered in unbelief and doubted the promise of God. To doubt God is to dishonor Him. To continue to question God after you have already heard Him weakens your faith.

Abraham's faith was strengthened because he honored God's promise. God's Word® translation captures this idea better than the King James does:
He didn't doubt God's promise out of a lack of faith. Instead, giving honor to God [for the promise], he became strong because of faith ~ verse 20 
God's Word® uses a translation principle that they termed "closest natural equivalent," which attempts to be as close to the original as possible and still sound like natural speech.  You can see that Abraham was not "trying really, really hard" to believe God. He simply made a choice to give respect/honor/glory to God for the promise. It was the giving of honor, Abraham's respectful response, that strengthened his faith. Doubting God's promise is not respectful at all.

Verse 21 says that Abraham was "fully persuaded," or as God's Word® puts it, "was absolutely confident that God would do what he promised." Abraham did not have to be convinced: he knew who God was/is/will be; he knew God well enough to have complete confidence in what God said.

The Lesson
Abraham received the promise because he trusted God. KatieLyn did not receive her promise because she did not trust God. 

Mother's Day

Mother's Day is "supposed" to be a happy day for honoring mothers.

It is really sad when a mother cannot see who her child really is and is blind to the potential for who her child may become. KatieLyn has a mom who was excellent in providing 'mom' skills during early childhood. She does a good job controlling her children's environment as guarding their safety.  But when it comes to adequately nurturing the emerging adult and to let go just enough at the right times, she stinks.

The day that I met Gwen, she was treating her then-28 year-old daughter as though she was 14, half her biological age.  Gwen's speech was filled with criticism disguised as 'helping' KatieLyn in her own best interest.  I believe that many of KatieLyn's insecurities result from the relationship that she shares with her mother. As long as KatieLyn is insecure, she feels a need for her mother. As long as KatieLyn feels that she needs her mother's approval, Gwen can derive her own sense of self worth from it.

This, in a nutshell, describes their codependency: Gwen gets her own sense of self-worth by keeping her daughter from realizing her own sense of self-worth. KatieLyn makes an idol of her mother because she has never been allowed to develop enough as an individual to be able to trust in a man's love for her.

Kids should not have to ask for permission to grow up!

Rather than doing the Proverbs 22:6 thing and training up a child in the way he or she should go, Gwen trained up KatieLyn to be her go-to support person. They share, not so much a healthy mother/daughter relationship, but a need-meeting codependency.
  
The Lesson
The ability to become a good mother is dependent upon many things, but first and foremost, the #1 criteria for judging success is the answer to the question: Have I raised a successful, independent adult who knows and honors the Lord? 
The ability to do this is proportional to how well we know our God and how much time we spend in His Word ourselves; and then upon how much we follow through with what God reveals to us.

In KatieLyn's case there were two big red flags.
◙ One is that KatieLyn is not an independent adult. She is trapped more deeply than ever in a codependency.
◙ The second, and the one that fits the Mother's Day post, is the more disturbing of the two.  We could see the pathway in God's design to allow KatieLyn to blossom into her own person. What became alarming after KatieLyn ran home in the middle of the night was just how little Gwen respected Joe's ability to hear from the Lord. This is the chief fact that led me to conclude that Gwen rarely, if ever, hears from the Lord, and that she is not in the habit of listening.  She certainly blathered on about her "misgivings" enough to convince me that she never really heard what God had to say about the marriage. KatieLyn was running back home to a Mother who was clueless and who would go on to give her the worst advice of her life.  

Romans 8:6 - Part Two: Finding Life and Peace

For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. ~ Romans 8:6


When we began looking more deeply into this verse, we understood that KatieLyn, the runaway bride, lost her peace about the marriage when she stopped being spiritually minded and began to set her mind on things of the natural world. The more that she considered her mother's arguments, the more carnally minded she became.  Eventually, the fleshly seed of discomfit grew until she could no longer trust what God had told her. Pressured into believing that if she had even the slightest doubt then it would be wrong to get married, she suicided her engagement—she brought death to it. 

It was a self-destructive act. She was not 'just in love with the idea of being married' as her mother told me, (but if that were true, then it would compound the problem because marriage for the sake of marriage is also superficial carnal-minded thinking). For God had placed the desire for marriage in her heart long ago, (which is another reason that I doubt her mom's explanation).  God had told KatieLyn that Joe was the man she was to marry, and she chose to think thoughts that were hostile to God. She chose to doubt God. As a consequence, she lost her joy and her peace.  It is that simple.  It is that complex.

Romans 8:7 teaches us that the mind that focuses on human nature is hostile toward God. It refuses to place itself under the authority of God; in fact, it cannot because it is in "a state of enmity to God" (Weymouth New Testament). The devil tricked KatieLyn into thinking that she had lost her peace about the marriage because the marriage was wrong; But KatieLyn lost her peace about the marriage because she stopped believing the Lord as a spiritually-minded daughter of Abraham and began believing her mom as a carnally-minded daughter of Gwen.  That is why I can say it is both simple and complex: She was half-right in that she knew she wasn't as closely connecting with God as she once did; that's the simple part. But she was also half-deceived about the reason for it; that is the complex part which the Lord has revealed to me in small steps and pieces as I sought for answers.

The reason that KatieLyn's explanation made no sense to Joe the night that she ran back home is because she did not know, specifically, why she was calling off the marriage. She only knew that she was uneasy. But she could not say why she was uneasy and she did not know where her doubts came from, so she couldn't give a reason that made sense.

Her doubts came from the pit of hell, and the devil had used her mother, the person whom she trusted most, to sow those seeds of doubt. And that's a fact.  She grew her own doubts and when they produced fruit, she ran away from God's plan in wild rebellion and fear. 

For to be carnally minded is death. 
She chose to set her mind on the natural realm of the flesh and to dwell on thoughts that were hostile to God.  To be spiritually minded is life and peace; it increases hope and gladness. If she had been able to maintain what the Lord had dropped into her heart on New Year's Day, 2015, her peace, her hope, and her joy would have continued to increase. To be carnally minded is death; it causes one to lose hope and grow weaker and weaker, eventually resulting in either fear, or depression, or a twisted mix of both.

God often makes requests that are counter-intuitive, which also means that normal reasoning does not apply. Dipping in the muddy Jordan River seven times is not a rational cure for leprosy, but that is what it took for Naaman.  

 • Isaiah walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and Ethiopia. Isaiah 20:1-4
• Jeremiah was told not to wash his underwear but to go and bury it 300 miles away, further if he traveled the normal trade routes. then he had to go back and dig it up after it had rotted as a sign to evil people who refused to hear God's words and walked in the imagination of their own heart, Jeremiah 13:1-11
• Ezekiel was told to lie down on the left side for the sins of the house of Israel three hundred and ninety days. He had to lie down again on the right side, this time for forty days, for the iniquity of the house of Judah. But wait! There's more: He had to bake his own bread to eat during this time using wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet and spelt (a heavy-hulled variety of wheat); and he had to bake it using human poop. Ezekiel 4:9-17
But then there was more: Ezekiel was also told to cut his hair, burn some, dice some, scatter some to the wind, and save a few strands to sew into his shirt for burning later. Ezekiel 5:1-5

KatieLyn may not have been sent as a prophet to the nations, but the point is that if God’s  people don't have faith in His words, then they will never obey His voice. These prophets were given tasks that absurdly defied human reasoning—and were very public! KatieLyn's task of faith was not spectacular: "Trust Me, even though your mom doesn't think it's the logical thing to do."

If you've read the posts from last fall that described the codependency between KatieLyn and Gwen, then you will easily see God's wisdom in giving KatieLyn this sort of test of faith. She was given a very hard choice: Trust God's provision, or trust her mother's doubts. The Lord had provided a man who loved her deeply, but she opted to obey her mother's misgivings. 
 
The marriage would not have been wrong. It was her inability to have faith in God's words that was wrong. As these prophets proved, it was obedience to the divine call that was important. Their obedience made them successful. If KatieLyn had obeyed God, she would have had a successful marriage.

but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
The prophets were great because they had learned to obey what they heard from God. They would go on to write about the coming of the Messiah, his sacrifice, his millennial reign, and the river of life flowing from the temple in Jerusalem. KatieLyn chose to run back home.

Peace, true peace, results from being in accord with the Lord. Much of what KatieLyn was claiming to be "peace" in the days after she ran back home was not real peace. It was just a mix of the absence of fights with her mother and the appeasement of friends who tried to console her. She succeeded in reducing her stress level, but stress reduction is not life and peace that comes from being spiritually minded; it is a this-world fleshly imitation. 
 

The Lesson
KatieLyn lost the life that the Lord had planned for her when she decided to doubt Him. She lost a marriage and her rightful future.  And yes, we know that God is an expert in picking up pieces and making new chances from blown opportunities, BUT...
She threw away her first love. Her next one will not get that same virginal intoxication. It can be good, but it will be different, and not without baggage. KatieLyn has baggage now. 

One thing that disturbed me—a lot—was how carelessly her mother treated this. Gwen was cavalier, almost dismissive, with a "God can send Joe someone more suited" attitude. This indicated to me that Gwen does not really understand men at all. And that fact showed in the specious advice that she gave her daughter, advice that held the appearance of truth, but was actually horribly wrong.

Romans 8:6 - Part One: How Jesus did it

I promised in my last post that we'd be looking further into Romans 8. Let's get to it—

5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.
6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
7 For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.
8  Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

I have posited all along that the reason KatieLyn ran back home in the middle of the night was because she stopped living by faith in the Spirit and set her mind on things of the flesh.  The  mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God and His plan.   

It would behoove us to look at how Jesus handled the conflict between the mind set on the flesh and the mind set on the spirit. Chapters 4 in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke provide the account.

After Jesus was baptized, he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Upon completion of a forty day fast, he was hungry.  In this state, the devil came to challenge Him and said, "If You are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread." And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God."
 [ Providentially, Mary wasn't out there in the wilderness to give advice, although her "suggestions" and "misgivings" did come up later, at which point Jesus had to nearly disown her, cf Mark 3:33. ]

This is typical behavior for the devil:
   Jesus was tempted to do something other than what his Father had said to him.
   The devil attempts to get Jesus to set his mind on things in the natural world.

 Jesus does not answer the flesh but turns his answer to the spiritual by quoting Deuteronomy 8:3,
 "Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD." This explains why Paul could tell the Romans that the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

Lesson Connections
   Regular readers will know that I usually conclude each post with The Lesson. But today I am taking the liberty to deviate from the formula because it is important to see how some lessons we've already covered fit together.  We have learned previously that a person is a spirit, has a soul, and lives in a physical body. We learned that the soul is the place of intellect, reasoning, and emotions; it is the mind of the soul that chooses between the spiritual spirit and the physical flesh. We can now make this connection with Jesus' temptations; we see him using his human soul to choose the divine of the spirit.  And we can make the connection as to why Paul wrote that setting the mind on the flesh is hostile to God. 

To be continued in Part Two...


 

Paul's Problem with the Corinthians

Paul had a problem with the Corinthian church. He did not pussyfoot around about it either. He told them pointblank:
Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.
The problem was that they were "people of the flesh." 1 Corinthians 3:1

As we continue reading past verse 1, we discover the reason that they are still fleshly, even though they had been fed good "milk." The same milk metaphor is used in Hebrews: every one who is partaking of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness — for he is an infant.  Hebrews 5:13
Milk is wholesome and easily digestible. Paul was not finding fault with them for a drinking nutritious beverage. He was disgruntled that they remained happy doing so. They did not want to move on and step up to meat.

The Taste Test
How can you know if someone is not ready for solid foods? What foolproof sign can you use to make a determination? People can become very good at saying all the right things to make you think well of them. A lot of people know how to look like Christians when they are in a church. The preaching goes out to the entire congregation, but how can one gauge if someone is eating the meat or is content with their liquid diet?

There's an answer for that! We can use 1 Corinthians 3:3 to know when people are immature and unskilled in righteousness: Believers who display envying, and strife, and divisions are acting in the flesh, not with their recreated spirit. They are acting and making decisions as if they were not saved, as if they had never heard God. Here's the verse in the International Standard Version:
That's because you are still worldly. As long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, you are worldly and living by human standards, aren't you? 1 Corinthians 3:3

And that answer really surprised me because it pointed straight at the chief reason KatieLyn gave in her blog for calling off the wedding!!!!!!!  She said, and I quote: If you and your loved ones are constantly fighting about your relationship and you normally don't fight long term about things, you might want to take a good long hard look at what is causing the arguments.

It is important to point out that she was not arguing with Joe, but with her mother. At the end, she said that she was constantly fighting, even though she had told Joe that it was periodic fighting. (I suspect she was trying to protect her family's reputation by not admitting to Joe how bad it really was.)

Apparently KatieLyn took a good long hard look at what was causing the arguments and came to an unscriptural conclusion. Apparently, she thought that her mom might have been right, even though God had previously told her that Joe was to be her husband.

The Lesson
That KatieLyn failed to discern the real cause that she lost faith is not the main point of this post, however. The BIGGIE is that the real reason for their fighting is revealed in 1 Corinthians 3:3,  You are still fleshly. For since there is envy and strife among you, are you not fleshly and living like unbelievers?

I have explained in previous posts that Gwen was envious of her daughter's joy in answered prayer. I don't know that Gwen ever had a dating relationship that wasn't based on sexual manipulation in one form or another. God answered KatieLyn and gave her the real thing that Gwen had missed. But rather than being happy for her daughter, Gwen was disbelieving and envious. This quite naturally led to strife between them. As her mother succeeded in sowing doubt into KatieLyn's beliefs that God had really answered her fifteen years of prayers, KatieLyn lost her her sense of closeness to the Lord. They were both acting in the flesh and living like unbelievers. KatieLyn had lost her confidence in hearing God, and Gwen had never been convinced that God had answered in the first place.

KatieLyn knew that she had lost her faith that the marriage was God's design for her and she felt distanced from God, but she never suspected that the chief reason for that emptiness was Satan had used her mom's immaturity to steal the promise from her.  This is why she could not give Joe a reason for calling it off that made sense—she did not know or even suspect the real reason. 

My next post will develop this concept further based on Romans 8:6
  For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
You will see that it was being carnally minded that brought death to God's plan for this marriage.