The Power of God

Our mother tongue is a beautiful and facile instrument, but it can also be a tricky and misleading one, and for this reason it must be used with care if we would avoid giving and receiving wrong impressions by its means. Especially is this true when we are speaking of God, for God being wholly unlike anything or anybody in His universe, our very thoughts of Him as well as our words are in constant danger of going astray. One example is found in the words, “The power of God.” The danger is that we think of “power’’ as something belonging to God as muscular energy belongs to a man, as something which He has and which might be separated from Him and still have existence in itself. We must remember that the “attributes” of God are not component parts of the blessed Godhead nor elements out of which He is com-posed. A god who could be composed would not be God at all but the work of something or someone greater than he, great enough to compose him. We would then have a synthetic god made out of the pieces we call attributes, and the true God would be another being altogether, One indeed who is above all thought and all conceiving.

The Bible and Christian theology teach that God is an indivisible unity, being what He is in undivided oneness, from whom nothing can be taken and to whom nothing can be added. Mercy, for instance, immutability, eternity these are but names which we have given to something which God has declared to be true of Himself. All the “of God” expressions in the Bible must be understood to mean not what God has but what God is in His undivided and indivisible unity. Even the word “nature” when ap-plied to God should be understood as an accommodation to our human way of looking at things and not as an accurate description of anything true of the mysterious God-head. God has said, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14), and we can only repeat in reverence, “O God, Thou art.”

Our Lord before His ascension said to His disciples, “Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). That word until is a time-word; it indicates a point in relation to which everything is either before or after. So the experience of those disciples could be stated like this: Up to that point they had not received the power; at that point they did receive the power; after that point they had received the power. Such is the plain historic fact. Power came upon the church, such power as had never been released into human nature before (with the lone exception of that mighty anointing which came upon Christ at the waters of Jordan). That power, still active in the church, has enabled her to exist for nearly twenty centuries, even though for all of that time she has remained a highly unpopular minority group among the nations of mankind and has always been surrounded by enemies who would gladly have ended her existence if they could have done so.

“Ye shall receive power.” By those words our Lord raised the expectation of His disciples and taught them to look forward to the coming of a supernatural potency into their natures from a source outside of themselves. It was to be something previously unknown to them, but suddenly to come upon them from another world. It was to be nothing less than God Himself entering into them with the purpose of ultimately reproducing His own likeness within them.

“Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God.”

Here is the dividing line that separates Christianity from all occultism and from every kind of oriental cult, ancient or modern. These all are built around the same ideas, varying only in minor details, each with its own peculiar set of phrases and apparently vying with each other in vagueness and obscurity. They each advise, “Get in tune with the infinite,” or “Wake the giant within you,” or “Tune in to your hidden potential” or “Learn to think creatively.” All this may have some fleeting value as a psychological shot in the arm, but its results are not permanent because at its best it builds its hopes upon the fallen nature of man and knows no invasion from above. And whatever may be said in its favor, it most certainly is not Christianity.

Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God. This power is to come upon powerless men as a gentle but resistless invasion from another world, bringing a moral potency infinitely beyond any-thing that might be stirred up from within. This power is sufficient; no additional help is needed, no auxiliary source of spiritual energy, for it is the Holy Spirit of God come where the weakness lay to supply power and grace to meet the moral need.