The One Thing God Cannot Do

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By David Brand

“If we are faithless, He remains faithful; for he cannot deny Himself.”

2 Timothy 2:13

It was the summer of 1954.  A young boy had just arrived at a Presbyterian junior high camp.  Almost immediately a pastor challenged him with a question: “Can God make a rock too big for Him to lift?”  No matter how he answered the pastor’s question, the boy’s answer implied that there was something God could not do!

A year earlier, this boy had affirmed the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:30).  A neighborhood friend retorted that it sounded like “God was trying to steal the whole show!”  Years later, in Daniel P. Fuller’s class for senior seminary students on the Unity of the Bible, that issue was remarkably resolved.  While the neighborhood friend of yesteryear certainly maligned God’s sovereignty, he had correctly acknowledged it  –the “whole show” belongs to God.  Indeed, God stated in Isaiah 42:8:  “My glory I will not give to another!”  

Just such an issue, was biblically expounded by Jonathan Edwards in a treatise entitled The End for Which God Created the World.  That “End”, of course, was and ever remains the “glory of God.”  The Bible makes abundantly clear, again and again, that His glory is the supreme end or motive for which He does everything that He has done and everything that He will ever do.  What would be a wrongful end for humans, fallen or unfallen, and the race itself, namely, to exalt one’s own self-love above fellow humans, is only reasonable and proper for the Creator Himself who alone is deserving of it.  That is the foundation of the universe and the end toward which all things are destined in the purpose and plan of God.

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David C. Brand and his wife Marilyn reside in Wooster, Ohio.  He and Marilyn have four grown children and eight grandchildren.  Dave’s master’s thesis completed at  Westminster Theological Seminary was published by the American Academy of Religion in 1991.  He was also a contributor to Eerdman’s Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia published for Yale University in 2017.