WITH MAN IT IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH GOD ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE (Santamaria)

That sentence is like a door that only opens when you stop trying to kick it in.

Most of us live as if reality is a machine and we are the mechanics. If we can just find the right lever—discipline, strategy, insight, grit, charm—we can make the outcome happen. We don’t always say it out loud, but our prayers often reveal it: we treat God as the higher power that assists our higher effort. Heaven becomes an endorsement of human capability.

Then Jesus speaks this sentence, and it snaps the spine of that religion.

He doesn’t say, “With man it is difficult.” He says it's impossible. Not “unlikely.” Not “rare.” Not “hard if you’re not trying.” Impossible.

That word is not meant to humiliate you. It is meant to liberate you. Because there are forms of despair that come not from weakness but from the exhausting illusion that you’re supposed to be sufficient.

In the context of the Gospels, Jesus says this after the rich young ruler walks away sorrowful, and the disciples stagger under the implications. “Who then can be saved?” they ask. And the question is not theoretical. They’re staring into the abyss of human inability. If the respectable, moral, religiously serious man can’t simply “do the right things” and enter life, then what hope is there for anyone?

Jesus answers with this verse.

He is not offering a motivational quote. He is announcing the architecture of grace.

The honesty of “impossible.”

There is a kind of mercy in God telling the truth about us.

We are not merely flawed; we are powerless at the level that matters most. We can modify behavior, yes. We can adopt routines. We can clean up our vocabulary. We can become more socially acceptable. We can even become more religious. But the deepest problem in us is not that we need polishing—it’s that we need life.

And life is not something a corpse can manufacture.

That’s why Jesus says “impossible.” Salvation—real salvation—is not self-improvement. It is resurrection. And resurrection is not a human skill.

This verse is painful because it unmasks the ego’s favorite survival plan: control. We want a salvation we can trace back to ourselves. We want to be able to say, “I did the steps.” We want receipts.

But Christ’s sentence refuses to give us receipts. It gives us dependence.

The strange comfort of “with God.”

The second half of the verse is not the opposite of the first; it’s the answer to it.

“With God all things are possible.”

That does not mean God will do any random thing we happen to imagine. It means God is not limited by the same walls that imprison us—especially not the wall of the human heart.

When Jesus says “with God,” He is not talking about God as a tool you add to your toolbox. He is speaking of God as the living Actor, the One who does what man cannot do: create, regenerate, raise, save, and keep.

That’s why the sentence is so emotionally potent: it gives you permission to stop pretending.

Stop pretending you can fix yourself at the root.

Stop pretending you can convert your child’s heart by force of personality.

Stop pretending you can out-think your own darkness.

Stop pretending you can heal your guilt by punishing yourself.

Stop pretending you can earn peace by being “good enough.”

“With man it is impossible” is the end of self-salvation. And the end of self-salvation is not the end of hope; it’s the beginning of it.

The tyranny of possibility

Here’s a weird paradox: we often suffer most under the tyranny of possibility.

If something is possible for me, then my failure becomes a moral indictment: “I could have, I should have, why didn’t I?” Possibility creates a courtroom in the mind. It produces either pride or self-hatred, depending on the day.

But Jesus puts salvation—and all the things that belong to God’s kingdom—outside the jurisdiction of human “possibility.” He moves the entire case into God’s court.

That doesn’t make you passive. It makes you honest. It creates the posture Scripture constantly commends: repentance, dependence, prayer, waiting, obedience that doesn’t secretly believe it is buying God’s favor.

It means you can obey without thinking obedience is the engine of regeneration. You can strive without thinking striving is the cause of life. You can work out what God has worked in.

What is “impossible” for man?

In the moment Jesus says it, the “impossible” is salvation: who can enter the kingdom, who can be made fit for God, who can be freed from the chains of a world they trust.

But the principle spills wider.

Man can't create a new heart.

Impossible to erase guilt by good deeds.

Impossible to resurrect love for God where there is only indifference.

Impossible to produce holiness as a natural fruit of the flesh.

Impossible to heal death with education.

Impossible to silence the law’s accusation with self-talk.

We can do many impressive things—build civilizations, split atoms, map genomes, reach the moon, write symphonies. Yet we cannot do the most basic spiritual miracle: raise a dead sinner to life in Christ.

That’s why religious systems that are basically “do better” always collapse into either hypocrisy or despair. Hypocrisy, if you can fake it. Despair, if you can’t.

Jesus gives a third option: grace.

“All things are possible” — not a slogan, a Savior

People love to take “with God all things are possible” and glue it onto whatever dream they’re trying to finance. It becomes a banner for human ambition with God as the mascot.

But in Jesus’ mouth, it means something far more bracing: God can save the person you have given up on. God can undo the tyranny of idols. God can unseat the love of money. God can take the respectable sinner and the wrecked sinner and do the same miracle in both: new birth.

It’s not that God exists to make your plans succeed. It’s that God exists to make dead men live.

That’s why this verse is not primarily about optimism. It’s about omnipotence aimed at mercy.

The emotional core: relief for the exhausted

A lot of people hear “impossible” and think it’s cruel. But it can be the kindest word you ever hear—if you’ve been strangled by striving.

Some souls are tired because they have tried for years to become “good,” and all they have produced is a better mask and a deeper shame. They have tried to stop sin by self-hatred, tried to manufacture faith by anxiety, and tried to earn God’s smile by religious performance. They have lived as though the Christian life is a treadmill that powers heaven.

Jesus steps onto the treadmill, unplugs it, looks you in the face, and says: “With man it is impossible.”

That is not cruelty. That is rescue.

Because the moment you accept impossibility, you finally stop bargaining with God and start trusting Him.

The God who specializes in the impossible

Think of the Bible’s gallery of impossibilities.

A barren womb that becomes a nation.

A sea that becomes a road.

A shepherd boy who defeats a giant.

An exile people returned, restored, rebuilt.

A prophet swallowed and delivered.

A crucified man who walks out of a sealed tomb.

The pattern is not that humans occasionally become amazing. The pattern is that God repeatedly waits until the human situation is beyond repair, so that the rescue cannot be mistaken for human achievement.

God loves to do it this way, not because He enjoys our helplessness, but because He loves truth. He loves to reveal Himself as God, and to reveal us as creatures—not independent, not self-sustaining, not self-redeeming.

And then He loves to be kind.

The verse as a mirror

This verse asks you, quietly but firmly: where are you still pretending?

Where are you treating prayer like a supplement to your competence?

Where are you relying on technique instead of God?

Where are you despairing because you have reached the end of yourself, when the end of yourself is precisely where God begins to look like God?

There is a kind of holy reversal here. What we call “hitting bottom” might be, in God’s economy, being placed on the rock.

Because the gospel does not begin with “you can.” It begins with “Christ can.”

The final comfort: impossibility does not cancel responsibility

Some people hear “with man it is impossible” and try to turn it into an excuse: “Then nothing matters, I’ll do nothing.”

But Scripture never uses inability as a permission slip for apathy. It uses it to kill pride and create dependence.

The right response to impossibility is not laziness. It is humility. It is prayer. It is repentance. It is waiting. It is obedience without bargaining. It is the cry, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

It is coming to Jesus like a poor man, not negotiating like a rich man.

Because that’s the twist: the rich young ruler couldn’t enter because he couldn’t let go. Not mainly of his money, but of his self-sufficiency. He couldn’t receive. He could only achieve.

And salvation is received.

So what does the verse mean for you tonight?

It means the hard thing you cannot fix may be the very place where God intends to show Himself faithful.

It means the person you cannot change is not outside God’s reach.

It means your guilt is not too heavy for Christ’s blood.

It means your deadness is not too dead for the Spirit.

It means your weakness is not an obstacle to grace; it is the stage on which grace performs.

“With man, it is impossible.”

So stop trying to be your own savior.

“But with God all things are possible.”

So look away from your hands—empty, trembling, unfit—and look to His. Those hands were pierced. They are not weak hands. They are saving hands.

The gospel is not that you can do it.

The gospel is that God can. And—astonishingly—He delights to do it for people who finally admit they can’t.