Verse of the Day – June 6, 2026
But he said, ‘The things which are impossible with men are possible with God. — Luke 18:27
What’s Happening Here
Jesus has just watched a wealthy ruler walk away sad.
The man had come running, knelt before Jesus, asked what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. He’d kept the commandments since childhood. Jesus looked at him and loved him. Luke doesn’t hide that detail. Then He told him to sell everything, give it to the poor, and follow.
The man couldn’t do it. He left grieving, because he had great wealth.
The disciples were stunned. If this man – devout, earnest, loved by Jesus – couldn’t make it in, then who could? They said as much: “Who then can be saved?”
Luke 18:27 is Jesus’ answer to that question.
He doesn’t soften the impossibility. He doesn’t say the disciples misunderstood the stakes. He says: you’re right. Men cannot do this. And then He says the sentence that changes everything.
The Word
Adynata – impossible. From a- (not) + dynatos (able, powerful). The root of dynamis, the same word Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 12:9 when God tells him that His power is made perfect in weakness. Adynata is not “difficult.” It is not “unlikely.” It is beyond the reach of human capacity entirely.
Jesus uses it without blinking. He isn’t managing expectations here. He is naming a real wall.
Then: para tō Theō dynata estin. With God, it is possible. Para – alongside, in the presence of, within the sphere of. Not “God can do anything vaguely,” but: in the nearness of God, the impossible becomes possible.
The word for “possible” is the same root as the word for “impossible.” The only variable is the presence of God.
The World Then
The wealthy man who walked away was not exceptional in his attachment to wealth. In the first-century Jewish world, wealth was widely understood as evidence of divine favor. Prosperity meant God was pleased with you. Poverty meant the opposite. This was not fringe theology. It was embedded in the popular reading of Deuteronomy’s blessings and curses, lived out in how synagogue communities treated the rich and the poor.
So, when Jesus said a rich man entering the kingdom was like a camel going through the eye of a needle, He wasn’t just describing one man’s personal obstacle. He was dismantling an entire framework of who God favors and how.
The disciples understood that immediately. That’s why they were astonished. If wealth doesn’t indicate God’s approval, the whole system is upside down. If even the devout and prosperous can’t enter on their own merits, no one can. Which is exactly the point.
An Echo in History
John Newton knew what it was to be beyond the reach of human remedy.
By his own account, he was as degraded a man as could be found in the slave trade – man who had been enslaved himself for a time, had participated in enslaving others, who had lived, by his own words, in moral ruin. He was not a man with a small problem. He was a man who knew the wall was real.
He didn’t gradually improve himself into faith. The change, when it came, came from outside him entirely. He described it that way for the rest of his life.
He wrote “Amazing Grace” from the other side of an adynaton. “I once was lost” is not poetry. It was a statement of fact about what men could not do, and what God had done anyway.
The hymn endures because it doesn’t pretend the impossibility wasn’t real. It says: it was. And here I am.
The Living Edge
There is a particular exhaustion that comes from trying to do, by will and effort and management, what is actually beyond human capacity to do.
The rich young ruler wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t spiritually indifferent. He had been trying his whole life. He kept the commandments. He came to Jesus earnestly. And he still couldn’t let go of the thing that had its hand around him.
Most of us know something about that. The thing that has us. The pattern we cannot break no matter how many times we’ve meant to. The relationship. The fear. The grief that doesn’t move. The version of ourselves we cannot seem to become on our own.
Jesus doesn’t tell the disciples they’ve misread the situation. He says: you haven’t. This is impossible for men.
And then He says the rest.
There is a place past the end of your own effort. Past the point where trying harder is a meaningful sentence. Jesus is not surprised by that place. He named it plainly, and then He told you what lives on the other side of it.
Not your improved performance. The nearness of God.
A Closing Thought
The wall is real. He said so.
So is what’s on the other side of it.
You don’t climb it. You stop standing in front of it alone.
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