What God cannot do (2)

While we believe that God is All-Powerful, we also believe that there are some things that God cannot do. That statement may come as a surprise, but skeptics and atheists alike love to propose such things, so let’s beat them to the punch.

We have already mentioned in a previous post that God is limited by things that are illogical. The questions whether God could make a rock so big that he could not lift it or make a snowball so big he could not roll it are illogical – not even logical contradictions. Why in the world would anyone (let alone God) want to do these things in the first place? Such questions remind me of the character Herod in the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar.” He wanted to meet Jesus so he could ask him to walk across his swimming pool. And just as Herod’s interview was met with silence by Jesus, so questions like these do not merit serious consideration.

There is another more serious consideration, however, that is often used to question the All Powerfulness of God. Since most of the evil in this world comes from other humans, and if God created humanity as free moral beings, why could he not have created them free but without the ability to abuse that freedom? Another form of the question might be to ask why God allows people do such terrible things without stepping in to prevent those things from happening?

These questions are not merely exercises in intellectual gymnastics. They often come from an honest response to tragedy and pain that has been inflicted by wrong-headed or wrong-hearted people. Why did God allow this holocaust, this abuse, this injustice to take place? We are not struggling with why God created us free moral beings and not robots, but with why God allows the evil to exist that flows from the exercise of that freedom.

I think we already know the answer. If we are free in our choices, then implicit in that freedom is the ability to choose evil. CS Lewis said “…God is good; that He made all things good and for the sake of of their goodness; … one of the good things He made, namely, the free will of rational creatures, by its very nature included the possibility of evil; and that creatures , availing themselves of that possibility, have become evil” (The Problem of Pain, 69).

We like the idea of being free to live and choose as we please, but then we hold God responsible when he doesn’t stop people from doing terrible things that are consequent of that freedom. What do we then expect God to do when people freely act in an evil way? Do we expect a club to turn into spaghetti, a knife into a cucumber, a bullet into a paintball before they strike and do harm? If he did these things would we really be free, and how evil would the deed have to be before he intervened? After all, shouldn’t we be allowed to live as we please just as long as we don’t hurt others?

To sum up: God cannot grant us freedom and withhold freedom at the same time; create human beings free without giving them the ability to abuse that freedom. It is a logical impossibility, much like making a surface that is both smooth and rough at the same time. (JonTal Murphy)

Someday, in God’s heavenly kingdom, we will be recreated to always freely choose to do good – just like Jesus. However, he did not create us that way originally. We were created as free moral beings with sinless natures, with the potential of using that freedom to choose good or evil. We chose evil, and our natures have become corrupted.

We can continue to argue with how God made the world, but we cannot blame him for the evil we freely do to one another. We can also marvel at how his Sovereign power can restrain evil (Job 1:12; 2:6; Rom 8:20-23); how, in his Providence, he can make good come out of evil (Gen 50:20; Rom 8:28, 29); and how he dealt a fatal blow to evil through Christ’s death and resurrection (1 Cor 15:50-57; Col 2:15, 16).

But there is one more thing that God cannot do…next blog.

 

Remembering Dr. King

This is a video Robb Emmett put together a few years ago. I did the narration and Anthony Turner read a portion of a “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” which was written by Martin Luther King Jr.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=nSPKtK1sm3w

What God cannot do…

We believe that God is All-Powerful. Have you ever had anyone say to you, “OK, then, can God create a rock so big that he cannot lift it or a snowball so heavy that he cannot throw it?” Ah, trick questions, but they have filled cynics with glee and provided Christians with head-scratcher for centuries. I couldn’t trace who first asked the rock question, but did find that it is  part of a larger system of questions composing “the omnipotence paradox,” which actually dated back to the Middle Ages. They were addressed by Christian Theologians like Thomas Aquinas and even the Muslim Scholar Averroes. Enough history…

The point I am going to make here may surprise you but I believe that there are things that God cannot do.  Some theologians have tried to explain these paradoxes by making a distinction between power and ability. In the words, God’s power can make the big rock- no problemo – but he does not have the ability to lift it because he cannot do what simply cannot be done.

Clear as mud? Let me get more specific. God cannot do those things which are limited by the illogical. I am not saying that God is limited by the laws of logic because he is Logic. Just as he is Love, he is also Mind, Intelligence. Thus God is limited by that which is not logical.

For example, Aquinas said, “God cannot make the things that are, never to have been.” In other words, God cannot make something that has happened to “unhappen.” While he forgives the sins of the past and does not deal with us according to them in Christ (treating us just-as-if-ied never sinned), he cannot make us so that we never committed those sins in the first place. In the same way, God cannot make a square circle, a giant midget, a jumbo shrimp (sorry- that’s an oxymoron) or a rock so big that he cannot lift it. These concepts are not even “things”; they are contradictions that have no reality.

This “limitation” is actually an encouragement to my faith. I believe that God does not use his power to play around with things that do not matter, like some immature wizard. But his power is demonstrated in things that directly affect us, such as Creating the universe and Redeeming sinful people like me, through Jesus Christ  (Colossians 1:13-20).

I’ll let you think about this and maybe you can come up with some other things that God cannot do. By the way, I’ve got two more… later.