Sometimes faith demands that we believe a couple of wrinkled old-timers are going to have a baby.
Sometimes the promises of God seem beyond belief. The only human response is a bitter laugh.
In two successive chapters in Genesis (17 and 18), Abraham and Sarah, who are pictured in the New Testament as heroes of faith, laugh when God announces the imminent birth of a child. Their story honestly portrays the scandal and difficulty of faith, and it is a comfort to me that the Bible often pictures the great ancestors of the faith not as models of belief but as examples of disbelief.
Their story reminds us that faith does not always come to us in the reasonable, measured voice of some white-coated scientist. Sometimes faith demands that we believe that a couple of wrinkled old-timers are going to have a baby. Or that God will lead some slaves out of Egypt in triumph. Or that a virgin will conceive and bear a son. Or that a crucified criminal will rise from the dead.
The whole story of Abraham and Sarah revolves around the question God asks when Sarah’s laughter subsides: Is anything impossible—other translations have “too hard,” or “too wonderful”—for God? (Gen. 18:14). It is not an assertion or a proclamation, but a question. It comes as a question because faith requires a decision. The question demands an answer from us.
Unfortunately, we are tempted to answer it too quickly—and superficially. The question seems more rhetorical than real to many of us who have a long history in the church, who have heard all the stories before. We want to reply eagerly, like a kid wildly waving his hand in a fourth-grade Sunday-school class, “No, of course not! Nothing is impossible for God.”
Or we may tempted to answer too quickly in another way: “Yes, some things are impossible, even for God—if there is a God.” That is the prevalent answer of the modern world, and it quickly reduces the whole throbbing, mysterious universe to a closed system of cause and effect. God is no longer Almighty God—benevolent, maybe; kind and concerned, perhaps—but ultimately powerless to make any concrete difference. Everything is ultimately stable, reliable—and hopeless. This was the world Abraham and Sarah had come to live in, too, a world where you finally come to terms with barrenness at 90 years old.
But if we answer too quickly, we may miss the question’s real point. It is a question that forces us to a deep reflection on what we really believe about God. Our entire view of reality depends on how we answer it.
For if we answer the question by saying, “No, nothing is impossible for God”—and mean it—we have a whole new view of reality. Then anything can happen, and the possibilities are staggering. Then the world is not a closed system, but a place where old women have babies, slaves march through the Red Sea, and the dead rise again. The world is a place that is pregnant with unheard-of possibilities.
Abraham and Sarah leave the question tantalizingly unanswered. But the question lights up the biblical sky like the path of a comet. The root word that we translate here as “impossible” or “too wonderful” pops up again and again, and it is fascinating to see when and how. (I am indebted to Walter Brueggemann, who pointed out this trajectory in a journal article.)
Exodus 15 is an early example. Miriam dances in triumph, slapping her thigh with her tambourine at God’s deliverance of Hebrew slaves through the Red Sea. She sings, “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendors, doing wonders [doing the impossible]” (Exod. 15:11, NRSV).
Later, when an angel visits Manoah, Samson’s father, to announce Samson’s birth to his barren wife, Manoah wants to make sure this comes from the highest levels of heaven. Manoah asks, in effect, “What did you say your name was?” To which the angel replies, “Just call me’ Impossible’ “(Judg. 13:15–18).
The word occurs often in the Psalms, Israel’s hymn book. Whenever they sing the praises of God who does “marvelous” or “wonderful” works, it is the same word. Israel praises God as the one who does wonderful impossibilities, and Israel is often warned not to forget the impossibilities God has done on their behalf.
But the subject of impossibilities becomes even more interesting in the New Testament. When the angel visits Mary to announce her pregnancy, the angel also announces the pregnancy of Elizabeth, her cousin, who is very old, as Sarah was. Then the angel comes to answer the question the visitor proposed to Abraham and Sarah centuries earlier. “And now, your cousin Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37, NRSV).
Jesus takes up the same question in his teaching. In Mark, when he describes the difficulty of discipleship, and the disciples balk at how hard it is, Jesus says, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God” (10:27). And in Matthew, after Jesus has rebuked his disciples for their inability to cast out a demon, he says, “Truly, I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (17:20, NRSV). When we have faith, when we rely on God, then truly nothing is impossible, not only for God but for us.
The question of what is possible for God and for people of faith, then, has reached its climactic answer. Everything is possible! Nothing is impossible!
But wait. Is that really true? Are we given a kind of blank check drawn on the New Jerusalem Bank and Trust? Such a view is often exploited by religious teachers who promise that everything, from financial security to favorable weather, from happy sex to healing, is available to the one who believes hard enough. Kenneth Hagin, a well-known exponent of this theology, wrote a booklet entitled How to Write Your Own Ticket with God. For him, to struggle with whether something might be God’s will or not is a sign of a lack of faith. To wonder whether something might be possible is to question God. According to this theology, we now live by faith in the kind of world where God, like some trained seal, jumps through impossible hoops at the snap of our fingers.
Are the divine possibilities empty vessels that we can fill with our own contents? No, God is the one who does impossibilities, and, as Abraham and Sarah’s laughter makes clear, he doesn’t need our faith to do so. We also have to remember that the impossibility granted to Abraham and Sarah was not any impossibility. It was an impossibility that fulfilled God’s will and purpose.
This becomes clearer when we look at one more instance where the word that has to do with possibility occurs in the Bible. Jesus lies prostrate on the ground of Gethsemane, praying to be delivered from that hour of pain and torment he had been facing all his life. Maybe he remembers the encouragement to faith he himself gave the disciples, and he prays accordingly: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I will but what you want” (Mark 14:36, NRSV).
Perhaps, then, one answer to the question of the divine visitors to Abraham is yes, there is at least one thing impossible for the Lord: It is impossible for him to go back on his will and purpose to save humanity through the suffering of his Son. Obedience without a cross, salvation without death, newness without barrenness, these are impossible with God. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies,” Jesus told his disciples, it remains a single seed and cannot bear fruit. Jesus did not seem to know the wonderful theology that we can write our own ticket with God. His was a nonrefundable ticket to a cross. That night in Gethsemane, agonizing in fear, he learned the secret of obedience to God’s will and purpose. As Frederick Dale Brunner puts it, “The irony of the Anti-Christ is that he sometimes appears as the Superchrist. The Anti-Christ ridicules the fleshly, human, struggling, not-always-knowing-the-will-of-God-for-sure Christ of Gethsemane.”
Resurrection will come, but only through the valley of the shadow of death. New life will come, but not apart from the death of the old self.
In our pain, failure, barrenness, sickness, and doubts, we, like Abraham and Sarah, struggle with the question, “Is anything impossible for God?” When someone like my wife, Judith, who struggles every day with multiple sclerosis, asks that question, it takes on a whole new meaning and urgency. Is it impossible for God to banish this disease from her body? Of course not. The issue is not one of possibilities or impossibilities, but of God’s will for this world, this time, this place. And God’s will we can leave confidently in his loving hands, just as Jesus did.
As Abraham and Sarah and Jesus found, the answer to the question “Is anything impossible for God?” may follow slow and painful waiting. It may demand faithful patience. It may include long, dark nights of seeming abandonment. It may not even become clear until that “great gettin’ up morning.” But the whole biblical story tells us the ultimate answer to that question: “No! Nothing is impossible for God.” In due time, the child of laughter, Isaac, will break through the long wait of barrenness. Easter morning will dawn, bright and clear, after the dark night of the cross. That is why today, right now, in faith, we can sing the praise of the God for whom nothing is impossible.
