What God Cannot Do: Think about this, the scripture says thou shalt not kill, yet God kills every day, (“I kill and I make alive,” Deuteronomy 32:39,) and not only one with whom he is at odds with so to speak, but with those who may be considered his friends. John 15:14. Is God under His own rule of right and wrong? Is there some higher, immutable standard to which He has bound Himself, some law that measures Him? To speak in such terms is folly. The law proceeds from His throne, not above it. To imagine that the Giver is bound by the same prohibition as the receiver is to blur the line between Creator and creature. “For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king.” Isaiah 33:22.
His commandments reflect His holiness as it relates to men, not as it constrains Himself. God cannot lie, Titus 1:2, not because He is bound by some external chain, but because His very nature is truth itself. He cannot deny Himself, II Timothy 2:13, not because He is limited, but because He is unchanging, faithful, and perfect. To suggest that God is bound to some external law is to dethrone Him and enthrone law as supreme. If there were such a law above God, then God would not be God.
It’s good to often be reminded that God’s ways are not our ways, Isaiah 55:8, neither can he be measured by man’s rule. Job 11:7-9. To attempt to bring the Almighty under the categories of human fairness, reason, or proportion is to reverse the order of things. The Creator is not subject to the reckoning of His creatures. He is absolute, sovereign, infinite, and eternal. The only “cannot” that belongs to Him is the “cannot” of contradiction to His own Being. In other words, GOD cannot cease to be GOD. Here is the foundation of worship, that GOD is GOD, unchangeably so. Every thread of creation is woven by Him, sustained through Him, and drawn back unto Him, to whom all glory belongs. Romans 11:36.
From this truth flows the certainty of the gospel. The God who elected us in Christ before the foundation of the world, Ephesians 1:4, is the same God who redeemed us by the blood of His Son, and the same God who will glorify us at the last day. And this is the bedrock of our hope, for “the God that cannot lie, promised before the world began,” Titus 1:2, life eternal in Christ Jesus our Lord. MPJ