Are all things possible with God?

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First of all, the assertion that "With God, all things are possible" is valid and scriptural.

Matthew 19:26 (NIV)
26  Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

However, it would be a mistake to assume that God's omnipotence means he can act against his nature. Hebrews tells us:

Hebrews 6:18 (NIV)
18  God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged.

This is not a contradiction. When Jesus says that "with God all things are possible", he does not intend to suggest that God can act outside of His nature - and His nature is righteousness. Similarly I, as a physical creature, am by nature bound to operate within the confines of a physical universe (i.e., I am bound by physical laws).

As to the other part of your question, no - God cannot make a rock so big that he can't lift it. That doesn't contradict His omnipotence. The question itself is silly and irrational. Another thing God can't do is make a circle with four corners. If he did, then it would no longer be a circle would it? By definition, it would be a square. C.S. Lewis addresses this eloquently:

His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. There is no limit to His power.

If you choose to say, 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.'

Upvote:-2

I don't believe God is real. However, it is as if God exists. Suppose we live in a universe where death is nowhere to be found and we have no concept of death. Everything I saw after this means within the confines of the laws which is like a sandbox which we already decided we don't ever want to leave. I think that we explore options and the last true fundamental change in our destiny occurs when we are about 30. It doesn't mean we aren't thinking from scratch. We are still thinking from scratch and rediscovering the same things. For example, I'm 35 and I sometimes rederive the commutative law of natural number addition from scratch with my own natural curiosity. Our awareness of the past is not zero. There is no reason it has to be one or the other but not both, remembering the past and reconceiving of the same thing using your thinking from scratch now. Some people might have a truly different destiny from when they're about 30 due to the way they were raised when they were young. For me, I was a little bit slower and it came at 34. Theoretically, nature could come and interfere and truly change your destiny. For example, I always knew that in Coraline, they threw the hand down the well but then once when I was watching Coraline in the sleepy state, I saw and noticed that they threw the hand down the well then it climbed back out then they smashed it with a rock and put it in a bag and threw it down the well, seeming to contradict what I thought. It's almost like the sleepy state has changed by destiny and it was gonna be a true fundamental change in my destiny seeing things that way. Of course, I will get changed by the sleepy state again later. We could think of that external interference of the sleepy state a being like God changing our destiny and then changing it again next time we go into the sleepy state overwriting the previous one. It probably wouldn't have been truly permanent anyway because it would eventually get so buried, but it would be more than a year. We go into the sleepy state more often than once a year.

Upvote:2

When Jesus says "with God all things are possible" , he means all things that exist or or is possible to exist or is possible to happen. All other things do not exist, has not existed or will not happen.

So instead of saying that it is not possible for God to be not strong enough to lift any stone in this Universe, it will be simpler and equally logical to say that there was, is and will be no stone that God cannot lift.

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