A God Who Cannot

The first one comes from Jeremiah. He is praying in a prison courtyard. The Babylonian army is camped outside the walls:

The second comes from a Bible study course on the same Scriptures, written by a man who spent most of his waking hours inside them:

One of those sentences is in his Bible. The other is in the notes underneath it.

Let me be careful here. That second sentence is not a passing remark. Dake built up to it across six full pages of argument. He stated it as a conclusion. And the word that does all the heavy lifting is easy to miss. It is the word naturally.

If Dake had said God chose not to force anyone's will, I would agree with him. Most of the church would. But that is not what the sentence says. It says the limit is natural. A natural limit is built into the way things are. It is not a decision God made. It is a condition God lives inside.

We have been here before. In Chapter 9, omnipresent shrank until it described a God who travels. In Chapter 10, omniscient shrank until it described a God who investigates. Now it is omnipotent. And here Dake does something unusual. He tells us, right up front, what he means by the word.

So we will start where he starts. Page 63 of God's Plan for Man, under a heading he wrote himself: "God is Omnipotent."³ That heading could come from any Bible teacher in any tradition. The paragraph underneath it could not.

Why It Matters

You have a son who has walked away from the Lord. You have been praying for him for eleven years. On the historic understanding of God's power, you are praying to someone who is fully able to reach your son. Whether He does, and when, and through what means, belongs to His wisdom and His timing. But the ceiling on your prayer is God's will. And God's will is good.

On Dake's understanding, the picture is different. Your prayer runs into a wall, and the wall is not God's wisdom. The wall is a fence around God Himself. Your son's free will is a real cap on what God can do. You are not asking an able Father for help. You are working a system with a partner, and the outcome depends on what a third party decides.

That is a real pastoral difference. It changes who you are talking to at two in the morning.

It also changes who gets the blame. This is the part that has cost people I know the most. If God's hands are tied by conditions, then when the healing does not come, the math runs backward. God was willing. God was limited. So the missing piece must be you. I have sat with believers doing that math on themselves in hospital hallways. It is a cruel equation, and it grows directly out of a doctrine.

And there is one more thing it changes. If free wills naturally cap God's power, then every promise in Scripture has to pass through somebody else's choices. The gospel goes to the nations through free people. The dead rise in a world of free people. The new heavens and new earth arrive after a whole history of free choices. If all of that naturally limits what God can do, then not one of those promises is guaranteed. Dake himself announces every one of them with absolute confidence. We will come back to that.

Let me be clear about what this chapter is not doing. It is not attacking free will. It is not attacking the belief that a Christian can walk away from Christ. Dake held that view. Millions of faithful believers hold it. It is not on trial here.⁴ The question in this chapter is narrower than that. Is the limit Dake describes inside God, or inside God's choice? That is the whole argument. And Dake's own pages give more than one answer.

Dake in His Own Words

1. He Defines the Word Before He Uses It

Lesson Four of God's Plan for Man is where Dake lays out his doctrine of God. It starts on page 49 and works through the attributes one at a time.⁵ Early in the lesson he gives a list of what the Bible says God is, and the list is perfectly ordinary. God is "infinite, eternal, immutable, self-existent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, invisible, perfect, impartial, immortal."⁶ Any Sunday school teacher could sign off on that. Then Dake reaches page 63, and he starts explaining what he actually means by the words.

Read that definition on its own. Omnipotence is "unlimited and universal power and authority within a certain sphere, or of a certain kind."

That is a remarkable sentence, and I think most readers glide right past it. Unlimited power inside a sphere is not unlimited power. It is limited power described from the inside. A king who has total authority in one province but not in another is not a total king. He is a governor. The word omni means all. Dake keeps the word and puts a boundary around it.

Watch the pair of verbs, too. There are spheres in which God "does not and cannot operate." Not one verb or the other. Both together. Dake uses that doubled phrasing over and over again. The second half of it, the cannot, is what this chapter is about.

His Study Bible note makes the same point in compressed form. Under "Omnipotent" in the newer edition's attribute summary, Dake writes that God "can do all things consistent with His nature and plan, but He cannot lie or act contrary to Himself and the best good of all," and points the reader to a list of "30 Limitations of God."^8a The separate index entry goes further: "God's infinite power must be sensibly understood as operating within the bounds of His own revelation of Himself."^8b He calls the power "infinite" and then draws a line around it. That combination runs through everything we are about to see.

2. The List of Things God Cannot Do

Right under that definition, still on page 63, Dake gives a list. He introduces it with a colon and runs the whole thing as a single long sentence.

Watch what happens across that list. It starts on ground every Christian shares. God cannot lie. God cannot deny Himself. God cannot be tempted with evil. Those are not holes in God's power. They are the shape of His perfection. The church has said this for two thousand years.¹⁰

But the list keeps going. By the end it has moved from what God's own nature rules out to what other people's decisions rule out. "Save a soul apart from faith." "Bless men contrary to faith in His Word." "Save rebels who persist in rebellion." Those are no longer claims about who God is. They are claims about what somebody else chooses to do.

And the list never marks the line between the two kinds of "cannot." Both sit in the same sentence, connected by semicolons, under one heading. A reader who trusts the page will finish it thinking the two kinds are the same kind. They are not. And that difference is the whole argument of this chapter.

3. "Naturally Limited by the Free Moral Agency of Man"

Now we move to Lesson Nineteen, on grace, and the sentence I opened the chapter with. Dake gets there in stages. On page 340 he writes:

There is the doubled verb again. "Can and will." And the measuring stick for both is the person on the receiving end.

A page later he presses further. I want to give him his full strength here, because the paragraph contains his best defense:

Read that paragraph fairly. Dake is guarding against a real error. He does not want a God who bulldozes people. He does not want to say that the human will is bigger than God. He says as much in the first clause. And "He has promised not to" is a promise, which is a choice. That is exactly the orthodox move.

But the sentence has two engines running at the same time, and Dake never tells us which one is driving. "God cannot do, and He has promised not to do." Then the paragraph ends, page 342 begins, and the doubling disappears:

Now the language of choice is gone. Not "God has chosen to limit." Not "God will not." Just: naturally limited. The adverb tells you where the limit lives. It lives in the way things are. God is inside the limit, not above it.

And look at the first sentence. It "takes both" wills to show the fullness of God's love. The fullness of God's love cannot be shown by God alone. It needs a co-signer.

4. Thirty Things Grace Cannot Do

Right after that conclusion, Dake begins a numbered list under his own heading: "Thirty Things Grace Cannot Do."¹⁴ It runs from page 342 to page 345. And here is the honest report on it, because it is not the report a hostile reader would prefer to hear.

Most of the thirty items are not about God's power at all. They are about whether a saved person can lose his salvation. Item 15 says grace "cannot guarantee that every saved man is going to be eternally saved." Item 26 says grace "cannot guarantee unconditional eternal security to anyone." Item 30 says grace "cannot cause God to be lenient with rebellion and sin."¹⁵

Those are standard Arminian claims. They are the position of the Methodist, the Nazarene, the Free Will Baptist, and most of the Pentecostal world. I do not hold that position myself, and I think a few of Dake's proof texts are strained. But this is a family disagreement inside the faith, and it has been for four hundred years. It is not on trial in this book. I am not going to pretend it is.¹⁶

So why does the list belong in this chapter? Because of the frame sitting above it, and because several items step past the family disagreement. Item 21 says grace "cannot operate in the life of the free moral agent without his consent." Item 3 says grace "cannot do away with the free moral agency of saved men."¹⁷ Read on their own, those are still in-house claims. But read as examples of the sentence that introduces them, they become something else. The whole list is presented as proof of "naturally limited." Thirty cannots, and above them all a heading that says the limit is in the nature of the case.

5. The Laws, and Who Is Under Them

This last exhibit is where the doctrine becomes a machine. Dake teaches that God has laid down fixed laws, and that God sticks to them. The full mechanics of his prayer laws belong to Chapter 18. What matters here is a simpler question: do the laws bind God?

Early in the course, in the first supplement, he tells new students what to expect:

I should note that God is the lawgiver in both places. He "has made plain." He "has laid down." That is Dake at his most defensible, and I will grant it in the next section. But look at the verbs that pile up around the almighty God across these pages. He "cannot" break His laws. He "must limit" His faithfulness. He "has to limit" His fatherhood. He "has been forced to be impartial." He "naturally has had to limit Himself."²⁰ That is a lot of compulsion language for a God who has no one above Him.

6. The Other Voice on the Same Pages

Now for the part that fairness requires. I believe it makes the case stronger, not weaker. Dake's pages do not all say the same thing about this.

On page 64, at the end of the very same section where he defines omnipotence, he pulls back:

Omnipotent by nature. Limited by plan. If Dake had written only that sentence, this chapter would be two pages long and it would end with a caution instead of a verdict. And on page 660, he insists that a person's power of choice "does not make will power more sovereign than God's own power or grace."²²

I want his defenders to see that I have printed both of those sentences. They are real. They are his.

Then there is page 618, which does the whole problem in miniature. Arguing that God's choice is not the reason some people are lost, Dake writes:

Three sentences later, on the same page and arguing the other side of the same point, he says that if anyone is finally lost it is not because "God did not have power to keep them contrary to His plan."

So: God cannot save them all. But God did not lack the power. Same page. I do not think Dake noticed the tension. And that is the honest center of this chapter. Not a man trying to teach a limited God on purpose, but a man reaching for two accounts that do not fit together, and never choosing between them.

Here is the real trouble, though. Dake himself admits that the question is open. In the same section where he defines omnipotence, he writes one of the most revealing sentences in the whole course:

"Whether by nature or by choice is not always stated." That is the exact question, and he leaves it open. Then he goes on writing as though it does not matter. But it is the only thing that matters. By choice, and God is a King who stoops. By nature, and God is a King with a constitution He did not write. Both accounts appear on his pages. And the "naturally limited" sentence of page 342 is not an accident. It is the version he reached when he was summing up.

The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

1. What the Bible Says About God's Power

Start where Jeremiah started, because God Himself answers the prayer thirteen verses later. Jeremiah says it as praise. God says it back as a question:

There is no sphere on that question. It is not "too hard for Me within My own realm." The same question gets put to Sarah when she laughs at God's promise, and in the same open form: "Is anything too hard for the LORD?"²⁵ Both times, the setting is a promise that human beings cannot keep on their own. A dead womb. A city under siege. And God's answer, both times, is that the size of the obstacle does not matter.

Job says it at the end of forty chapters of argument. After all his questions and all of God's answers, he lands here:

That second clause is the one to underline. No purpose of God's can be held back from Him. Not by circumstances. Not by devils. Not by us.

The Psalms put it as settled fact. "But our God is in heaven; He does whatever He pleases."²⁷ Daniel, watching a proud king brought to nothing, says it with the strongest verb the Old Testament uses on this subject:

"No one can restrain His hand." Not a devil. Not a king. Not a free moral agent. Then the New Testament puts the same truth on the lips of Jesus, and He says it at exactly the moment when a free human will has just walked away from Him. The rich young ruler leaves. The disciples ask who then can be saved. And Jesus answers: "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."²⁸ He is not offering a general proverb. He is answering a question about salvation, spoken seconds after a free choice has gone the wrong direction.

Gabriel says it to Mary as a flat declaration: "For with God nothing will be impossible." And Paul pushes past the edge of what we can even think to ask, praising the God "who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think."²⁹

Now set those passages beside "unlimited and universal power and authority within a certain sphere." They are not saying the same thing in different words. One draws a line around God's power. The other says there is no line to draw.

2. What "Almighty" Has Always Meant

The church has never taught that God can do absolutely anything you can cram into a sentence. That is worth saying up front, because Dake sometimes writes as if his critics hold that view. Nobody does.

Here is what the tradition actually says. God can do all that is consistent with His own nature. He cannot lie, because He is truth. He cannot deny Himself, because He is God. He cannot die or sin or stop being God. Those are not gaps in His power. Turn them around and you see what they really are. A God who could lie would be less than God, not more. The impossibility of lying is a perfection, not a weakness.³⁰

Three terms will carry the rest of this section. Omnipotent comes from two Latin words meaning "all" (omnis) and "powerful" (potens). It means able to do all things consistent with who God is. The New Testament word behind "Almighty" is the Greek pantokratōr, "the one who holds all things in His grip." And self-limitation means God choosing not to use power He fully has, the way a king signs a treaty he could refuse. That last term is the hinge of this chapter. A limit you chose and a limit you are stuck with are not the same kind of limit at all.

So the tradition already has a place for "God cannot." But it is a category built entirely out of God's own nature. Every historic confession keeps the limit inside God. It never puts the limit outside Him. The oldest creeds simply say "Almighty" without adding qualifiers. The Protestant catechisms say God is infinite in His power, along with His being, wisdom, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.³¹ Nobody adds a sphere.

Dake's list of "cannots" starts inside that tradition, then walks out of it. Lying and self-denial are limits from inside God. Human unbelief is a limit from outside. Once the two sit in the same sentence, the reader quietly absorbs the idea that God's power is bounded by other people in the same way it is bounded by His own truthfulness. It is not. Those are two entirely different things.

3. Where the Line Actually Falls

Here I want to defend the Arminians against Dake. That may be the strangest sentence in this book.

Both historic camps in this old disagreement confess an almighty God. The Reformed tradition says God's grace is not finally resisted by those He effectually calls. The Arminian tradition says God's grace can be resisted, and that God has sovereignly chosen it that way, because He wants love and not mere compliance.³² The two camps disagree about plenty. But they do not disagree about this. Neither one says God's power is naturally capped by His creatures.

Ask any thoughtful Wesleyan pastor whether God could override a human will. The answer will be yes, He could, and He has chosen not to. That answer keeps the word "almighty" intact. God's restraint is His decision. He is not being held back.

Now put Dake's adverb back in. "Naturally limited." That is a different claim. It is not the Arminian claim. It moves the limit out of God's will and into the structure of reality. And it is not an isolated word. It sits right alongside "He naturally has had to limit Himself," and "He has been forced to be impartial," and "unlimited power within a certain sphere."

The line in this chapter does not run between Calvinists and Arminians. It runs between everyone who says God will not and the pages that say God cannot, where the second phrase means exactly what it says.

4. The System Cuts Its Own Branch

There is an internal problem in Dake's system here, and the sharpest tool for seeing it comes from Dake himself.

The second problem is prophecy, and it is bigger. Dake stakes enormous weight on fulfilled prediction. His confidence about the future is total. Antichrist will come. The trumpet will sound. The dead will rise. There will be a new earth.

Every single one of those runs straight through free human choices. Somebody has to preach the gospel. Somebody has to believe it. Somebody has to build the empire, sign the treaty, break the treaty. If free wills naturally cap what God can do, then God cannot guarantee a single one of those outcomes. All He can do is hope it holds together. But Dake does not write about the future like a man hoping. He writes like a man reading a train schedule. Chapter 10 found the same crack underneath his doctrine of knowledge. The two cracks are one crack. Certainty about the future requires a God who both knows and can. The notes deny Him both, and then spend hundreds of pages assuming He has them anyway.

There is a third contradiction worth naming, and it is the gentlest one. On page 596, writing to a struggling believer about how to pray, Dake says: "When you realize fully that God is capable and that all things are possible with Him, then in a like manner you should settle it that all things are possible with you as you cooperate with God."³⁴ There it is. Unhedged. All things are possible with Him. When Dake is trying to help somebody, the sphere disappears. I find that genuinely moving. I think it shows where his heart was. But his system cannot support what his pastoral instinct wants to say.

5. What a God Who Can Actually Gives You

A leper walks up to Jesus. He has clearly thought this through. He gets the theology exactly right in nine words:

He puts the question where it belongs. Not can You. He has already settled that. Only will You. And Jesus reaches out, touches a man nobody had touched in years, and answers the only question that was actually asked: "I am willing; be cleansed."

That is the prayer real omnipotence makes possible. You bring God the willingness question, not the capacity question. And when the answer is no, you are not left doing math on your own faith. You are standing before a good Father who said no for reasons of His own. That is a completely different place to stand. Paul asked three times and got a no. What came with it was not a diagnosis of his faith. It was a promise: "My grace is sufficient for you."³⁵

Answering the Defenses

Let me put it another way, since this is the objection I hear the most. There are three positions here, not two. Position one: God overrides the will. That is Reformed. Position two: God will not override the will. That is Arminian. Position three: God cannot override the will. That is neither. Dake's pages reach for position two and land, at their most explicit, on position three.

But look at what those verses are actually saying. Titus 1:2 describes God's nature. It says the truthfulness goes so deep that falsehood is simply not available to Him. That limit comes from inside. Page 342 describes something else. It says the limit comes from a creature's response. The first is God being fully Himself. The second is God being held back by somebody else. Calling both of them "God cannot" hides the whole difference under one verb.

And there is a step Dake does not take. God's self-binding is itself an act of power. He chose to make the covenant. He chose to swear the oath. A promise God cannot break is a promise God freely gave. That is why it is good news. Nobody forced it on Him.

Here is why I think it fails. Compare the comfort each account actually gives. In Scripture's picture of unanswered prayer, you have a wise refusal from a good Father, and sometimes a purpose you are not shown. Paul's thorn stayed. God's answer was not "I could not." His answer was "My grace is sufficient." In Dake's picture, things look different. If God was willing but limited, and the limits were the conditions, then the failure has to land somewhere. It lands on you. That is not a defense of God's goodness. It is a transfer of blame to a person who is already hurting. The full picture of how that transfer works, and what the laws of faith do to the people who cannot meet them, belongs to Chapter 18.

Conclusion: The Word and the Thing

Dake defines omnipotence as unlimited power inside a sphere. He teaches that God's grace and love are naturally limited by human free will. He teaches that it takes both wills in full cooperation to display the fullness of God's love. He teaches that God cannot break His own laws. He uses "cannot" and "will not" almost as synonyms and never tells us which one he actually means. He admits as much himself: whether the limit is by nature or by choice "is not always stated."

On other pages he says God is omnipotent by nature, that human choice does not make our wills more sovereign than God's power, and that the lost are not lost because God lacked the power to keep them. Both voices are on his pages. I have printed both.

But I cannot pretend the ambiguity is harmless. A study Bible is not a private journal. It is read at kitchen tables by people who trust the notes to settle their questions. When the notes leave the central question unresolved and then reach for the harder word in the summary sentence, the reader carries the harder word home.

Dake himself, writing his way through the nineteenth chapter of Revelation, copies out the song of the great multitude: "Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth."³⁶ He copied that line without a sphere on it. Heaven does not sing about power of a certain kind. Heaven sings because nothing is too hard for Him, because no one can hold His hand back, because what He planned before the world began is going to be done.

My friend Ray has prayed for the same son for thirty years. He prays like Jeremiah, even though his margins say something different. I think the Holy Spirit is correcting a footnote. Keep praying that way. The God you are praying to is not standing outside a fence, waiting for permission. He is able. The only question was ever whether He is willing. And at a cross outside Jerusalem, He answered that one for good.

Notes

↑ 1. Jeremiah 32:17 (NKJV). Unless otherwise noted, Scripture in this chapter is quoted from the New King James Version. Jeremiah prays this from the court of the prison during Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem (Jer. 32:2), immediately after buying a field he had no earthly reason to expect to use.

↑ 2. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; 1977 printing), Lesson Nineteen, 342. Page numbers throughout are taken from the printed running heads embedded in the resident digitization of the 1977 printing. Lesson Nineteen is titled in the Contents as "Dispensation of Grace — grace in all ages — fallacies about grace — 30 things grace cannot do," beginning at p. 336.

↑ 3. Ibid., Lesson Four, 63. The heading "God is Omnipotent" is Dake's own, following parallel headings on "God is Omniscient" (62–63) and the omnipresence material treated in Chapter 9.

↑ 4. On the standing rule that in-house Protestant disagreements are not treated as departures from the faith, see Chapter 1. Conditional security is held across the Wesleyan, Holiness, Pentecostal, and Free Will Baptist traditions, and the Assemblies of God itself teaches it. This book's concern is the doctrine of God, not the doctrine of perseverance.

↑ 5. God's Plan for Man, Contents: "LESSON 4: The truth about God — hundreds of scriptures make God understandable — what spirit beings are like," beginning at p. 49. The lesson's closing study questions include no. 45: "Define and discuss the omnipotence of God. Name some things He cannot do."

↑ 6. Ibid., Lesson Four, 56. The full sentence continues: "… absolutely holy and just, full of knowledge and wisdom, in whom all things have their source, support and end." The page is fixed between the running heads for pp. 56 and 57 in the resident file. On the pattern of orthodox vocabulary carrying unorthodox content, see Chapter 5 and Appendix D.

↑ 7. Ibid., Lesson Four, 63. The resident digitization is an OCR extraction; obvious scanning artifacts have been silently repaired in this quotation ("W ithin" to "Within," "conse crate" to "consecrate") without any change of wording. The em dash before "unlimited" is Dake's own.

↑ 8a. Dake Annotated Reference Bible, newer typeset edition, "22 Personal Attributes of God," attribute no. 7 ("Omnipotent"), resident scan in Dakes_annotated_reference_Bible__Omnis.pdf and parallel copies in Dake_Bible_Misc_Passages_From_Images_Folder.pdf, Dake_Study_Bible_Invisible_New_Version.pdf, Dake_Annotated_Study_Bible___Trinity_New_Version.pdf, and Dakes_Bible_Planets.pdf. The note reads: "Omnipotent (all power, Rev. 19:6). God can do all things consistent with His nature and plan, but He cannot lie or act contrary to Himself and the best good of all (see 30 Limitations of God, p. 1058)." The cross-reference to "30 Limitations of God" parallels the "Thirty Things Grace Cannot Do" list in God's Plan for Man pp. 342–345.

↑ 8b. Dake Annotated Reference Bible, newer typeset edition, index entry under "Omnipotent," resident scan in Dakes_annotated_reference_Bible__Omnis.pdf. The full entry begins: "Omnipotent (1), all power, Rev. 19:6. God's infinite power must be sensibly understood as operating within the bounds of His own revelation of Himself. According to Scripture God has limited Himself to working within certain limitations in some realms. Perhaps, it is not so much a question of what He could possibly do, but what He morally allows Himself to do." The concluding sentence is the one Dake sentence in this chapter closest to the orthodox formulation; had the index entry been the governing statement, the note would sit more comfortably within the tradition. But the God's Plan for Man material at pp. 63, 341–342, and passim fills out the picture differently, and it is the fuller treatment that controls.

↑ 9. Ibid., Lesson Four, 63. The final item's parenthetical Scripture string has been omitted for length; it reads in full "(Gen. 2:17; Ezek. 3:17-21; 18:4-24; 33:7-16; Mk. 7:19-21; Rom. 1:21-32; 6:16-23; 8:12-13; Gal. 5:19-21; 6:7-8; Col. 3:5-10)." No other text has been omitted from the list.

↑ 10. The classical formulation is that God's power extends to all things that do not involve a contradiction of His own nature, so that the "cannots" of Scripture (Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18; 2 Tim. 2:13; James 1:13) are statements of perfection rather than weakness. The point is not a late scholastic refinement; it is the plain sense of the texts themselves, each of which grounds the impossibility in who God is.

↑ 11. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Nineteen, 340. The sentence concludes a paragraph answering what Dake calls the "school of interpreters" who "magnify the grace of God above everything else in the program of God" (p. 338).

↑ 12. Ibid., Lesson Nineteen, 341.

↑ 13. Ibid., Lesson Nineteen, 341–342. The quotation straddles the page break: the sentence beginning "It takes both the will of God" starts at the foot of p. 341 and continues at the head of p. 342, where the running head "342 GOD'S PLAN FOR MAN" appears in the resident file. The concluding sentence, "Thus God's grace or love is naturally limited by the free moral agency of man," stands on p. 342.

↑ 14. Ibid., Lesson Nineteen, 342. The heading is numbered "6" within the lesson's outline, and the list runs from p. 342 through p. 345.

↑ 15. Ibid., items 15 and 26 at p. 344; item 30 at p. 345. Item 26 reads in full: "Grace cannot guarantee unconditional eternal security to anyone (Heb. 10:26-29; Rom. 6:16-23; 8:1-13; Ezek. 18:4; 33:12-20; Gal. 5:16-26)."

↑ 16. My own position is that the warning passages function as the means God uses to preserve His people rather than as evidence that He fails to. But that is an argument for a different book. The disagreement is genuinely in-house. It has been argued by orthodox Christians on both sides since the seventeenth century. Treating it as heresy would be both unfair to Dake and harmful to this book's credibility on the points that matter.

↑ 17. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Nineteen, 344, item 21: "Grace cannot operate in the life of the free moral agent without his consent (John 3:16-18; 7:17; 8:34; 2 Pet. 3:9; 1 John 1:7-9; Rev. 22:17)"; and 343, item 3: "Grace cannot do away with the free moral agency of saved men and make them eternal slaves against their own will (Col. 1:23; 1 John 1:7; Rom. 6:16-23)."

↑ 18. Ibid., Supplement One (for Lessons One and Two), section I, "God's Promises," 28. The Contents places Supplement One at pp. 28–35; the resident digitization carries a bare page marker for 29 immediately after this passage, placing the sentence on p. 28. Where a running head has not survived the scan, this book degrades the citation to the lesson or section heading rather than assert a page the file does not show.

↑ 19. Ibid., 506. The OCR reads "Fie has laid down" for "He has laid down," a common scanning error in this file; the reading is certain from context and from the parallel construction earlier in the paragraph.

↑ 20. Ibid., Lesson Four, 63–64. The phrases in order: "He must limit it according to His plan"; "yet He has to limit His parenthood"; "yet He has been forced to be impartial to those that have obeyed Him"; "He naturally has had to limit Himself in His dealings with free moral agents."

↑ 21. Ibid., Lesson Four, 64. The sentence continues: "… and therefore, it cannot be known what they will do under all circumstances until they are tested." Its immediate context concerns God's knowledge rather than His power, which is why Chapter 10 treats the passage at length; I quote it here because the clause "omnipotent … by nature" is the strongest thing on any of these pages for Dake's defenders, and it should be in front of the reader.

↑ 22. Ibid., 660. The OCR reads "will hot break" for "will not break" later in the same sentence; corrected silently. The same page carries "God will not and cannot save man until he chooses to be saved and calls upon God," which is the doubled formula once more.

↑ 23. Ibid., 618. This note covers both statements quoted from the page. The first stands in Dake's answer to the question "What is the reason some are saved and others are lost?" The second reads in full: "If God should seek to save and keep rebels contrary to their wills He would break His own laws and fail to carry out His own plan. God could not be guilty of such unlawful dealings, so if men are finally lost it is not because God has failed, His plan has failed, the sacrifice of Christ has failed, or that God did not have power to keep them contrary to His plan." Note that even in the second sentence the reason given is that God "would break His own laws," which returns the argument to the question this chapter is asking.

↑ 24. Ibid., Lesson Four, 63. I have found no place in God's Plan for Man where Dake returns to resolve the tension. On p. 662 he states the conclusion without resolving it: "God is limited in blessing man, should he rebel against Him. If He were not, then He would be obligated to force all men to be saved alike."

↑ 25. Genesis 18:14 (NKJV). The Hebrew verb translated "too hard" (pala') carries the sense of something extraordinary or beyond reach; the same root stands behind Jeremiah 32:17 and 32:27, which is why the three passages read as a single conversation.

↑ 26. Job 42:2 (NKJV). The ESV renders the second clause "and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted," which is if anything sharper; I have kept the NKJV here because it is the version Dake's readers are most likely to have open beside them.

↑ 27. Psalm 115:3 (NKJV). Compare Psalm 135:6: "Whatever the LORD pleases He does, In heaven and in earth, In the seas and in all deep places." In both psalms the point is made by contrast with idols, which have mouths and hands and can do nothing.

↑ 28. Matthew 19:26 (NKJV); compare Mark 10:27 and Luke 18:27. The context matters here: the saying answers the disciples' question "Who then can be saved?" immediately after a man has freely refused Jesus and walked away.

↑ 29. Luke 1:37 and Ephesians 3:20 (NKJV). Some manuscripts and translations render Luke 1:37 as "no word from God will ever fail," which if anything strengthens the point.

↑ 30. Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18; 2 Timothy 2:13. The standard way of putting it is that these impossibilities are not restrictions on divine power but expressions of divine perfection. The ability to lie would be an imperfection in any being and an impossibility in God.

↑ 31. Apostles' Creed, art. 1 ("God the Father Almighty"); Nicene Creed, art. 1 ("one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth"), traditional English texts; Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 4: God is "infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth." The Greek behind "Almighty" in the Nicene text is pantokratōr, the same word sung in Revelation 19:6. I cite a Reformed catechism deliberately, because the point it makes about power is shared by the Arminian confessions and by the Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths, which names God as "almighty" without qualification. The full treatment of the creeds and Dake belongs to Chapter 7 and Appendix E.

↑ 32. Both the Remonstrant articles of 1610 and the Wesleyan tradition that followed locate resistibility in God's gracious ordering of salvation rather than in any deficiency of divine power. I state their position at the level of what these traditions confess rather than quoting them, since neither set of documents is in the sources this chapter was drafted from. This book does not manufacture quotations it cannot verify.

↑ 33. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-Six, 473, under "(3) THE WORKING OF MIRACLES." The distinction Dake draws there is between natural law and miracle. He does not raise the question of moral or spiritual law in the same paragraph, and I do not claim he does. My point is only that the principle he states is general, and that he never tests his own doctrine of grace against it.

↑ 34. Ibid., 596, under the heading "All Things Are Possible to Him That Believeth." The OCR of this page reads "vou are weak" for "you are weak" a few lines above; corrected silently. Across the course Dake far more often quotes Mark 9:23 ("all things are possible to him that believeth") than Matthew 19:26, shifting the emphasis from God's ability to the believer's. The mechanics of that shift belong to Chapter 18.

↑ 35. 2 Corinthians 12:9 (NKJV); the account of the three requests is at 12:8.

↑ 36. God's Plan for Man, Lesson Forty-Nine (exposition of Revelation 19), quoting Revelation 19:6 in the King James text Dake used throughout. No printed page marker survives at this point in the resident digitization, so the citation is degraded to the lesson.