Impossible!

Reading through the Bible this year, I am recognizing common threads that run throughout the Old Testament … the gospels … David’s songs … Solomon’s wisdom. (This shouldn’t come as a surprise: throughout thousands of years and dozens of human writers, it was the same Author telling the same Story.) Those threads weave a tapestry that reveal our desperate straits and God’s glorious redemption in Christ.

Day 26 – Exodus 3-5 - Matthew 18 – Psalm 22

What if they don’t believe me?

What if my clumsy speech gets in the way?

God, please send someone else! Anybody but ME!

No matter how patient God was in instructing him, Moses always had another “but...”. In his eyes, it was inconceivable that he could speak to Pharaoh in the ways Yahweh was saying, even though God was calling him to. Impossible!

We must gather our own straw now to make bricks – but still make the same quota.

Moses, you have made us abhorrent to Pharaoh and brought us nothing but anguish!

Then when Moses confronted Pharaoh, as the Lord had called him to, the Israelites suffered even more harshly under the Egyptians, and subsequently blamed Moses. How were they to make the same number of bricks, with NO straw?! What Moses was asking of Pharaoh simply wasn’t possible, and could never come to pass. He would never release them to worship their God. Impossible.

How can I become like a child, Jesus, which You say is the only way to Your kingdom?

How on earth can I forgive, and forgive, and then forgive again?

What Jesus tells us to do is surely impossible. I’m a middle-aged woman, not a bright-eyed child. I struggle to forgive the same sin/sinner seven times. But 70 times 7? Who are we kidding?!

Do you know that Jesus truly understands these questions? He Himself came face to face with the impossible. In Psalm 22, we hear his anguished cry, penned centuries before He cried it from the cross:

Why are you so far away when everyone is mocking and injuring me?

Come quickly and help me!

His pleas met with silence from the Lord. He suffered without God’s intervention; He suffered at the hands of those for whom He suffered.

Impossible that the Father should abandon His Son! We cannot comprehend it, until this glimmer of hope in the final verses of the psalm:

His story shall be told to all coming generations. And all humankind shall come and declare His righteousness to a people yet to unborn—that He has done it. It is finished!

In His resurrection, God’s impossible requirements and promises were fulfilled!

Our all-powerful eternal God declares some things to be impossible:

It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.
But not impossible for Jesus! (Hebrews 10:4)

It was impossible for death to keep its hold on Jesus.
And so God freed Him from the agony of death. (Acts 2:24)

But as for those things that look impossible to us – for God to fulfill His jaw-dropping promises, for us to follow Him in the ways He calls us to – Jesus has this to say: