On Second Thought
“For with God nothing will be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)
There are moments in Scripture that sound almost reckless when read too carefully. Luke 1:37 is one of them. The angel Gabriel stands before a young woman in Nazareth and calmly announces that God intends to do something that violates every category of human reason. A virgin will conceive. A child will be born without precedent, without explanation, without human cooperation in the usual sense. Luke is careful to tell us that Mary does not respond with cynicism or blind enthusiasm. She responds with trembling realism. She knows how the world works. She understands biology, social consequences, and personal risk. And yet she is confronted with a God who is not limited by how the world normally works.
The Greek construction behind Gabriel’s words—ouk adynatēsei para tou Theou pan rhēma—is instructive. It does not simply mean “nothing is impossible” in the abstract. It means that no word spoken by God will prove powerless. God’s speech carries creative force. When God declares intent, ability is already present. What sounds absurd to human logic becomes inevitable once God has spoken. This is why the incarnation does not begin with Mary’s faith, but with God’s initiative. Mary is invited into something already set in motion by divine will.
That invitation, however, demands adjustment. God was not merely asking Mary to believe a doctrine; He was asking her to rearrange her life around a miracle. Belief without obedience would have been meaningless. Faith that remained theoretical would not have carried her through public misunderstanding, private fear, or the long years of raising a Son whose identity would remain partially veiled even to her. Scripture never presents Mary as heroic because she understood everything, but because she trusted enough to yield herself to God’s impossible plan. “Let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38) is not resignation; it is alignment.
This is where the text presses uncomfortably into our own spiritual habits. Many believers sincerely affirm that God can do anything, yet quietly assume that He will not do much of anything personally, disruptively, or miraculously in their own lives. We affirm omnipotence in theory while practicing expectation management in reality. This is what might rightly be called practical atheism. God exists, God is powerful, God intervenes—just not here, not now, and not with me. Faith becomes admiration rather than anticipation.
The incarnation exposes how inadequate that posture is. God did not send salvation through an institution, a program, or a carefully managed strategy. He placed it inside a person’s body and asked her to trust Him with the consequences. Christianity without the divine is indistinguishable from morality. Churches without expectation of the miraculous become well-organized social clubs. Ethical behavior can be imitated. Compassion can be replicated. Community can be manufactured. But the miraculous—transformed hearts, redirected lives, impossible forgiveness, unexpected callings—cannot be produced by human effort alone. Those realities remain the unmistakable signature of God at work.
It is worth asking, then, when God last did something in your life that required explanation beyond your own planning. When was the last time obedience felt risky rather than reasonable? When was the last time God’s prompting felt larger than your capacity to control the outcome? Scripture suggests that fear is not a sign of unbelief in those moments, but a sign that the scale of God’s work has exceeded human containment. Mary was “troubled” by Gabriel’s words, not because she doubted God, but because she understood the cost.
God still does the impossible, but He rarely does it in ways that leave us unchanged. Miracles are not spectacles for passive observers; they are invitations to participate in God’s redemptive work. The question Luke 1:37 leaves us with is not whether God is capable, but whether we are willing to live as though He is. Faith matures when belief moves from abstract agreement to embodied trust. It grows when we stop adding safety clauses to God’s promises and begin asking what obedience might require if those promises are actually true.
On Second Thought
Here is the paradox we often miss: the impossible acts of God are rarely meant to remove human weakness; they are meant to expose it as the stage on which divine power is displayed. We often pray for God to make things manageable, explainable, and safe. God, by contrast, seems to favor situations where His involvement cannot be mistaken for human competence. Mary’s strength was not her courage, her purity, or even her faith. It was her willingness to let God act where she could not. On second thought, perhaps the greatest obstacle to experiencing the miraculous is not doubt, but control.
We prefer a God who assists our plans rather than interrupts them. We are comfortable with divine affirmation but uneasy with divine disruption. Yet Luke’s Gospel quietly insists that salvation entered the world through surrender, not strategy. God’s impossible work advanced through a young woman who did not ask for guarantees, timelines, or contingency plans. She trusted the character of God more than the clarity of the process. That may be the deeper challenge of Luke 1:37—not whether God can do the impossible, but whether we are willing to release our grip on what feels possible enough to manage.
On second thought, faith may be less about believing extraordinary things and more about yielding ordinary life to an extraordinary God. The impossible does not arrive with fanfare for those who live expecting it; it arrives as obedience disguised as inconvenience. And when it does, it leaves behind not just changed circumstances, but changed people—quiet witnesses to the truth that no word God speaks will ever return powerless.
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