In church we hear a lot of pious talk about the almightiness of God — the Lord’s omnipotence. Sunday after Sunday the solemn congregation stands and says: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and earth.” We begin our prayer with the honor-giving and power-ascribing phrase: “Almighty and most merciful God.” The songs and hymns of praise we sing are full of acknowledgements of the unlimited authority of the God we worship: “I sing the mighty power of God that made the mountains rise, that spread the flowing seas abroad and built the lofty sky.”

“God of our fathers, whose almighty hand

Leads forth in beauty all the starry band

Of shining worlds in splendor through the skies

Our grateful songs before Thy throne arise.”

Yes, in church, we are accustomed to speak and sing and pray of the almightiness of God, and this is right and meant for us so to do. For thus the creature should give glory to the Creator and confess his own frail creatureliness. And thus also are we armed from Sunday to Sunday with new hope and inwrought with new courage for life’s fierce struggles as we come together and our common faith fires us with the confidence that we struggle not alone, but ever beside us is the almighty champion of eternal righteousness.

Week by week, life crowds in upon us with its hurt. Suddenly comes the dire catastrophe. Silently, in the midst of life, health slips away and search frantically how we will, our tear-dimmed eyes cannot find that precious jewel. Defenseless we are before the hurt and loss and sting of life and in our human frailty we need to come and lift up imploring hands to one whom we have learned both by precept and experience to call Almighty Father, strong to save. Yes, aware are we, cruelly aware, of our own defenselessness, vulnerability on all sides, to the dangers and damages of this life, and we need to return again and again to that sanctuary of the soul where we may plead for and receive a sense of security from professing faith in, and ascribing glory to, an Almighty God. How right we are to make much in common worship of the almightiness of God.

But have you ever pondered the subject of the Almighty’s defenselessness — of where and how the Ancient Eternal God is helpless? That, too, is a helpful, though sobering, exercise for the spirit of man. In Elizabeth’s Goudge’s beautiful interpretation of Christ’s life to which she gives the title: For God so Loved the World, I came upon this arresting phrase: “The Defenselessness of God.” “Here,” I thought, “is a contradiction in terms — Almighty God, defenseless? Or, is it a misprint?” But as my eye traced again the words, “the defenselessness of God,” there came thoughts of how, indeed and in truth, the Almighty is defenseless and vulnerable at so many points in His dealings with us, His children.

See how defenseless is Almighty God in accomplishing our eternal salvation if we meet the divine purpose with an unwilling heart. Is not this the supreme lesson of the parable of the Vineyard Tenants? The Lord’s planted a vineyard. It was His. He rented it to the Vineyard keepers. At the harvest season he sent a servant to ask for his share. The renters beat the Lord’s servant, and gave him nothing. Then a second servant the patient owner sent. This man the rebellious tenants killed. A third they stoned, and other servants they mistreated until, finally, the owner said: “I will send my own son, surely they will reverence him.” But when the tenant saw the son, they said: “Here is the son and heir, let us kill him and seize the inheritance.”

The story is an unmistakable allegory of Israel’s history and Messiah’s coming. Israel was the favored vineyard of the Lord’s own planting. “He had sent His servants into it. The succession of the prophets was no happenstance.” (Buttrick) God was at work, working His saving purpose out for His select people. But Israel stoned the prophets and killed those whom God sent unto her. The nation’s history was but a sad revelation of the defenselessness of God in dealing with a stiff-necked and disobedient people who pulled down the Lord’s altars, rebelled against His righteous rule, and refused His just humanitarian principles for dealing with each other.

And when at last God sent His own son, in the vain hope that humanity would recognize divinity when they saw it, and reverence Him, the vilest intents of the human heart were let loose, and the Christ himself went down in mangled death before stampeding wickedness. Oh, the defenselessness of God as Christ hung on the cross! “The true picture,” says George Buttrick, “is not that of Jesus receiving in His body the darts which an angry God has hurled at us, but rather that of God in Jesus receiving all the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ which rebellious humankind has hurled at Him. Behind the cross of Golgotha there is a cosmic cross flinging its vast shadows. Behind the spear piercing the side of Jesus there is a spear piercing a ‘Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ . . . In no parable told by Jesus, not even the story of the prodigal, is the love of God, in its persistence and its sacrifice, more poignantly revealed.”

And through the years, this pitiable parable has remained the sad story of God’s defenselessness in effecting the salvation of all men who receive with unwilling hearts the gospel of His love, the wooing of His spirit, the tempering experiences of life. For God Almighty will not compel men. No other advocate will He use. “O mystery, miracle, wonder, greater than any other surprise,” cries Joseph Parker, “man must be wrestled with to keep him out of hell.” For God wants not a slave’s service, but a son’s love. And even Almighty God remains defenseless before any human heart’s rejection of the divine salvation in Christ.

Do you recall that day, when crossing blue Galilee into desolate Gadara, Jesus encountered that wild, demented man who lived among the tombs, slashing his own flesh with sharp rocks and stabbing the midnight silence with is eerie shrieks? You remember how the healing, saving hand of Jesus calmed that wild spirit and brought him back to sanity. Well, do you remember what the citizens of Gadara did and what they said when this, their fellow citizen, experienced so great a salvation? Did they come out to Jesus and beg Him to be their King? Did they say: “Here is the greatest of all physicians. Come, Sire, we have taken up a public offering and are ready to erect in our city a spacious hospital if you will stay and superintend its healing work?” Is that what they said? Not on your life. When the man was healed and saved, a delegation of the Gadara citizenry came in fear and begged Jesus to depart from them. They were afraid of what this new transforming power might do to change them and their sinful institutions, so they begged Him, begone. “If a mere man wants to push God Almighty, eternal and glorious, his Maker and Redeemer, right out of his life, he can.” (Elizabeth Goudge) For God is defenseless to accomplish the soul salvation of any man whose spirit is unwilling to accept it.

But God is defenseless, not only in the realm of our spiritual salvation, if we are unwilling, but He is also defenseless in enforcing the terms of our stewardship to Him. In the parable of the cruel vineyard keepers, the Lord of the Vineyard sends one servant after another to tell the tenants of His claim upon their lives, to ask for an accounting of their stewardship. When each servant is violently and shamelessly rejected, the Lord of the Vineyard does not resort to forcible ejection, but patiently dispatches one servant after another with the same message.

Halford Luccock says this story has “timeless relevance as a powerful picture of failure in stewardship. The stewards of the vineyard had betrayed their trust. Here is depicted the subtle way in which men reject their status as trustees, and come to think of themselves as outright owners, with the absentee landlord forgotten. God is never really an absentee from life, but man’s fondling of that dangerous pronoun, ‘mine,’ and his distortion of it, can push the Almighty into a darkened background . . . When the saving remembrance: ‘All things come of Thee, O Lord,’ drops from life, the little word ‘my’ is blown up like a balloon till it obscures the true conception of life as a trust.”

But mind you, though defenseless to enforce the terms of our stewardship, God is not down a blind alley. The Almighty still rules supreme. Though in this life God takes no recourse but the pleadings of His word, and the merciless working of the law of materialism which turns a man’s heart as hard as flinty diamonds and slimes his hand with a greedy Midas touch, after this life comes the judgment. The tenure of man’s holding is only for life. In God’s sight, how brief is that little human life. Then cometh the judgment.

But saddest of all, God Almighty is defenseless in shielding His own children from the consequences of willful sin. God’s moral law must operate. Though our Father in Heaven can welcome us back to fellowship with Him, when penitent and sick of our sins we come, nevertheless, our transgressions of the moral law must be worked out in the course of human experience.

Did you see the brief news item when it appeared in a local paper on April 8th of this year?  “The war has not yet ended for Italian children. 1,400 of them were killed last year by explosions of mines and shells left by armies in World War II.” Evil may be repented of, the peace may be made, estrangement done away with, the fellowship restored, but the blasting power of man’s sin remains under the cover of our social order to burst forth in destruction. And even Almighty God is defenseless to shield His children from its destruction.

“I have lived long enough,” says one wise saint, “to see that we are not punished so much for our sins, as we are punished by our sins. We don’t get away with anything. Eventually they all come home to us.”

Surely this is the most sorrowful part of God’s defenselessness in dealing with sinful man whom He has loved with an everlasting love. In Studdert Kennedy’s poem, The Sorrows of God, a cockney soldier delivers himself on this poignant subject:

“I remember a lad o’ mine,

He’s sailing now on the sea,

And he were a thorn in his mother’s side,

And the plague of my life to me.

Lord, how I used to swish that lad

Till he fairly yelped with pain,

But fast as I thrashed one devil out

Another popped in again.

And at last, when he grew up a strappin’ lad,

He ups and He says to me,

My will’s my own, and my life’s my own,

And I’m going, Dad, to sea.

And he went, for I hadn’t broke his will,

Though God knows how I tried,

And he never set eyes on my face again

Till the day his mother died.

Well, maybe that’s how it is with God.

His sons have got to be free;

Their wills are their own, and their lives are their own,

And that’s how it has to be.

So the Father God goes sorrowing still

For His world that has gone to sea,

But he runs up a light on Calvary height

That beckons to you and me.

The beacon light of the sorrow of God

Has been shining down the years,

A flashin’ its light through the darkest night

Of our human blood and tears.”

Yes, God, Almighty God, is defenseless against man’s rejection of His offered salvation in Christ; He is defenseless against man’s rejection of the terms of His stewardship; He is defenseless even to ward off the inevitable catastrophe of sin’s dire consequences in this life, but, when with willing and eager hearts we join forces with Him, all His and our defenselessness is swept away in the almighty power of His redeeming love.

Let us just be sure that it is never by our needlessness or our rebellion that His almighty power is undercut, nor His almighty love is turned aside and our God made defenseless in our behalf.

“If I have faltered more or less

In my great task of happiness;

If I have moved among my race

And shown no glorious morning face;

If beams from happy human eyes

Have moved me not; if morning skies,

Books and my food, and summer rain

Knocked on my sullen heart in vain;

Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take

And stab my spirit broad awake/

Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,

Choose thou, before that spirit die,

A piercing pain, a killing sin

And to my dead heart run them in.”

            (The Celestial Surgeon — R. L. Stevenson)