Omnipotence of God

In his book, A Million Little Miracles, Mark Batterson believes we’re walking through a world brimming with the miraculous—we just don’t have the eyes to see it.

“There are miracles happening all around us all the time, hidden in plain sight,” Batterson says. “If you miss them, life can become a little bit of a chore and a bore. But if you rediscover the miracle that is life, it takes on a different dimension.”

It’s not just the big, cinematic miracles—the Red Sea parting or a blind man seeing. It’s the fact that we’re currently spinning at 1,000 miles per hour on a planet hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour, all while our bodies conduct trillions of biochemical reactions every second.

What if the real problem isn’t that miracles are rare—it’s that we’ve trained ourselves not to notice them? Psychologists call it “inattentional blindness.” If something is constant—like the sun rising, our hearts beating, or our lungs breathing—we stop paying attention to it. Batterson explains, “We should be startled by the sun, not the eclipse.”

The same is true of our own bodies. Batterson says:

Right now, you have 37 sextillion biochemical reactions happening inside of you. Your heart will beat 100,000 times today, pumping six quarts of blood through 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries—that’s twice the circumference of the Earth. And yet, we go about our day saying, ‘Well, I’ve never seen a miracle.’ With all due respect, you’ve never not seen one. In fact, you are one.”

So how do we start seeing the miracles around us? Learn to take nothing for granted. To wake up each day and marvel at the ordinary. To stop waiting for the grand, spectacular moment and realize that the spectacular is happening all around us, all the time. And maybe, just maybe, if we start paying attention, we’ll realize that life itself is the miracle we’ve been waiting for.

On a cloudless November night in 1572, Tycho Brahe observed an unusually bright star in the northern sky that suddenly appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. It had been assumed since antiquity that anything beyond the moon's orbit was eternally immutable. That star, SN 1572, is now classified as a supernova that is 7,500 light-years from Earth.

By 1592, Tycho Brahe had cataloged 777 stars. His mapping of those fixed stars blazed a trail for his protege, Johannes Kepler, to discover the laws that govern planetary motion. Several centuries later, it was a telescope named in Kepler's honor—the Kepler space telescope—that would catalog 530,506 stars.

Tycho Brahe is widely regarded as the greatest observer of the skies who had ever lived, but even Brahe couldn't have imagined the existence of half a million stars. And that's the tip of the iceberg. Astronomers now estimate the existence of more than two trillion gal¬axies. Each of those two trillion galaxies has an average of one hundred billion stars. Do the math, and that adds up to two hundred sextillion stars in the observable universe.

The point? Creation is much larger than any of us can imagine! And the same goes for the Creator. Like Tycho Brahe, some of us are quite content with our catalog of 777 stars. We think that's all there is. We've settled for a god we can measure and manage. If that's you, your god is too small.

Possible Preaching Angle: Why did God tell Abram to count the stars? (Gen. 15:5). God was messing with his mind, in a good way. He was giving Abram a nightlight—a visual reminder of both his history and his destiny. The same God who hung the stars in the sky can give you descendants. Faith adds God to every equation. When you do that, five loaves plus two fish equals all-you-can-eat for five thousand people. And there is more left over than you started with.

“Life will not be contained, life breaks free, it expands to new territories, it crashes into barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously,” said Jeff Goldblum, playing the role of chaos theory mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm in the iconic 1993 film Jurassic Park. “I’m simply saying that, well, life finds a way.”

That line was part of a fictional exchange, but it might have just as easily been uttered by real life scientists, baffled by a recent discovery at a storefront aquarium in North Carolina.

Charlotte the stingray lives at the Aquarium and Shark Lab in Henderson, North Carolina. She’s more than two thousand miles away from her natural habitat, off the coast of southern California. And it’s been more than eight years since she shared a tank with a male of her species, instead sharing a tank with five small sharks. But somehow, Charlotte has become pregnant.

Marine biologists call the process parthenogenesis, where a mammal can reproduce offspring from unfertilized eggs. It’s a rare phenomenon, but similar behaviors have been observed in other animals like California condors, Komodo dragons, and yellow-bellied water snakes. According to Katy Lyons, a research scientist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, Charlotte’s pregnancy is the first occurrence of her species, the round stingray.

“I’m not surprised,” said Lyons. “Because nature finds a way of having this happen.”

Editor’s Note: Unsurprisingly, the casual temptation for a skeptic may be to suggest that, even if there were a Jesus of Nazareth born of a virgin, it could have been through a parthenogenetic process. But given that parthenogenesis results in a near clone of the parent—and hence, all offspring are female—no one can suggest that a virgin conception of Christ could have been anything but miraculous. For further information, follow this link to Answers in Genesis.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is sovereign and will not be constrained by any earthly obstacles, whether from biology or technology. Miracles do happen and they testify to God’s power. If we continue to submit our lives to God’s will, we might very well witness an unexpected blessing.

Todd Brewer writes in an edition of Mockingbird:

Happy Holidays! Happy Advent! Happy Elf on the Shelf? Ha, there’s nothing happy about that Elf reporting every misdeed back to the big man at the north pole. This week, my daughter told me that her class’s elf on the shelf carries a Bluetooth Santa Cam, as if to make the Big Brother surveillance even more explicit. Perhaps it’s all fun and games … but the all-seeing Santa of the holidays can feel eerily similar to the Eye of Sauron.

Writing in Christianity Today, Russell Moore contrasts the watchful eye of the Elf-on-the-Shelf with that of God:

What stands out … is how strikingly more comprehensive the seeing of the God of the Bible is. Hagar … encounters God in the wilderness. “She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’” (Gen. 16:13). This is a woman who is considered dispensable, no longer useful, and thus invisible to her community. But God sees her. She is not alone in the cosmos. His eye is on the sparrow, and his eye is on her.

Perhaps that’s why one of the most remarkable things about Jesus in his encounters with people … is his seeing them as they are, such as the private character of Nathanael: “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you” (John 1:48). After Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well, she tells her fellow villagers, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” (John 4:29).

This is not an Elf-on-the-Shelf religion; this is good news of great joy.

It was the height of summer in the UK and then the sky darkened. On the evening of July 21, 2021, hailstones the size of golf balls fell from the sky, smashing windows and battering cars.

While the hailstorm was unusual in its severity, it was mild compared to a hailstorm that struck Calgary in Canada in June 2020. Hailstones the size of tennis balls caused damage to at least 70,000 homes and vehicles, destroyed crops and left the area facing a $940 million repair bill.

And climate change is altering the pattern of hailstorms. In the last three years in Texas, Colorado, and Alabama, the records for largest hailstone have been broken, reaching sizes of up to 6.2 inches in diameter. Hail damage in the US now averages more than $10 billion a year.

Hail forms as droplets of water are carried upward into a thunderstorm. Updraughts carry them into parts of the atmosphere where the air is cold enough to freeze the droplets. Moisture from the air accumulates on the outside of the drops of ice as it moves through the air, causing the hailstone to grow in onion-like layers.

Hailstones of less than 1 inch diameter typically fall at 25-49 mph. But downbursts can feature vertical windspeeds of 156-179 mph with correspondingly destructive hail. The heaviest hailstone ever recorded fell in Bangladesh in 1986, weighed 2.25 lbs. The hailstorm killed as many as 92 people and injured 400.

But just how big can a hailstone get? Experts now estimate the largest possible hailstone at 10.6 inches across or "bowling ball sized.” Meteorologist Matthew Kumjian of Pennsylvania State University said, “Strong 'supercell' thunderstorms produce the world's largest hailstones. So, the strongest of these storms today is probably capable of producing a supergiant stone.” It's clear that the really big stuff is likely to still keep hurling down at us. All we can do is prepare, and find a decent shelter.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Throughout Scripture God has used hailstones as a form of judgment upon his enemies. This will be particularly true in the end times when hailstones weighing 100 pounds each will bring devastating judgment to the earth. “And men cursed God for the plague of hail, because it was so horrendous” (Rev. 16:21).

The US has long ranked high among the world’s nations in its level of religious belief. But the Pew Research Center examined just what 80 percent of Americans actually mean when they say they “believe in God.”

Here’s what its survey of more than 4,700 adults found:

56% of Americans believe in God “as described in the Bible.”

97% God is all-loving

94% God is all-knowing

86% God is all-powerful

God determines what happens in my life…

43% All of the time

28% Most of the time

16% Some of the time

6% Hardly ever

6% Never

Talking with God…

56% I talk to God and God does not talk back

39% I talk to God and God talks back

University of Oxford professor of astrophysics Pedro Ferreira is puzzled, as most physicists are, about the origins and basic elements of the universe.

In fact, we’re at a complete loss at how to explain some of the most fundamental but baffling observations of how our Universe behaves. There is a tremendous, even cosmic, chasm between the physics we know and love, and some of the phenomena that we observe, but simply can’t make head nor tail of. We have no idea how to bridge this chasm – yet we are proceeding, to construct ever more expensive experiments and observatories in the hope that we will.

I’ve spent most of my adult life staring at the cosmic chasm – the abyss between what we know and what we don’t. And while our knowledge of the Universe has improved dramatically in that time, our ignorance has become only more focused. We’re no closer to answering the big questions about dark matter, dark energy and the origins of the Universe than when I started out. This isn’t for lack of trying, and a titanic effort is now underway to try and figure out all these mysterious aspects of the Universe. But there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed, and we might end up never really grasping how the Universe works.

Science has come very far in understanding how the human body works. But scientists admit understanding the human brain is still in its pioneering stage. God’s marvelous creation is still a mystery. The ultimate question in neuroscience is: How does the brain work?

Neuroscientists have made considerable progress toward understanding brain architecture and aspects of brain function. We can identify brain regions that respond to the environment, activate our senses, generate movements and emotions. ... But we don’t understand how their interactions contribute to behavior, perception, or memory.

Stanford neurologist Charisse Lichtman, offers a picture to clarify the problem:

But if I asked, “Do you understand New York City?” you would probably respond, “What do you mean?” There’s all this complexity. If you can’t understand New York City, it’s not because you can’t get access to the data. It’s just there’s so much going on at the same time. That’s what a human brain is. It’s millions of things happening simultaneously among different types of cells, neuromodulators, genetic components, things from the outside. There’s no point when you can suddenly say, “I now understand the brain,” just as you wouldn’t say, “I now get New York City.”

The marketing team at Lakeside Shopping Centre are accustomed to the difficulty of getting the attention of a fickle shopping public. But recently, they vowed to do the impossible.

As part of a Christmas promotion, Lakeside’s research indicated that 11 percent of area parents had at least one impossible-to-buy gift request from their children. They took stock of many of those requests (things like “a pencil that does my homework for me” or “a trampoline to the moon”), then tasked five prominent British inventors to solve one of these seemingly impossible requests. Their resulting creations will be part of a massive giveaway.

So if a child wants to become a LEGO figure, certified LEGO builder Duncan Titmarsh will be at the ready. Confectioners at Smith & Sinclair have designed a suite of Wonka-esque candies that taste like a holiday dinner. And seamstress Charlotte Denn created a dress that can, with the pull of a string, turn its wearer into a princess.

“It’s a lovely truth that children and even adults will sometimes put impossible gifts on their Christmas lists,” said marketing manager Ben Leeson. “At…Lakeside you’ll find all your Christmas presents – even the seemingly impossible ones.”

Potential Preaching Angles:

1) These inventions are impressive, but at Christmas God did something truly impossible—he became human, walked among us, and died for our sins. In doing so, he met the deepest need of our heart, a need much deeper than just a new toy or gift. 2) God's boundless divine creativity means even the things we seek that appear impossible are doable for him. Earthly acts of innovation or ingenuity are mere foreshadowing of God, who not only created the heavens and the earth, but will one day create a new heaven and a new earth.

In 1996 two military strategists, Harlan Uliman and James Wade, started advocating a more focused approach to war. Uliman and Wade argued for engaging the enemy with an overwhelming show of force that will destroy "the adversary's will to resist before, during, and after battle." They titled their book Shock and Awe.

Shock and Awe, also known as Rapid Dominance, is defined as "a military doctrine based on the use of overwhelming power, dominant battlefield awareness, dominant maneuvers, and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight." The goal is to render your opponent impotent by using "superior technology, precision engagement, and information dominance."

Shortly before the first Iraq War, Uliman described what would happen with this Shock and Awe approach: "You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted."

In response to human sin and evil, God could have used Shock and Awe. He could have employed Rapid Dominance to crush us with his "overwhelming power, dominant battlefield awareness, dominant maneuvers, and spectacular displays of force." Instead, the God of all authority and power, chose a radically different strategy: redemptive love, being delivered into the hands of sinners and then laying down his life at the cross. No wonder Paul had to acknowledge "the foolishness of the cross."

The March/April 2016 issue of Psychology Today attempted to give readers several reasons to cultivate a sense of awe and wonder with their article "It's Not All About You!" The article mentioned the following secular sources about our need for awe and wonder:

• University of Pennsylvania researchers defined awe as the "emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self."
• A popular theoretical physicist wrote: "Awe gives you an existential shock. You realize that you are hardwired to be a little selfish, but you are also dependent on something bigger than yourself." Being enraptured is a way "to remove the tyranny of the ego."
• Therapist Robert Leahy, PhD writes: "Awe is the opposite of rumination. It clears away inner turmoil with a wave of outer immensity."
• Social scientists have found that when people experience a sense of awe, they feel more empathetic and more connected with others. One scientist concluded, "Wonder pulls us together—a counterforce to all that seems to be tearing us apart."
• The Wharton School of Business evaluated the New York Times' most emailed articles and found that the ones that evoked awe were the most shared.

We've all at least seen it, if not participated—the bizarre trend of taking pictures of our food to share on social media. But what is the most popular angle to take these pictures from, and what does it say about us?

Edith Young, in an article in Vice, uses her background in photography and art history to help explain this question: Why are all those Instagram food photos shot from above? Her answer: "If we, as photographers or viewers, assume the point-of-view of God, we expose our own buried desire to have complete control over the food we consume." She adds that perhaps we're "enchanted" by this "god's-eye view" because it "flatters our innermost ambition to be omnipotent."

Possible Preaching Angle:

And you thought those were just photos of your food? Hum, maybe we really do hunger (no pun intended) to be like God. But then what happens to our trust in the one who is truly looking from the God-point-of-view?

Lake Tahoe is the eighth deepest lake in the world. On July 4, 1875, two men discovered the deepest point in the lake to be 1645 feet by lowering a weighted champagne bottle on fishing line from the side of their boat. Following the invention of sonar, soundings by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that depth. Lake Tahoe is so large that if the lake were tipped over, its contents would cover California in 14.5 inches of water. Tahoe could provide every person in the United States with 50 gallons of water per day for five years. The evaporation from Tahoe over the course of one year could supply a city the size of Los Angeles for five years. And Lake Tahoe is a small lake compared to Lake Superior (120 times as large) and the world's largest lake, the Caspian Sea (576 times as large).

Your use of water could never personally exhaust the limits of Lake Tahoe. But God has no limits. Whatever your need you can never exhaust God's supply.