El-Shaddai, or the God Who Is Enough

I am the Almighty God. Walk before Me and be thou perfect. Gen. xvii. 1.

There are epochs in every great life, and perhaps this day marks an epoch in many of our lives. The text marks such an epoch in Abraham’s life. Several similar crisis hours had already come in the history of the patriarch. The first was when he left his native land at God’s bidding. The second was when he entered Canaan and found it a famine-stricken land of foes. The third was when he separated from Lot and God appeared to him and gave him the promise of all that he had left and much more besides. The fourth was when God gave him the promise of a son, perhaps fifteen or twenty years before the present epoch. That promise was accompanied with a very wonderful revelation of God and a covenant covering all the future and foreshadowing the blessing of coming ages.

But Abraham had not been altogether true to the high calling which God had given him. He had not doubted God’s promise and yet he had staggered under its weight enough to unite with Sarah his wife some fourteen years before the present incident in helping God to fulfill His promise by taking into his family Hagar, their servant, and striving through her to bring about the fulfillment of the promise of a son in the person of Ishmael. In all this God had seen the wavering of a double mind, and now when He appears to Abraham in his hundredth year He very obviously alludes to Abraham’s doubtful attitude by the startling message which is as much a reproof as it is a promise, “I am El-Shadai. Walk before Me and be thou perfect,”

He had not been quite upright in his faith because he had not quite believed in the all-sufficiency of his God, and therefore it was necessary that God should come to him in a new revelation of His power and require from

Abraham a new expression of his faith. It may be that this is just where some of us are standing today. We have been trusting God in part and have been trying to do the other part ourselves, and God is speaking to us by His new and almighty name and saying to us “I am El-Shadai. Walk before Me and be thou perfect.”

I. A NEW BEVELATION OE GOD.

Every advance step in our spiritual life must spring from a new view of God. It was the vision of God that sent Abraham forth on his new career of faith, and it was a new revelation of God that led him to further advances in the successive steps of his life of faith. It was the revelation of God to Jacob, first at Bethel and next at Peniel, that led to the great crisis of his life. It was rt revelation of God that sent Moses forth to deliver Israel. It was a similar revelation that made Joshua the conqueror of Canaan. The vision of God brought healing and new life to Job and called Isaiah to his great prophetic mission; and it is such a vision of God that alone can meet the needs of our hearts and inspire our souls to our heavenly calling. It is

God we need to see and it is God in this mighty character as El-Shadai, the All-sufficient One.

THE GOD OP THE SUPERNATURAL.

This name stands for the Almightiness of God. We might translate it to mean the God of the supernatural. Men are trying to get the supernatural out of the Bible and explain it all on rationalistic principles. The devil is engaged on a parallel line to get the supernatural out of Christian life and to bring religion down to a mere matter of ethics, morals and humanitarian improvement. The very essence of Christianity is that it is the revelation, worship and fellowship of a supernatural Being and it is all Divine from the first to the last century. God’s great object is to make Himself known to us and then to work out His almightiness in us. Every situation into which He brings us is just a frame in which to set His promises and a mould in which to cast some new manifestation of His all-sufficiency The very difficulties that surround our lives today are but opportunities for God to show Himself to us as El-Shadai.

WHAT THIS MEANS.

This does not merely mean that He is almighty in the abstract and that He has the attribute of Omnipotence. All will concede this in a general way, for if God be God at all He must be omnipotent. But many of ns hedge Him around with such limitations, laws and modes of operation as to practically tie His hands and make it impracticable for Him to do any real supernatural thing in our lives. To really believe in the all-sufficiency of God means that He is actually at liberty to do for us all that we need a God for, and that we have a right to take Him for everything for which we are unequal and insufficient. It means that He has promised all things necessary for life and godliness, that He has provided all things and that we have a right to come to Him for all things, presenting without question the mighty check on the bank of heaven, “My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.”

ABLE TO SAVE.

It means, in the first place, that we have a God that is equal to our salvation and the salvation of any sinner, however lost and however long resisting the mercy and grace of God. It means that He is equal to the salvation of your boy, your friend, your soul, whoever you are and whatever you may be. It means that He is equal to your sanctification and the sanctification of any temperament, no matter how impracticable; the counteracting of any habit, no matter how confirmed; the overcoming of any defect, infirmity and sin, no matter how deeply rooted and aggravated; victory over any and every temptation that may come, and a life sanctified through and through and preserved blameless unto the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. It means that He “is able to keep you from stumbling and present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.”

ABLE TO HEAL.

It means that He is equal to your physical need and has made provision for your sickness as well as your sins, your infirmities of body as well as your infirmities of temper and the supply of all needed strength, health and help until your life work is done. It means that He is equal to your circumstances, that He can sustain you, comfort you and keep you under all possible unfavorable conditions, making you happy when everything around you is uncongenial, using and blessing you when everything seems to conflict and hinder, and then transforming circumstances, turning the curse into a blessing and bringing up the fir tree and the myrtle instead of the thistle and the thorn.

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