Attributes of God - Omnipotent

Who is God?

God is omnipotent. God is omniscient. And God is perfect. 

In this article series, requested by an email subscriber, I'm going to go over these three attributes of God, and talk about what it means for us.

While there are certainly many attributes of God, so many that they aren't able to be counted, I'm only going to go over these three so that we can keep focused! God is amazing, and he's so far beyond our understanding that we could study him for the rest of our lives and not even begin to comprehend the majesty that he is.

The Glory of Creation

First of all, God is omnipotent.

Omnipotent means all powerful. It comes from the Latin word omni, meaning all, and the word potent, which we've often heard used to refer to taste or smells. Potency is power, and it's also strength.

Why does this matter? Well, it gives us a new sense of what the word omnipotent means. All-powerful, but specifically all-strong.

God isn't just a battery, full of "power" that we can plug into to do things. He's more like a mountain. Or a great tree. Or your father, who protects you from all the bullies when you're a small child at school.

He's strong.

To get a sense of how strong God is, we'll go back to the beginning. "In the beginning," says Genesis 1:1, the very first verse in the Bible, "God created the heavens and the earth."

Space is really big.

Like, really big.

Like, so big you can't wrap your mind around it, even though your mind is the most sophisticated data processor ever created by—guess who—the same person who made space.

The idea of such a vast size is incomprehensible to us. It just goes out, and out, and out some more—it doesn't really end.

And it's not just emptiness, either. Space is full of stuff. Stars, dust, asteroids and planets and comets and meteors—oh, and black holes, which are super-dense super-heavy masses that basically just eat everything.

All that stuff, God created.

How many stars are there? Have you ever tried to count them?

Even leading scientists and astronomers only have a rough estimate of how many stars there are in the universe. Hundreds of people, with thousands of college degrees between them, are stuck guessing at how much stuff there is in the sky.

And yet, God made it.

Can you imagine how amazing that is? It takes me forever to make my lunch, let alone a star—and yet God made a gazillion of them.

And they aren't just formless blobs of matter. Stars are amazing, but even just here on Earth we can be amazed at how powerful God is.

Next time you're outside, look at a tree.

Really look at one. Study it; the thickness of the branches, the way the sunlight plays off the bark, the little twigs, and how the leaves sprout out of the branches in a way that almost looks like a stained-glass fractal, and the ivy climbing up the trunk.

Really take the time to study it. Look at all the details.

There are a lot of details. And God made a decision about every single one.

How powerful does that make him?

There's enough complexity in the human body to fill hundreds of books. In fact, hundreds of books have been filled by it already, and there are probably many more that will be written in the future.

Your circulatory system, your breathing, the way your eyelashes look, the way your DNA interacts with amino acids and proteins to duplicate itself and to control what goes on in your body. Your bones, and how they're just the right density to walk around without snapping but not too dense to weigh you down.

All of this, God made.

We can't understand it. Human scientists have tried to study and explain the processes of the body, but it's just too hard. I haven't even mentioned your brain!

God is powerful enough to bring the largest of stars into existence, and he's powerful enough to control every single hair in your head and DNA molecule and your body. He is omnipotent.

Holding the World In His Hands

And he didn't just do a bunch of work creating everything just to forget about it.

God created everything, but he also sustains everything. He holds it together.

"All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:16–17)

There are four fundamental forces in physics: gravity, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.

The strong nuclear force is the one that holds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus. We don't quite know why it works, but it does. Without it, no life could survive.

The four fundamental forces have varying degrees of strength. Gravity is the weakest, and a strong nuclear force is the strongest.

And, oh man, is it strong.

Lift your hand up. Do you feel gravity? Try jumping. The earth just pulls you right back down.

The strong nuclear force is 6000 trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravity.

That's the hand of God.

We can't even fight against gravity, and that's not even close to the strongest force in the universe! God is so much more powerful than we are. He is—literally—holding everything together, right now, as you read this.

When I was in middle school, my science teacher mentioned that if the strong nuclear force was even the slightest bit weaker, everything would just explode. All the atoms would suddenly fly apart from each other, and organized matter would just stop existing.

But it doesn't.

God is omnipotent, and we're completely reliant on him for our life.

He created everything, and he holds all things together.

God created the heavens and the earth, and he's still holding them together today. Thank him for it. He doesn't owe it to us to keep us going—and yet he does it, out of his mercy and love.

It's certainly something to be thankful for.