“All things are possible with God.” —MARK x. 27 (R. V.).
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES tells us that some ideas are so great that when they once find entrance into a human mind they permanently stretch it, and leave it for ever afterwards bigger. Surely this declaration of our Lord’s embodies one of these mind-expanding ideas. For we must observe that its astounding declaration is not a mere hyperbole of careless speech, the negligent exaggeration of a proposition which has only relative validity. It is the well-weighed and precise assertion of a great fact. It does not mean merely that God is greater than man, and may accordingly be believed to be capable of doing some things which man cannot do. It means just what its startling words declare: that “all things”—taking the term in its unlimited absoluteness—that ‘““all things are possible with God.” Perhaps the conception is too large to find entrance into our minds at all. Perhaps none of us will fail to trim it down on this side or that in order to make it fit our several capacities of belief. But surely if it once gets into the mind, in the fullness of its meaning, it cannot fail permanently to enlarge it, to revolutionize all its points of view, and to raise it to a higher plane of both thought and feeling.
We may assure ourselves of the absoluteness of the meaning which our Lord intended to inject into the words by attending to the circumstances in which He announced them. The rich young ruler had come to Him, seeking eternal life; not with the simple-hearted trustfulness of a little child, nor yet with the self-despair of the publican who could only smite his breast and cry, “God be merciful to me, a sinner”; but, led by a rich man’s instinct, with his thoughts bent on purchase. “Good Teacher,” he asked, “what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” Jesus had probed his heart by setting a price on future blessedness which the young man was loath to pay: “Go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give it to the poor; and come, follow Me.” And when, with his countenance fallen, the young man had turned sorrowfully away, the great teacher improved the occasion for the instruction of His followers. “How hardly,” he exclaimed, “shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” Perceiving the amazement of His disciples, He repeated the declaration, and this time, if we may trust the form in which the words have come to us in some of the oldest documents, in that universalized sense which is attached to them, in any event, in the sequel: “Children, how hard it is to enter into the kingdom of God!” And then, reverting for a moment to the specific case which was the occasion of the remark, and devoting Himself to driving home the impression which it was His prime object to make on their hearts, He gave utterance to that extraordinary comparison which has confounded the minds of His followers from that time until to-day: “It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
We all know how men have labored to rid this limitless assertion of the human impossibility of salvation of its necessary meaning. Some have thought to lessen at least the extremity of the affirmation by reading “cable” instead of “camel” —under the impression, apparently, that as a “cable” has some relation to the thread that would pass through a needle’s eye, extreme difficulty might be expressed by it indeed, but not absurd impossibility. Others would have us believe that our Lord but “paltered here in a double sense,” and had in mind not a real needle’s eye, but some narrow gateway in Jerusalem, through which a camel could squeeze itself only with difficulty, and with the loss of whatever load it might essay to carry with it. All such emasculating interpretations, however, are shattered by our Lord’s own explanation of His words. For when He observed His astonished disciples —who certainly understood Him to assert an unconditioned impossibility—asking wonderingly among themselves, “Who then can be saved?” He turned to them and said—what? “It is indeed difficult, but not impossible”? “I did but jest in ambiguous words; I meant, not an actual needle’s eye, but that narrow passage you know of in Jerusalem”? No, but directly and emphatically this: “With men it is impossible.”
It was an absolute impossibility He meant to affirm. Men can no more press themselves into the kingdom of heaven than a camel can force himself through a needle’s eye. His solution of the paradox turns on no attenuation of the meaning the language is fitted to convey, but on a lofty appeal to the omnipotence of God. With men it is impossible,” he affirms; “but,” he graciously adds, “not with God: for all things are possible with God.” This special case of the impossible He meets by referring it to the general fact of the divine almightiness. This generalized enunciation of the divine almightiness is therefore to be taken in the height of its meaning. It is not to be weakened into the mere affirmation that God is very strong and can do things which man cannot understand. It is the ringing assertion of the true omnipotence of God. It is the grand announcement that the impossible constitutes the very sphere of the divine operation.