All-Powerful?
What does it mean that God is “all-powerful”, especially in light of a year like 2020?
“God is in control.” --what people say when tough things happen
If the year 2020 taught us anything, it was that crappy things can happen and life can just suck. Life, as we knew it, was shut down. Many became sick and many people died in a global pandemic. Businesses were closed and jobs were lost. The political scene was (are) an absolute mess, as if those “in power” (ironic way to put it, by the way) had all reverted to playground bullies and “for us or against us” rhetoric. Many of us became more aware of unaddressed/unhealed societal wounds, tragic racial tensions, and collective trauma of people of color.
To hear, believe, or to say, that God is in control in regards to a year like 2020, has massive implications. The world is falling apart, and yet, God is supposed to be in control. What the..? One could make the case that God is doing a horrible management job.
Is God the author of the challenges of the last year, or all challenges ever?
If not, then is God at least “allowing” them for some unknown reason?
If it is true that God is omnipotent or “all-powerful,” then, how do we make sense of all of this?
What does it mean that God is all-powerful in a world where really terrible things happen and disappointments can totally wreck our lives?
These are big questions that I don’t have answers to. But I might know a good place to start, and in this chapter, I hope that you’ll come away with new questions and a new perspective on God’s power, in a way that draws you closer to God.
Throwing their weight around
My friend, Joey and his son, Joseph, love to play football. So when my son, Zac, and I hang out with them, we often play two-on-two football, dads against sons. A few years ago, when our boys were about eight years old, we played one of our backyard football games. It wasn’t really a fair game. Joey weighed 220 lbs. and I weighed 175 lbs. Joseph and Zac weighed about 75 lbs. and 100 lbs., respectively.
Imagine you’re there in the yard with us, and this is what you see:
Joseph kicks the ball off and Joey catches it. As Joey makes his way down the field, the boys rush up to tackle him. Because he’s a competitive guy, Joey lowers his shoulder and POW, plows right through both of these eight-year-olds! He knocks them to the ground, running right over them; makes the touchdown; and spikes the ball in victory. We chest bump and give each other high fives in celebration.
I know what you’re thinking: “Wow, Joey and Chris are so cool!”
Okay. What are you really thinking?
Are you wondering what we are trying to prove? Do you think we must be really insecure?
You’d think there was something wrong with us if we needed to “throw our weight around” like that. To show our strength without restraint.
But isn't that exactly what we expect God to do?
Isn’t that what “all-powerful” must look like?
This is what really happens when we play football:
Joseph kicks the ball off and Joey catches it to return it. Zac blocks me, taking me out of the way. Joseph grabs his dad around the waist. And what does the dad do? He fights his son a little bit in a pretend kind of way, but eventually, he lets his son take him to the ground. In reality, it was the little boys that did the celebrating, because they were able to overpower their dads.
What if true strength actually looks like Joey submitting himself to his son and letting his son feel powerful?
But again, how often do we think that for God to be all-powerful, God must throw God's divine weight around the cosmos? (And anything less is letting us down?)
We often want God to overpower our circumstances, overcome our challenges, come to our rescue, and be victorious, like some sort of superhero. Although there are “superhero” type stories throughout Scripture, (Jesus heals. He raises the dead. He liberates.), what if we let Jesus help us unpack what it might look like for God to specifically be “all-powerful”?
What did Jesus do with his power?
There’s a beautiful story found in the 13th chapter of the Gospel of John. The narrator begins by telling us, “Jesus knew the Father had given everything into his hands and that he had come from God and was returning to God.” (John 13:3). [By the way, do you ever feel a little envious sometimes that Jesus had these questions of meaning and identity figured out? Jesus knew what belonged to Him. He knew what His sphere of influence was. He knew where He came from and where He was going. Would you like to have those questions settled at some point in your existence? Guess what? Part of the Gospel is that Jesus came to share His answer with you inside your very being!]
Other translations put it like this: “Jesus knew that the Father had given him power over everything.”
The Gospel of John is about to show us what Jesus does when he knows that all authority and all power, belong to him.
It's the Passover meal and He's sitting with His disciples: “So He got up from the table and took off His robe. Picking up a linen towel, He tied it around His waist.”
You have to picture the scene of Jesus sitting at this feast with His disciples, their dirt, muck, and grime all over their feet, all over their bodies. I don't know how often they bathed in the first century, but these guys spent a lot of time walking, and they didn’t have Brooks running shoes.
Jesus knows that all power has been given to Him and He says, “This is what I'm going to do with that.” He takes off His outer layers, strips down to basically a little waistband, puts a towel around His waist, and takes the place of a servant, kneeling at their feet. This is a powerful (pun intended) expression of humility, that went way beyond any up-ending of the social order the disciples had ever seen (Peter’s response gives that away). Then Jesus “...poured water into a washbasin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel He was wearing.”
Let’s sit with the scene for a moment.
What does Jesus show us that having “all-power” looks like?
It looks like washing grimy feet.
It looks like submission and servanthood.
Imagine Jesus is in your home, and you’re about to share a meal. And one of the first things He does is He takes off your shoes, kneels down at your feet, and begins to wash the grime off of your feet.
Imagine Jesus kneeling before you. Would you know what to do with that?
Would you be like, “Get up. Get up. Please stop!” That’s what Simon Peter did. He couldn’t handle it, and asked Jesus to stop. Jesus essentially responded, “If you don’t let me do this for you, you have totally missed the point of who and how I am, and you won’t be participating with the real me.”
I get Peter’s response though. My feet are really ticklish. And my toes are pretty gross. I wouldn’t know how to respond, if Jesus offered to wash the gunk out from in-between them. I wouldn't know what to do with that level of humility, when the God of all creation in the person of Jesus stoops down to kneel down at my feet.
Can you imagine what the disciples are processing as they experience this? And Jesus says, “You want to know what it looks like for Me to be all-powerful? I come and I submit Myself to you and your grime and your mess and your dirtiness, and I love you through it and in the midst of it. I take the place of a slave and I wash your feet.” (And of course, we know with Jesus, that every action was a concrete act of love and at the same time a symbol of something else.)
Where did Jesus learn that?
Because we’ve probably heard the story numerous times, this might not mean much to us.
And because Jesus is human, we might be thinking, “Yeah, this is Jesus, though. He stepped into humanity. But that's not God the Father. God the Father is the all-powerful, transcendent One. Jesus did that, but God the Father is the One that’s in control.”
Now here's the question that absolutely blows my mind, and I’m so grateful to Paul Young for voicing it: Where did Jesus learn to wash feet?
Where did Jesus learn to take off His robe and kneel down to wash the grime off His disciples’ feet?
From where does that knowing, that servanthood, that humility originate? Very possibly it was something he saw his mother do. Less likely still, but possible, his step-father, Joseph.
But I think that when Jesus said, “The Son only does what He sees the Father doing” (John 5:19), He meant it quite literally.
Is it possible that Jesus learned to wash feet from His “all-powerful” Father?
According to Jesus and his Father, all-powerful looks like: submitting Themselves to us, to our mess and imperfection, even our broken, hurtful choices, serving us in love, and washing us clean.
Entitlement or Empowerment?
Now, does that answer every question about God being “in control” and what that means?
Of course not.
It actually raises a lot more questions.
But I believe it gives us a better starting point from which to ask, reflect, and process.
So how do we orient ourselves? Where do we look to process these questions with Jesus? John 1:18 says, “No one has seen God but the one and only Son has made God fully known.” If we want to know what the Father is like, where do we look? We look at Jesus and let Jesus show us what the Father is like. Then we can consider how Jesus reframes all-powerful. Jesus stoops down, submits Himself to us, and serves us.
But it doesn’t stop there.
“After He washed the disciples’ feet, He put on his robes and He returned to His place at the table. He said to them, ‘Do you know what I've done for you?’” (John 13:12).
Their answer of course was, “Nope,” because how could they?
This is the all-powerful transcendent Yahweh. And by the way, at least in this instance, Jesus didn't just flat out tell them, “Hey, being all-powerful looks like serving.” (Although He hints at it in Matthew 20:24-26, and Jesus absolutely practices what He preaches.)
What does Jesus do?
It’s as if he’s saying, “You're going to feel the beauty and the power of God as I stoop and serve you.” It was a relational dynamic, not a transaction.
“Do you know what I've done for you?”—there He is asking a question again—“You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you speak correctly because I am. If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you too must wash each other's feet. I have given you an example: just as I have done, you also must do. I assure you, servants aren't greater than their master, nor are those who are sent greater than the one who sent them. Since you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them…” (John 13:12-17).
What do Jesus and the Father do with their “all-power”? They share it with us.
That adds a whole new level to the concept of empowerment, doesn’t it? Jesus empowers his followers.
Serving others without empowering them to do anything often leads to entitlement.
But serving others and empowering them to do the same actually multiplies God's glory throughout the world.
So according to Jesus in John 13, what does God do with God's “all-powerfulness”? God kneels down, serves, and shares power with us. The Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit empower us to serve out of love and wash others clean.
We may respond, “Oh wow, God, I hope You know what You're doing.” And the Triune God is like, “Me, too.”
Do you see the beauty of this God?
Do you see how this reframing is so important that it changes the conversation about God being all-powerful? That when we say these things like, “God is in control,” we really need to think about what we mean by that. How is that understood by the child who was recently abused, the woman who just miscarried a child or the friend who just lost a job? Now God has become the perpetrator instead of the healer and comforter.
When we think of God being in control, we often have an image in our minds of a machine or chessboard, with a bearded white male sadistically or at least detachedly moving the pieces. But that’s not what Jesus shows us.
One day, my youngest son, Nathan, and I were sitting down to have our little breakfast date that happens every morning. It’s one of the ways we connect: I make a double portion of my breakfast, Nathan sits down, and we eat breakfast together.
This particular morning, we were sitting across from each other, but normally we sit next to each other. Nathan looked at me and said, “Daddy, come sit by me.” I responded, “Oh, I don't want to sit over there right now because Zac's homework stuff is out and I don't want to mess it up.” Rather than conceding with a simple “Okay, Dad,” Nathan pushed all of Zac's homework stuff aside and said, “I moved it. Now come sit here.” What do I say to that? “Uh, no, I'm really comfortable in my seat.”? What did I do? I submitted. I picked up my stuff and moved it to the other side of the table, because it's not about me being in control of the relationship. Rather it's about me being in the relationship even when that means not having or keeping actual control.
Jesus shows us that God submits to us relationally and says, “Look, sometimes you make messes of things, but I honor your choices. However, there's no mess that's beyond My ability to clean up, heal, or redeem.” That's crazy, isn't it? God actually lets us be ourselves and lets us bring ourselves to the equation, sometimes to tremendous risk and sacrifice. But our agency, identity, and uniqueness are too important to God to just cut that all off and wipe it away.
It is a fruit of the Spirit, after all
Isn't it beautiful that God's power looks like self-restraint? That a main expression of God being “in control” means self-control? (A fruit of God’s Spirit, by the way!) God self-limits, instead of unleashes, God’s power, in order for us to be us, and in order for us to become more like Jesus. Not by forcing us through coercion and might, but by serving us through humble, healing love.
I want to take a moment to recognize that what you have been reading may feel a bit disorienting or unsettling. The traditional idea of God being “in control” in a literal, even mechanical sense may have been settling or even grounding for you.
That’s understandable. But we need to trust Jesus to show us what “in control” and “all-powerful” look like, because at some point the “traditional” notions will fail us.
Starting with our feet
Jesus' model here of starting at the disciples’ feet actually gives us a way forward and a way to process conversations that are reframing and reorienting in their very nature.
When you find yourself with an idea you don't know what to do with, what if instead of trying to work it out logically, you started to work it out from somewhere else? Jesus starts with the disciples’ feet and begins by washing the grime off their feet as He reveals to them knowledge of the Divine.
Isn't that interesting?
Cynthia Bourgeault, a well-known conference and retreat leader, and writer on the spiritual life, says it like this: “Rather than trying to do faith from the ‘top-down,’ by first convincing yourself of the logic of the argument in question, begin from the ‘bottom-up,’ by acting in alignment with it, and see what happens next!”
My point in writing this book(let) is not to be prescriptive, but I know that some of us really appreciate some practical ways forward. Here are some ways that might look:
--Asking God to empower you to be the difference you’re praying for in a situation
--Paying attention to where Jesus is serving, working, and healing in the midst of the challenge you’re facing
Reflection Questions
When has the traditional notion/interpretation of God being “in control” or “all-powerful” actually worked against your relationship with God?
When has God served you? When has God submitted to you out of love?
What’s unsettling for you about these ideas? What’s liberating?
Reflect on your relationship to power. What do you do when you have it? How do you respond when you feel it’s being threatened? Where can you responsibly give some power away?
Where do you hold on to control? How might that backfire and work against you, your relationships, your goals?