12 Things God Can't Do: ...and How They Can Help You Sleep at Night

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I’m torn. I liked the scope of this book - it functions pretty well as a basic doctrine of God (though, thankfully, doesn’t describe itself that way). It links the doctrine of God to the incarnation really well via little ‘interludes’ that highlight the wonder of Jesus being like us, without trying to ‘smooth out’ the ways that might be seen to clash with the things we’ve seen about God in the main chapters. It’s wonderfully Christ-exalting, which is fab! Also notable was drawing on Church Fathers more than I’d expect from a book like this. But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart’” ( 1 Samuel 16:7). 5. God Does Not Make Mistakes

As the book goes through ways that God is not like us, it really ends up being a book about God's holiness. The chapters about God's other-ness are interspliced with short chapters about Jesus, who is himself this awesome God but is also fully human. WOW! A lot of the rest is the omni- attributes. Theology Proper is really an all-or-nothing kind of thing. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” ( 1 Peter 2:24). 2. God Does Not Fear For the most part, though, the author does a brilliant job of making deep truths, which have tested the minds of theologians for centuries, comprehensible to a lay audience. Moreover, he leads us to marvel at all the good things Godcando. Let’s stay with the idea of a water barrel. Try to imagine one much too big to fit in your garden. In fact, imagine that this barrel already contains all the water in the world—more than that, it contains all the water in the universe. In this case, it is impossible for that barrel to get any fuller—not because of any limitation in its capacity to hold water, but because there simply isn’t any more water to add.The real masterstroke in this book is the application of Jesus' experience as a human within 'Interlude' chapters. These shine a light on the ways Jesus would've experienced the full gamut of human emotions, weakness and suffering as one of us. It's really fascinating stuff! Sure”, you might be thinking to yourself, “but that’s cheating. Those things don’t count”. After all, denying God is the mark of a fool in Scripture (Psalm 14:1), and who wants a foolish God? To say that God cannot deny his own existence—or that he cannot lie, or that he cannot be tempted by evil—is a good thing. In the words of Anselm, the tenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury:

Let’s take a few minutes and uncover a few of the things God doesn’t or can’t do. And I’m so thankful He doesn’t. Finally, in the last two sections, we look at the fact that God cannot be tempted, He cannot lie and God can’t disown Himself.For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed” (Malachi 3:6). [To verify, compare Psalm 90:2,4; Psalm 102:27; Hebrews 13:8; James 1:17; and Revelation 1:8.] God is absolutely committed and resolute about His plan for man. Aren’t you grateful that God does not change your world randomly or change His mind about your calling and salvation? 3. God cannot break a promise.