The sermon series at my church is about questions that God asks in the Bible. You wouldn’t think God would ask any questions, if he already knows everything. Nevertheless, God often asks questions.
Today, the sermon was about the question that God asked in Genesis 18:14 after God said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will be have a son.” After God heard Sarah laugh, he responded, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” (ESV)
With my nerdy interest in reading the Bible in its original languages and context, I opened up my Accordance app and looked at the passage. I was curious about the phrase “too hard.” What is that in Hebrew?
The common word for difficult is kasheh (ka-SHEH). I was guessing it would say, “Is anything too kasheh for the Lord?
Instead the word in Hebrew was היפלא, ha’yipaleh, which puzzled me, because it was unfamiliar. The first syllable of the word, “ha,” is the interrogative particle, which is how questions usually start. But what is that verb?
I pulled up the translation window. Very surprising!
Believe it or not, the verb here, פלא, means “to be wonderful, amazing or marvelous” or maybe “impossible.” Obviously, it was quite impossible, even laughable, for Sarah to bear a son at the age of 90!
In Other Contexts
Then I searched for the verb פלא in other Bible passages. This is how translators figure out the shades of meaning of a verb, by seeing all the contexts where it is used. You can find other places where “too hard” makes sense, like:
Deut. 30:11 “For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off.
But in many places it means much more than that, like,
Ex. 34:10 And he said, “Behold, I am making a covenant. Before all your people I will do marvels, such as have not been created in all the earth or in any nation. And all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the LORD, for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you.
Is. 29:14 therefore, behold, I will again
do wonderful things with this people,
with wonder upon wonder;
and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish,
and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.”
The adjective form of this word is found in Isaiah 9:6 where it says,
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor (פלא טועץ), Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Is anything too marvelous for the Lord? Wow.
This is just one of the many ways that the Bible is much better than you think. That’s why I sit and study the Hebrew text, because the original words sometimes just don’t have an English equivalent that fully captures their meaning.
For those who have energy, it is worth it to keep digging into the biblical text and studying Hebrew, because Scripture will surprise you in beautiful ways.
Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?
A Powerful Sermon Too
I should say that the sermon today was powerful. It was given by Lisa Urivez-Karp, the pastor of outreach at my church. (Watch online here.) She works with unreached people in our city to meet physical needs and share the gospel. She asked various people who had seen God do amazing things in their lives to hold up a paper that said what the problem was on one side, and then what God had done on the other. Like
“Aggressive Cancer”… “Healed by God’s Grace”
“Gambling Problem”… “Receiving God’s Unconditional Love”
“Reveled in Darkness”… “Shown God’s Light”
By the time they were done, the stage was filled with people who had discovered that nothing was too hard for the Lord. He had done wonderful, marvelous, impossible things in their lives.
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