With God All Things Are Possible

It helps me to remember where we are standing in the chapter. By Matthew 19:1 Jesus has left Galilee and come into the region of Judea, on the far side of the Jordan, so he is already moving in the direction of Jerusalem. The conversation about wealth and salvation happens with that destination ahead of him, which gives the whole exchange a weight it would not have if he were settled and at ease.

The other thing I keep noticing is that verse 26 is an answer, not a slogan. It only makes sense because something has just collapsed. A man with money and morality and real eagerness has turned and gone, and the disciples are left asking who on earth could be saved if even he could not manage it. So Jesus is not handing them a motivational line. He is putting their whole assumption back together with God at the centre of it instead of human achievement. I find it steadying that the most quoted half of this verse was first spoken to people whose confidence had just been knocked clean out of them.

The sentence turns on a single contrast, and in the Greek the two key words share a root. Behind “impossible” sits a word built on the idea of being without power, no strength for the task. Behind “possible” sits the matching word for having the power. Same family, opposite outcome, and which way it falls depends entirely on the subject of the sentence.

That small thing matters to me. Jesus is not saying salvation is merely hard for us and easy for God, a difference of degree. He is saying we have no power for it at all, while God has all the power it needs. “With men this is impossible” is therefore not a gloomy view of people. It is honest accounting. Take the rich young man and strip back his wealth, his good record and his keenness, and he still cannot save himself, because saving was never a thing human strength could reach. Then the sentence pivots, and everything rests on whose power we are leaning on. The grammar is carrying the gospel.

When Jesus says all things are possible with God, he is not coining a new idea. He is joining a chorus that ran through the Old Testament. The Lord asked Sarah whether anything was too hard for him (Genesis 18:14). Jeremiah, with Jerusalem under siege, prayed to the God for whom nothing is too hard (Jeremiah 32:17). And Gabriel told Mary something close to the same thing about the child she would carry (Luke 1:37).

What strikes me is what God’s power keeps being attached to in those moments. Not success or comfort, but life arriving where there was none: a child to an old and barren couple, a future promised to a city facing ruin, a saviour given to a young woman. So when Jesus borrows the phrase and aims it straight at salvation, he is being entirely consistent. The impossibility he overturns is our own inability to rescue ourselves, the very point Paul later makes about being saved by grace and not by what we manage (Ephesians 2:8 to 9). The cross is where this verse pays out in full.

The part of this that searches me is not only the people I have written off, though there are a few of those. It is that the man who fails here is the respectable one. He had everything that should have made him a safe bet, the money and the manners and the obvious sincerity, and he still walked away sad. If salvation were a reward for being decent and keeping the rules, he was first in the queue. He was not.

So I cannot read this verse as if I am only ever the rescuer praying for harder cases than myself. When I start to feel secure because I turn up to church and behave well enough, the rich young man is there in the doorway, a quiet warning. My respectability cannot do for me what only God can do. That is humbling, and oddly it is also a relief. The same power that I lean on for myself is the power I can ask God to exercise for anyone, since none of us was ever going to manage this on our own strength.

Before verse 26 comes one of the strangest pictures Jesus ever drew: a camel trying to pass through the eye of a sewing needle. The largest animal anyone in that crowd could imagine, set against the smallest gap they handled every day. It is meant to sound ridiculous, and it does. People have tried over the centuries to soften it, picturing a low gate a camel might just kneel through, or reading the word for camel as a similar word for rope. But the disciples plainly did not hear it softened. Their reaction gives the game away. They do not ask how a rich man might squeeze in by an inch; they ask who on earth can be saved at all. They heard “impossible” and meant it. Jesus let the picture stand because he wanted it to land as impossible. Only then does verse 26 do its real work, because a door no one can open is exactly the kind God delights to open.

Because the line is so quotable, it is easy to lift it clean out and treat it as a promise that God will do whatever I have set my heart on: land the job, heal the illness, turn the situation my way. But notice what “all things” is actually pointing at. Jesus is not answering a question about our ambitions. He is answering “who then can be saved?” The impossible thing on the table is salvation, the rescue of a person who cannot rescue himself. That is where God’s power is aimed in this sentence. Reading it as a guarantee for my plans does not make the verse bigger; it shrinks a promise about eternal life down to the size of my preferences. Held rightly it is far more comforting. It does not assure me that everything I want will happen. It assures me that the one thing I could never manage, being put right with God, is something he can and will do.

There is a misuse of this verse I find harder to spot than the motivational one, and it does more damage. It is telling someone that God will make a way for them to keep the thing Jesus had just asked the rich man to put down. I have sat with people wrestling over a relationship they already know is wrong for them, a habit they are still defending, a business that would not survive an honest tax return, and I have heard this verse offered as reassurance that God can hand them the kingdom and let them keep their grip on it too.

Look at who is in the room when Jesus says it. The man has already gone. The sentence is not spoken to talk him into a compromise, and it is not spoken over him at all: it comes after he has refused the one thing and walked. So “all things are possible” cannot mean God will arrange for a person to hold onto what is holding them. It means God can loosen a grip that no argument of mine will ever loosen, including my own. That is a better promise than the one people want from it, and a good deal more uncomfortable. If you are handing this verse to someone pastorally, hand it over to unsettle the grip, not to bless it.

If I were building a talk from this, I would not open at verse 26 and work outwards, which is what a quote calendar does to it. I would walk the room through the collapse first: the man’s question, his good record, Jesus’ single demand, the sorrowful exit (Matthew 19:16 to 22). Then the disciples’ shock, because that shock is the hinge everything after it hangs on. Only once “who then can be saved?” is genuinely hanging in the air does the answer carry any weight. Said too early it sounds like a slogan. Said there, it sounds like rescue.

I would not stop at the answer either, because Matthew does not. Peter speaks straight afterwards, pointing out that they have left everything and asking what they will get for it (Matthew 19:27). Put that in front of a congregation, not to be hard on Peter, but because it shows how fast a disciple who has only just heard that all things are possible with God reaches for a ledger anyway. Let it be a live illustration rather than an awkward footnote. If your listeners do the same thing on the walk home, that is not a failed sermon. It is what happened the first time round.

I would use this verse without hesitation at a baptism, especially when the story behind the water is an unlikely one, someone the room had quietly stopped praying for. I would use it in a members’ meeting when a church is deciding whether to keep pursuing a family or an estate that has ignored every visit for years. That is the precise ground it was given for: a person who looks unreachable.

I would not put it in the same breath as a fundraising target. Tie it to a number, and a shortfall reads as God failing when the honest reading is that the budget was ambitious. And I would be careful at a bedside. Said over a diagnosis it can sound like a guarantee of recovery, and if the recovery does not come, the family are left carrying their grief alongside a suspicion that their faith fell short. The rescue in view here is the one only God can perform, a soul being saved, not a body doing what bodies eventually do. Kept there, the verse holds its full weight. Stretched over a hospital chart, it can wound the very people it was meant to steady.

I keep thinking about what money actually bought this man, because it was not simply comfort. It bought him standing. Land he could point at and call his family’s. Alms he could give that everyone watching counted as righteousness itself, and Matthew has already shown us that machinery, because when Jesus warns about doing your righteousness in front of people to be seen, the very first example he reaches for is giving to the needy (Matthew 6:1 to 2). A rich man in that room was not merely well off. He was visibly, publicly good, and he had paid for the evidence.

Here is the part I missed for years, though. Jesus never tells him his money is worthless. He tells him where to move it. Sell what you have, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven (Matthew 19:21). That is the same instruction Matthew put in the Sermon on the Mount about where to store treasure and why (Matthew 6:19 to 21), handed now to one specific man with the fields to prove it. It was not a demand that he take up poverty for its own sake. It was an offer to transfer the account into the only bank that outlasts the account holder. And he would not, and I understand him better than I would like to, because the account he could count was the account he could see. So verse 26 falls on people who have just watched a man refuse to be rich in the one currency that survives him. It tells them, kindly, that the transfer was never something he could have arranged for himself in the first place.

Matthew hands us a stage direction before he hands us the sentence: “Looking at them, Jesus said.” That is not decoration. The rich man has gone, off down the road and out of the book for good, and there must have been a beat where Jesus and the disciples stood together in the hole he left. Jesus does not fill it by staring after him. He does not fill it with doctrine either. He turns. He looks at them. Then he speaks.

Mark keeps the look too, in his version of this same answer (Mark 10:27), and Mark adds something earlier that Matthew leaves out: before the man ever refused, Jesus looked at him and loved him (Mark 10:21). Luke tells the same exchange and does not mention any looking at all (Luke 18:27), which is honestly part of why I notice it in the other two. So in Matthew and Mark the whole encounter is bracketed by looking. One look full of love, given to a man who was about to walk away sad. One given to frightened friends who were about to hear something they would not enjoy much either.

I find that steadying in a way I cannot entirely defend. It changes nothing about the content of verse 26 and everything about how I hear it. This was not called over a shoulder while he watched the dust settle where the man had gone. He had turned his back on the exit and his face towards the people still standing there, and whatever hard true thing he had to say next, he said it to eyes he was meeting.

I want to be straight about the side of this verse nobody puts on a mug. It gets handed, gently and with real love, to people waiting on something that has not come. The father whose grown son has not turned back in fifteen years. The woman who has prayed for her husband so long that the praying has become the shape of her day, and he still will not come near a church door. I have sat in those kitchens. Saying “the theology is sound” has never once been the comfort I hoped it would be, and I have watched it land as a small slap more than once.

What took me years to make peace with is this. Matthew simply lets the rich young man walk. No epilogue, no later verse where he comes back with the fields sold and his face wet. He goes away sorrowful and Matthew never mentions him again, so the one man here declared unsavable by any human reckoning is left, permanently, as an open question. I used to read past that gap fast, half hoping I had missed a line. I have come to think it is the most honest thing in the passage: the sentence about all things being possible with God is spoken over a man whose ending we are never allowed to see.

That is not the tidy version, and it is the only version I trust, because it does not need my circumstances to prove it true. Even Job, who says something close to this, that no purpose of God’s can be restrained (Job 42:2), says it after the losses and not before, never as a preview that might have made them lighter to carry. So if you are in the waiting, I am not going to tell you the door opens. I will tell you the sentence never rested on whether you can see it open from where you stand today.

If I am teaching this with children in the room, I will not reach for a clever trick that makes the impossible feel manageable. I would bring an old jam jar with the lid gone tight, let every child in the room have a turn at it, and let it stay shut. That is what “impossible” means in the disciples’ question. Not a hard sum. Not a long climb. A thing that will not move for trying harder, and will not move for trying harder in front of an audience either. I would let the jar win, because the moment I quietly imply there is a knack for the clever ones, I have taught the opposite of the verse.

Then the second half, smaller and truer than the version I keep hearing. Not that any wish gets granted if you are good enough and patient enough, which teaches something cruel the first time a real prayer goes unanswered on time. What I would say is that some things are too big for any of us, however hard we try and however good we have been, and that is exactly the size of thing God is not troubled by. Children can carry a true hard thing far better than a false easy one, provided you stay in the room while they carry it.

And I would show them where they already are in this chapter. A few verses before the rich man turns up, people are bringing little children to Jesus, the disciples are shooing them away as a nuisance, and Jesus tells them to stop it, because the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to ones like these (Matthew 19:13 to 15). Read on a few lines and a wealthy adult with a spotless record cannot get in at all. Matthew set those two side by side and I do not think he did it by accident. The child with nothing to bring is waved through; the man with everything to bring cannot buy the door open. So the children in your room are not an interruption of this passage. They are in it, a paragraph earlier, and they are the ones Jesus held up as the example.

Matthew does not give this verse the last word on its own subject, and the chapter number will fool you into thinking he does. Here is the detail that settled it for me. Look at Matthew 19:30, about many who are first being last and the last first. Then look at Matthew 20:16, where Jesus says almost exactly the same line back to you. Sitting between those two nearly identical sentences is the parable of the labourers hired for a vineyard at different hours and all paid the same at sundown (Matthew 20:1 to 16). Matthew has bracketed the parable with the same saying at both ends, which is how he tells you it belongs to what came before it. Somebody centuries later drew a chapter line straight through the middle of that bracket, because print has to break somewhere. The conversation does not break there. It is the same argument, continued as a story.

The men taken on at five in the afternoon get a full day’s wage, and the ones who have been at it since dawn are furious, and I have never once read that parable without siding with the dawn crew for at least a moment. Which is the rich young man’s problem again in different clothes. He could not receive a kingdom he had not paid for with a well-kept life; the all-day workers cannot stomach a wage handed to people who did a fraction of their hours. Jesus says the same thing underneath to both: what God gives is his to give, and it was never running on a scale any of us could audit.

So verse 26 tells you salvation is God’s to give because we could never buy it, and that arrives as relief. The parable shows him giving it anyway, to people who by any fair reckoning had not earned their share, and that arrives as an offence. Both are true in the same breath. I notice I love this verse most when I am the eleventh-hour man, and least when I have been standing in the heat since dawn.

• Where am I leaning on my own decency, effort or churchgoing to feel safe before God, the way the rich young man leaned on his record?
• Is there someone I have quietly decided is past reaching, and what would change in my praying if I really believed God can do the impossible with them?
• When a situation looks shut for good, do I treat “with God all things are possible” as solid ground, or only as a wish for the outcomes I happen to want?
• What am I most afraid is impossible just now, and could I bring it to God plainly today instead of carrying it on my own?

If you would like to keep going, you could read more of this Gospel at /bible/matthew/ or follow some related verses on faith and hope.