Almighty God

Having considered what it means that God is called "Father" in the Apostles’ Creed, we turn now to the description, "Almighty," referring to His sovereignty and power. 

Almighty God

Just as
God’s Fatherhood was understood best in the prayers of His people, so the
prayers of the faithful are evidence of trust in His almighty power.[1] In Reformed thought, God’s omnipotence
carries with it the concept of His absolute sovereignty, perhaps one of the greatest
sticking points for non-Calvinists. Yet
for Reformed believers, the belief that “God from all eternity did by the most
wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain
whatsoever comes to pass” is not intended to be frightening, but comforting.[2] Indeed, if this teaching is separated from
the fatherly care of God, it might indeed be terrifying. Combined, however, with the belief in a
relational Father-God, the Heidelberg Catechism explains the great advantage of
a strong belief in God’s providence:

That we may be patient in adversity;
thankful in prosperity; and that in all things, which may hereafter befall us,
we place our firm trust in our faithful God and Father, that nothing shall
separate us from his love; since all creatures are so in his hand, that without
his will they cannot so much as move.[3]

What is
particularly telling about the Heidelberg Catechism is that its teaching is
initially framed by the question, “What is thy only comfort in life and death?”
and the sovereignty and almighty power of God is appealed to in the answer.[4] In other words, the classical Reformed view
of God’s almighty sovereignty does not set out to paint a harsh and horrifying
picture of a dictator God, but to offer the greatest comfort to broken, weak, and frail
human beings. Many modern Reformed
theologians would do well to remember such.

Of course,
it is not only the Reformed that find comfort in God’s sovereign purposes that
He works out by His own almighty hand. Yet for all believers, the notion is difficult, because it often does
not look like the world is under the control of an all-powerful, benevolent
God.[5] The age-old problem of theodicy has haunted
the minds of all believers in God at some point or another. Can it really be possible, given everything
we see around us, that God is “working out all
things for good?” Luke Timothy
Johnson provides excellent insight:

By reducing the mystery of God’s power
and knowledge to the level of a problem, by insisting also that the “problem”
of free will and the “problem” of evil must be understood within the frame of
ordinary human understanding, such theologies diminish both the majesty and the
mystery of God, and diminish both the tragedy and the hope of human existence.[6]

We dare not
simply reduce theodicy to a mere intellectual problem by which we judge whether
or not there is an all-powerful and
benevolent God. At the same time, it would
be just as irresponsible to shrug off the reality of suffering and evil with
cliché statements about God’s being “in control.” The Bible takes the reality of suffering
seriously, and so do postmodern people.

If we are
going to proclaim the God of the Bible to a postmodern generation, our worship
services are going to need some rethinking. While much of the book of Psalms, Israel’s
hymnal, so to speak, takes up the issue of suffering in its lament psalms,
modern evangelicals are turning the worship service into “celebration,”
encouraging worshippers to leave their problems on the doorstep to come in and
focus entirely on God. God, on the other
hand, encourages His people to come, weary and heavy laden, with prayers and
supplications, making requests known.[7] Jesus made no mention of leaving their
troubles on the doorstep before coming to Him. God does not struggle when He hears his people ask Him why He seems to
have caused them injustice, and He is not threatened by questions and
complaints born out of human frailty. Indeed, Job was vindicated, and his three friends judged.

It should
also be realized that God’s sovereign, almighty power is in direct
confrontation with the modern and postmodern idolatries of human autonomy.

Those who reject God’s providential
control over every event do not thereby gain freedom, but find themselves in
slavery to some form of determinism: chance, fate, the power of others, or
their own self-will.[8]

To be
confronted in our idolatries with the God of Scripture is not to have our
freedom stolen away, but to lead us to the freedom of our original created
purpose: “to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”[9]

Luke
Timothy Johnson sums up well where we have come thus far:

[W]hen we confess God as one and as
Father and as all-powerful – all at once – we use the consistent language of
Scripture and accept the unanimous testimony of the church from the beginning. We put ourselves within the worship and
prayer of the faith community. We do not
begin by trying to figure God out, but by bowing before God’s unutterable
majesty and power, as the source and goal of all that exists or has ever
existed.[10]

One more
comfort is derived from the doctrine of God’s almighty sovereignty, and it
should prevent the kind of knee-jerk reactions characteristic of much Christian
commentary on postmodernism. That, of
course, is the fact that a sovereign God is in control of history. If indeed we believe in His providence and
sovereignty, and we believe that He works all things out for good for His
people, then it is time to begin looking for the hand of God in the shift from
modernity to postmodernity.[11]

Michael Horton has seen the incident of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 as a helpful
parallel to the cultural transition.[12] The similarity of the two is obvious: while
the rebellious humans of Genesis 11 were building a tower and an accomplishment
without God, so modernists, leaving behind the supposedly outdated concepts of
a God who is involved and intervenes in this world, touted the principles of
secular humanism and believed in the inevitable progress of the human race.[13]

Middleton
and Walsh utilize the Babel imagery as well.[14] While modernity erected its tower on science,
technology, and the market economy,

Postmodern pluralism…corresponds to the
situation after Babel,
when construction on the tower had come to a grinding halt. Today, the tower is tottering, perhaps even
on the verge of collapse. Construction
is halted; indeed, deconstruction seems to have taken over.[15]

From a
point of view that stresses God’s sovereignty, then, it may be clear that the
current cultural change is nothing less than the judgment of God upon the
arrogance of modernism. Jumping to the
interpretation, however, that postmodernism is therefore what God intended to
put in place of modernism would be as foolish as saying that captivity in
Babylon was where God had wanted Judah all along, or some other such thing.

At the same
time, we must remember that God disciplines in love, opening up new
opportunities for repentance and faith. Horton has noted at least one result of the transition to postmodernism
that opens up new opportunities for the Christian faith: “a new openness to the
supernatural.”[16] Dawn argues that there is at least a small
group of postmoderns who are willing to look again to the wisdom of the past,
which will open the doors for a fresh hearing of the ancient faith.[17] Daniel Adams alerts us to the return to
religion, the “unsecularization of the world” that has accompanied
postmodernism.[18] In all of this, it is critical that we “not
defend modernity against postmodernism simply because the former is familiar
and comfortable.”[19] Rather, we should “exploit the new
opportunities” afforded us by postmodernism,” while avoiding “academic fads.”[20]

Other connecting points with
postmodernism exist, and faithful Christians will look diligently for
them. In any case, we must put our trust
in God’s almighty power, remembering all the while that this is still our
Father’s world. The words of the great
hymn should ring in our ears:

This is my Father’s
World!

O, let me ne’er
forget

That though the wrong
seems oft so strong

God is the ruler yet.[21]