The Things Which Are Impossible With Men Are Possible With God

A man did what I asked him to do and came back with a number and I did not know what to say to him.

I had told him to count it. That is what this site tells people to do, and it is what Jesus tells people to do, and I stand by it.

He counted it honestly. He included things I would not have thought of, because he knows his own life and I do not. And the total came out at something he cannot pay.

Not difficult. Not painful. Cannot. There is a version of this where a man does the arithmetic and finds it is bearable, and this was not that version, and he sat there with the paper and asked me what I wanted him to do with it.

I want to take the honest route through this, because there is a scene where exactly that happens and the man in it walks away, and the scene does not end there.

He leaves, and Jesus lets him

Here is the moment.

And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich. (Luke 18:23, King James Version)

Very sorrowful. He is not defiant. He is not arguing. He wanted this and he has done the sum and he cannot make it come out.

And Jesus does not chase him. He does not lower the figure and He does not call after him with a smaller version. The man leaves, and the passage lets him leave, and I have never found that comfortable.

But Mark records one detail that changes the temperature of the whole scene:

Then Jesus beholding him loved him. (Mark 10:21)

That is in the same conversation, before the hard sentence, and it is the only place in the gospels where that is said about an individual in that way.

So he is not being tested by somebody indifferent to him. The looking and the loving are recorded in the same verse as the demand, and the man walks away from Somebody who is described as having looked at him with love.

You are being looked at with love in the same verse as the hard sentence. Mark 10:21 says then Jesus beholding him loved him before the instruction. It is the same Spirit, Romans 5:5 shedding the love of God abroad in the heart, who carries into a person what a passage can only report.

The disciples ask the right question

After he goes, the people watching ask the question that my friend was asking me with a piece of paper in his hand.

And they that heard it said, Who then can be saved? (Luke 18:26)

Who then can be saved. It is not a rhetorical flourish. They have just watched somebody serious, wealthy and sincere do the arithmetic and fail it, and they are asking whether anybody clears the bar.

And notice they include themselves. Peter says two verses later that they have left everything, and even he is not confident.

That question is the honest end of counting the cost. A person who counts it properly and does not arrive there has probably not counted properly.

You are asking the same question the people watching asked out loud. Luke 18:26 has them saying who then can be saved after watching an honest man fail the sum, and it is the Spirit of God, John 16:13 the Spirit of truth, who lets a person arrive at that question rather than at a comfortable estimate.

The answer moves the whole thing off the human column

Here is what He says.

And he said, The things which are impossible with men are possible with God. (Luke 18:27)

Impossible with men. He grants it. That is the first half and it is not a consolation, it is an agreement. He does not say they have overestimated the difficulty.

Are possible with God. And then He moves the whole calculation into a different column, which is the only place it can be made to work.

Notice what He does not say. He does not say the price is lower than they think. He does not say the rich man was mistaken about his own capacity. He agrees with the assessment and changes whose ledger it is on.

That is the answer to the man with the paper. His total is correct. He cannot pay it. And the arithmetic was never going to be completed on his side of the page.

You have a total that is correct and a column it was never going to be paid from. Luke 18:27 grants the impossibility with men before it says anything else. It is His Spirit, Zechariah 4:6 saying not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, who is named as what a work actually runs on.

What Paul says about who supplies the willing

Paul says the same thing about the mechanism, in a letter, without a rich man in it.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13)

Both to will and to do. Both halves. Not just the doing, which a person might expect, but the willing as well.

Which matters enormously here, because the man with the paper cannot even want it enough, and he knows that, and it is the part he is most ashamed of.

If the willing is also supplied, then his current inability to want it at the full price is not a disqualification. It is the first thing on the list of what he is not able to produce, and Paul puts it inside the supply.

And Paul says it again about the smallest thing available:

Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God. (2 Corinthians 3:5)

He says it about thinking. Not about heroic obedience. About the ordinary act of having a thought.

You are not required to supply the willing either. Philippians 2:13 puts both to will and to do on God's side of the sentence. It is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:26 who helps our infirmities, who is named for exactly the helping a person cannot arrange.

And if the number on your paper has begun to sit on your chest at night, say it out loud to a person: a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A total nobody else has seen weighs more than one that has been said out loud in a room.