When we think of strength in God’s creation, we might think of elephants but rarely would we think of an octopus. After all, an octopus doesn’t even have any bones, so how could it be very strong? Sy Montgomery writes in The Soul of an Octopus:

Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. It can change color and shape. It can taste with its skin.

Yet the octopus is strong, very strong. An octopus’s muscles have both radial and longitudinal fibers, thereby resembling our tongues more than our biceps, but they’re strong enough to turn their arms to rigid rods—or shorten them in length by 50 to 70 percent. An octopus’s arm muscles, by one calculation, can resist a pull one hundred times the octopus’s own weight.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Our creative, powerful God gives gifts of strength throughout his creation even in the most unlikely of places. So how surprising should it be that God gives us strength when we need it to serve him and to resist temptation?