The God Who Can Do All Things: The Omnipotence of God

You wake up at three in the morning. Your mind is racing. Something you cannot control is happening, and your phone will not let you forget it. Maybe it is your job. Maybe it is your marriage, your finances, that bill you forgot to pay and remembered in the dark. Maybe it is a child going the wrong direction, a church conflict that keeps spiraling, a decision someone else made that now touches everything you built. You lie there and you calculate. You strategize. You rehearse conversations you have not had yet. Somewhere around four o’clock you hit a wall. There is nothing more you can do.

That feeling is not unfamiliar to a Christian. We live in a world full of forces larger than ourselves. Sickness comes that medicine cannot cure. People betray us. Circumstances change overnight. The harder we grip, the more we see how little we actually control. We are not in charge. We never were.

But Someone is.

As we continue through the attributes of God, I want us to consider His omnipotence. You will not find the word itself in your Bible, but the truth behind it is everywhere: God is unlimited and unbounded in power. That is the definition John Gill gave in his body of doctrinal divinity. Job came to see it after he had lost everything. Hear his confession.

The big idea is simple. God possesses the power to accomplish all things, and nothing on earth or in heaven will ever stop Him from finishing what He has purposed. Three truths run through Job’s words, and each one presses on the way we live.

God’s Power Knows No Limit

Look at the first half of verse 2. “I know that You can do all things.” Notice what Job does not say. Not I hope. Not I wish. Not I am trying to believe. He says I know. He has moved from argument to confession. After chapters of suffering, after his friends piled their theories onto his grief, after he demanded an audience with God, Job stands before his Maker. What comes out of his mouth is certainty. Bone-deep certainty. You can do all things.

This is omnipotence. Not a doctrine to master in a seminary classroom, but a living reality that breaks a man’s self-reliance and rebuilds him. Job’s confession is not academic. It is the fruit of his broken world finally lining up with the truth.

What does it mean that God can do all things? His power has no boundary. His strength has no weakness. No enemy can defeat Him. No problem outruns His solution. No circumstance is too tangled for Him to untangle. He does not strain. He does not tire. He never meets opposition that surprises Him or a limit that holds Him back. When Scripture says God can do all things, it means His will and His power are one. What He chooses to do, He does. Not eventually. Not with difficulty. He does it.

This is not the same as saying God does everything. He does not make you sin. He does not author evil. But His power to accomplish His purpose is absolute. His knowledge is perfect. So His choices are never thwarted by circumstance or caught off guard by consequence. Daniel saw the same thing in a foreign kingdom.

That is omnipotence. Not debated, not questioned, simply acknowledged as reality.

So if God can do all things, then your circumstances are not beyond His notice. The job you lost did not surprise Him. The diagnosis your doctor handed you is not outside His knowledge. The person who wronged you is not stronger than your Maker. This does not mean your troubles disappear. It means they are held in the hands of the One whose power knows no limit. If you are in Christ, they are held for your good. Your suffering has a Shepherd. It does not have a master.

God’s Purpose Will Not Be Thwarted

Job says more than that God is powerful. The second half of verse 2 carries the weight. “And that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.” That phrase shifts everything. It is not enough that God is powerful. His power is yoked to His purpose. He does not wield omnipotence like a giant child swinging a toy. He moves toward an end. He is building something. He is redeeming something. He is working out a design that began before you were born and will run on long after you return to dust.

Nothing blocks that design. Nothing forces God to change His mind. The word thwarted means to stop, to prevent, to turn aside. Job is saying that no force in all creation can turn aside the purpose of God. You cannot do it. Your enemy cannot do it. Your circumstances cannot do it. Even your own failure cannot do it.

This is the line a Christian has to see. Your life is not a string of accidents. It is not a random collision of forces. You may have broken His commands. You may have made a terrible choice. You may have lost something precious. You have not altered His purpose toward you. You have not derailed His plan for your good. The omnipotent God who made you is still moving toward the end He chose for you before the foundation of the world. Isaiah heard God say it plainly.

God is not scrambling to rescue His plan. He is not working around your failures. Your mistakes are woven into His finished work. His counsel will stand.

Think about Job’s life. He lost everything. His children died. His health was stripped away. His name was ruined. His friends turned on him with their tidy theories and their blame. Sitting in the rubble of it all, Job says that nothing which has happened has thwarted Your purpose. You are still moving. You are still building. My suffering has not stopped You.

Is there something in your life right now that looks like it has thwarted God’s purpose? A door that closed. A promise that has not come true. What you see is real, and your pain over it is real. It is not the whole story. God’s purpose for you stands. His intention toward you does not move. He is not waiting on the sidelines for you to fix the mess so He can get back to His plan. You are part of His plan. Your suffering is part of it. Your weakness is part of it. Every bit of it is being worked into something you cannot yet see.

This Changes How We Trust

When Job finally grasped that God’s power and God’s purpose are both absolute, his response was not arrogance or despair. It was repentance. Look at verses 5 and 6.

Notice the progression. “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear.” Job had a theology. He had ideas about God. He had not seen Him. Knowledge about God and knowledge of God are not the same thing. You can know the doctrine of omnipotence and still grip your life with clenched fists. You can say the words, God is in control, and still lie awake at night managing your fear.

I have never understood the suspicion some believers carry toward learning about God. Sit under good pastors and good preaching. Read the great theological books and commentaries. Go to school. Get a degree. Learn all you can. The heart cannot worship what the mind does not know. We cannot expect anyone to worship a God he knows nothing about. You have to know who God is to worship Him from the heart. Even so, head knowledge is only the doorway. Job says, “Now my eye sees You.” Seeing changes everything. When you see omnipotence with your own eyes, you do not just read about it or study it or preach it. You respond to it.

His response is self-rejection and repentance. That is the posture of a soul that has truly met the omnipotent God. Not defeat. Repentance. Turning away from self-reliance and turning toward God. You cannot say God can do all things, you cannot say His purposes cannot be thwarted, and then live as though you are still the one in charge. That is a contradiction. It may be closer to blasphemy.

Many of us run our Christianity on theory. We believe in God’s omnipotence. We pray about it. We talk about it. Then we live like functional atheists, as if the outcome of the day depends on how much we worry, how hard we scheme, how cleverly we steer. We treat God’s power as real but irrelevant to Tuesday morning.

Seeing the omnipotent God means loosening your grip. There is such a thing as human responsibility, and we do not throw it away. But we have to settle who holds the authority. Like Job, we say, I was wrong about where the power lives. I am not the authority here. I am not the guard at the gate. I am the servant. I am the subject. I am the beloved, but I am not the one in charge.

This is not passive. Job’s repentance is not collapse. It is the clearing away of the one thing standing between him and trust in the Almighty. Himself. His self-will. His demand to understand before he obeyed. His insistence on being consulted about the design.

What are you managing right now that you need to release to Him? I do not mean pray about it and keep both hands locked around it. I mean lay it down. If God can do all things, and His purpose cannot be thwarted, then your white-knuckle grip on the outcome is not faith. It is faithlessness dressed up as being practical. Trust Him with the result, not because you understand how He will work it, but because you know who He is.

The Inheritance of Every Christian

Job’s confession brackets his whole ordeal. He came to God with questions. He wanted answers. He wanted to know why. When he finally stood face to face with omnipotence, he did not get his explanations. He got something better. He got certainty. Not the certainty that he would recover, or that life would go back to normal, or that he would ever fully understand. The certainty that the God holding his suffering knew exactly what He was doing, and that not one single thing could turn aside His intention toward Job’s good.

That is the inheritance of every Christian. You are not orphaned in your suffering. You are not the victim of a cosmic accident. The God whose power is absolute and whose purpose is unstoppable has claimed you as His own. He is working all things, not some things, toward your good. Paul said it this way.

That is omnipotence aimed at you. The infinite power of God, not turned against you, but working for you, in you, through you, toward your good.

The Gospel

Hear this plainly. If you do not know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, the omnipotence of God is your terror and not your comfort. His power stands against you. His purpose will be accomplished, and apart from Christ, His purpose for you is judgment. The God who can do all things will carry out His justice. You cannot escape it. You cannot bargain with it. You cannot wish it away.

In Christ, that same omnipotence becomes your comfort. The God who holds all power used it to become a man. He stepped into time and space and mortality. He faced the full power of death and conquered it. He rose from the grave. Now He sits at the right hand of the omnipotent God, working all things, not against you, but for you. The God who could do anything chose to die for His people. That is the gospel. That is hope. That is why you can lay down your self-reliance and trust Him.