As omnipotent and free, God has power over evil and all that opposes him. Evil, which arises out of self-will and issues in destruction, is derivative, not primary; it is a negation of being, hence dependent on the being it denies. It is a lie, and that which comes into its orbit is sucked into untruth and bondage. Sin, being a distortion of freedom, enslaves; it also deludes, so that the sinner is blinded and actually thinks himself free.
Only God, truly free and holy, can liberate and redeem those in the thrall of evil. This liberation involves judgment. God judges evil in his own time and way, with sovereign power, not only by condemning it—in individuals and in nations—but also by drawing good out of it, as with the crucifixion of Christ which, by divine determination, became the source of mankind’s salvation. He does not always prevent evil as we might wish him to do, for that would require him to impose himself on us coercively, and coercion, which is different from judgment, is against his nature. Those who trust in him are not thereby systematically spared evil’s painful whiplash, for they live in a world enmeshed in sin, their own and that of others, and sin’s concrete effects cannot easily be undone; but, penitent as they will be if they are in a relationship of obedience and trust with him, they stand under God’s forgiveness and are saved from divine condemnation and undoubtedly protected from many of sin’s effects as well, though this may not be readily discernible. The Holy Spirit deepens them as persons through their trials and keeps them from nihilism and despair, even while correcting them and changing patterns of behavior seen by God to be egocentric and destructive of love.
So the God revealed in Jesus Christ is Judge as well as Savior. These two dimensions of the divine being go together, and together they demonstrate God’s omnipotence. Human sin is a failure of love and entails its own pernicious consequences. These consequences are stitched into the fabric of the world by its Creator, no less than the physical laws of the universe. However they may work themselves out, they constitute the inevitable judgment that falls upon any deviation from the norm of love.
Only the Creator of reality has the power and authority to intervene and amend that reality if, as has happened, one of its features—human freedom—has been distorted by sin, with deadly consequences for the whole of creation. Humanity’s ambition to perform this salvage operation itself through utopian constructs of a political or technological nature is an extreme manifestation of the very evil it is intended to redress. God alone can alter what we call fate and undo the inevitable consequences of a bad attitude or action. He alone can forgive us our sins, deliver his human creatures from guilt and the judgment of slavery to sin and death, and create in us new hearts inclined to love him and love our fellow human beings. As Creator, he judges the sinner according to the moral logic he has built into the world; as Redeemer, he intervenes to pardon, save, and renew, according to his gracious mercy and his understanding of every individual human heart.
While in both these cases, as Creator and as Redeemer, God’s omnipotence is operative, the ultimate expression of this power is present, paradoxically, in the complete abnegation of power in the worldly and temporal sense by Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, before his human judges, and in his acceptance to be crucified by them in absolute weakness. The power of sin and death, which in this world expresses itself in the power to dominate others by coercive force of one kind or another, is overcome by the greater power of love (John 14:30–31, 16:33): Jesus freely and humbly lays down his life for the world (John 10:17–18; Phil 2:5–8), gives himself up to God to be made sin for our sake (2 Cor 5:21), absorbs in his person the worst that man can do to man, and then is raised up by God through the power of the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4; Phil 2:9). Life, which is greater than death, works by the holiness of love, which is greater than material power. Life/Love/Holiness conquers death/power/corruption and redeems, just as, in the beginning, life/love overcame chaos and the formless void and created. This is the supreme manifestation of divine omnipotence and the definitive judgment of sin under the form of perverted human power.
If God did not judge sinners in this life and in the final judgment in the fullness of time of which the Scriptures speak, justice would be absent from the world and evil would triumph; and if he were not gracious, if he did not show mercy to the penitent—to those who hunger for mercy and who show mercy to others—love would be absent and evil would triumph. Both justice and mercy are present in the world, of course, woven into its structures; and they are present, ironically, in some of the actions of the same human beings who desecrate them.45
Made in God’s image, we are not bereft of these qualities, though we regularly pervert both. But because of this moral doublemindedness we cannot redeem ourselves or fundamentally reform our behavior. In Christ, God’s very image incarnate, who was like us in every way except that he was without sin and loved God and all his human neighbors with an undivided heart, the Lord God has undertaken to do this on our behalf. That is the meaning of the cross. The Messiah took upon himself freely the judgment and penalty for the sins of mankind, condemning condemnation itself to the grave and so manifesting supremely God’s omnipotence and his essential nature of love and opening the way to resurrection and the triumph of life.
Two other aspects of omnipotence remain to be pointed out. We spoke above of God’s immanence in connection with his mysterious plurality. Here I want to suggest that his immanence is an aspect of his omnipotence. He is omnipotent as he is immanent in his creatures since in some way every one of them, from the smallest particle upward, will reflect him, its Creator, and be sustained in being by him. Surprisingly to us, perhaps, God’s omnipotence, in implying immanence, may thus be said to involve intimacy and intrinsic involvement with his world. This truth underlies the possibility of incarnation, where God in Christ comes amongst us as one of us and then sends the Holy Spirit actually to live within us, in what the Bible calls our hearts, in a real and not just symbolic sense.
Secondly, omnipotence must never be dissociated from goodness, inherent in God’s love. God is limited by his character: as good, he cannot do or endure evil; as love, he cannot act unjustly or cruelly; as rational, he cannot act irrationally or arbitrarily; as faithful, he cannot break his word or alter his purpose; as merciful, he always seeks to give us grace. But these limitations in no way detract from divine omnipotence; rather, they qualify it and disclose its inner moral dynamic.
The concept of omnipotence is in itself impossible for finite mortals to grasp. The idea of the sheer act of creating ex nihilo or of raising another from the dead may give us a hint of what we designate by this concept, but even that idea is quite beyond our intellectual reach. All we can say about such an act is that the power to do it must be unlimited (except as suggested above), altogether beyond any analogy with power as we experience it within the creation. What we may be sure of, on the basis of revelation and of the structures of the natural world, is that the fruit of divine omnipotence is, as goodness, the opposite of chaos, and becomes manifest in order, beauty, and redemptive love.46
It is, finally, as noted above, God’s redemption of mankind through the cross and resurrection of Jesus that provides the ultimate manifestation of omnipotence within the confines of history. The power to overcome death and bring forth a new creation within history—first Jesus the Christ, then those who long for him in their hearts (whether they know it or not) and so will be raised with him in the life to come—is equivalent to the power that brought forth light and matter out of nothingness “in the beginning.” Creation and new