Cold Case Christianity: Are There “Limits” to God’s Power? Yes, if the bible has anything to say about it

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Are There “Limits” to God’s Power?

Posted: 27 Sep 2017 01:13 AM PDT 

285Christians claim God is “all-powerful”. Does this mean He can accomplish anything?

When Jesus answered that question the answer was "yes" and no exceptions were expressed or implied:

 26 And looking at them Jesus said to them, "With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." (Matt. 19:26 NAU)

Are unbelievers morally obligated to know enough about the bible to recognize that when God himself teaches people on earth  in the person of Jesus, he sometimes employs typical Semitic exaggeration?  If Jesus was exaggerating here when giving his exception-less statement that with God all things are possible, where else might he have been exaggerating?  Maybe in his statement that whoever doesn't support him, opposes him (Matthew 12:30)?

Skeptics often test this notion by offering the following challenge: “Can the all-powerful Christian God create a stone so heavy he cannot lift it?” The question highlights an apparent dilemma: If God cannot create such a stone (or cannot lift what He has created), He is not all-powerful. Does this apparent paradox prove an all-powerful Being cannot exist in the first place?

Yes.  We are capable of creating an object we cannot lift, so the challenge is not a deceptive sophistry or trifle.  So if God cannot create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it, then there is indeed at least one act that, while being a logical possibility, is an act God is nevertheless incapable of doing, at which point the cherished doctrine of God's full omnipotence is refuted.

It’s true the Bible describes God as an all-powerful Being and often uses language that suggests that “nothing” is impossible for Him (as in Luke 1:37).

And if Paul Copan and Matthew Flanagan are correct when they argue in their "Did God Really Command Genocide?" book that God himself sometimes employs exaggeration, then we have to wonder how many other times a biblical author is employing exaggeration-rhetoric when describing some attribute or act of God, and what degree of potential death-blow this poses for traditional biblical proofs for classical theism.

At the same time, there are many places in Scripture where certain behaviors or conditions are described as “impossible” for God to accomplish. This apparent contradiction is inexplicable until we examine the nature of the activities (or behaviors) described as “impossible” for God:
 Moral “Impossibilities”
The Bible clearly indicates there are many things that God cannot do. Most of these are “moral” in nature. For example, it is impossible for God to sin (James 1:13). According to the Bible, God always acts and behaves with certain moral considerations in mind and it is impossible for Him to do otherwise. Our moral laws are not simply the decrees of God (as if He could have chosen otherwise) but are, instead, a reflection of his unchanging moral nature. God cannot violate His nature. For this reason, it is impossible for God to sin.

Some would argue that God sins whenever he either a) makes good on his promise to cause women to be raped, or b) takes "delight" in causing women to be raped:

15 "But it shall come about, if you do not obey the LORD your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
 16 "Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the country.
 30 "You shall betroth a wife, but another man will violate her; you shall build a house, but you will not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you will not use its fruit.
 63 "It shall come about that as the LORD delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the LORD will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it. (Deut. 28:15-63 NAU)

If your basis for exempting God from sin despite his doing acts that are "sin" for human beings, is blind reliance on the biblical statements that god cannot sin, then your basis for saying God is all-good, is not reality or the merits of his character, but sheer word definitions.  Asking you to consider that God might sin is like asking the dictionary to consider that good might be the proper definition of evil.  You have DEFINED God as necessarily good, and you fallaciously view that conclusion as some untouchable icon.  Well guess what...you being a sinner means ANYTHING you believe could possibly be false.  And who doesn't know that Christians disagree with each other on almost every biblical subject.

Stop pretending your classical theist beliefs are foregone conclusions, unless you admit you are only interested in helping other classical theists feel better, in which case you are hardly doing "apologetics".

The person who would give two shits for any fundamentalist Christian attempt to classify God's causing rape to be a morally "good" thing, would be other fundamentalist Christians.  The rest of us keep our cell phones at the ready, waiting to call the police on you should you ever come within 500 feet of us.

Logical “Impossibilities”
The Bible also clearly indicates that there are a number of things that God cannot accomplish based on logical necessity. For example, it is impossible for God to change (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17) or to deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13).

God changes often enough.  He changes his mind in Genesis and in 1st Samuel 15, despite the claim in Numbers 23:19 that he doesn't change his mind:

 19 "God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent; Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good? (Num. 23:19 NAU)

 5 Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
 6 The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.
 7 The LORD said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them."
 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. (Gen. 6:5-8 NAU) 

 9 The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.
 10 "Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation."
 11 Then Moses entreated the LORD his God, and said, "O LORD, why does Your anger burn against Your people whom You have brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?
 12 "Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, 'With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth '? Turn from Your burning anger and change Your mind about doing harm to Your people.
 13 "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"
 14 So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.   (Exod. 32:9-14 NAU) 

 28 So Samuel said to him, "The LORD has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today and has given it to your neighbor, who is better than you.
 29 "Also the Glory of Israel will not lie or change His mind; for He is not a man that He should change His mind."
 30 Then he said, "I have sinned; but please honor me now before the elders of my people and before Israel, and go back with me, that I may worship the LORD your God."
 31 So Samuel went back following Saul, and Saul worshiped the LORD.
 32 Then Samuel said, "Bring me Agag, the king of the Amalekites." And Agag came to him cheerfully. And Agag said, "Surely the bitterness of death is past."
 33 But Samuel said, "As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women." And Samuel hewed Agag to pieces before the LORD at Gilgal.
 34 Then Samuel went to Ramah, but Saul went up to his house at Gibeah of Saul.
 35 Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death; for Samuel grieved over Saul. And the LORD regretted that He had made Saul king over Israel. (1 Sam. 15:28-35 NAU)

You do not say these are anthropomorphisms due to any concern about the grammar, context, genre or other any objective criteria of hermeneutics, you say they are anthropomorphisms solely because that excuse is the only artifice you can employ to avoid the conclusion that the bible contradicts itself.  But you don't have the first clue whether the originally intended ancient Hebrew audience, having no "bible inerrancy" baggage to worry about defending, would have accepted God's regret in Genesis 6:6 as a literally true statement about their god.

Your fanatical devotion to bible inerrancy is greater than your willingness to interpret bible texts consistent with their immediate contexts.  If the bible had said in the originals that 2+2=5...

Wallace continues:

According to the Bible, God always acts and behaves with certain logical considerations in mind and it is impossible for Him to do otherwise. The laws of logic are, once again, a reflection of God’s unchanging nature.
 These “Divine Impossibilities” provide us with insight into God’s character and power. Objective moral truths and transcendent laws of logic are simply a reflection of God’s eternal being.

There are biblical exceptions to all moral laws of God in the bible.  Don't believe me?  Take your best shot.  Or decide that ignoring the challenge will likely help keep sales of your gimmicks going at a profitable rate.

They are not rules or laws God has created (and could therefore alter recklessly), but are instead immutable, dependable qualities of his nature reflected in our universe.

So because keeping holy the Sabbath day originally required killing anybody who dared to engage in work on the Sabbath day (Numbers 15:32 ff), God's eternal unchangeable objective morals require that this moral truth be observed today in the exact same way.  The more you talk about how Jesus showed us the liberal truth about working on the Sabbath day, the more reason you give us to believe the original death-sentence for Sabbath day work was improper and immoral.

Sorry, but most of God's "absolute" morals are contained in the Mosaic Law or first covenant, and the NT is clear that these things of God were becoming obsolete even in the 1st century, and were ready, even back then, to vanish away, which is the exact opposite of your lauding God's morals as eternal unchangeable objective truths.  And the NT specifies that it was God himself who made his first covenant obsolete, making him not much different from a sinner whose morals change throughout their life:

 13 When He said, "A new covenant," He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear. (Heb. 8:13 NAU)

Wallace continues:

They exist because God exists (not because God created them).

Then the moral of God (i.e., that those who work on the Sabbath be killed (Numbers 15:35)) only exists because God exists, not because God created that law.  So unless you wish to argue God doesn't exist, this rather harsh objective moral of God still applies today in all the full stern way it did originally, that is, if you wish to accord the least bit of meaning to your belief that God's morals are eternal and unchangeable.

Some would argue that first requiring the death penalty for an act, then later refusing to enforce that death penalty in appropriate cases, constitutes a change in morals even if not a change in law.

In addition, the Bible describes God as omnipotent and capable of doing anything he sets out to do.

It also says God sometimes fails to achieve what he wished to achieve, such as his desire to give Judah battle victory, but could not in the case of particular enemies because they had chariots of iron:

 16 The descendants of the Kenite, Moses' father-in-law, went up from the city of palms with the sons of Judah, to the wilderness of Judah which is in the south of Arad; and they went and lived with the people.
 17 Then Judah went with Simeon his brother, and they struck the Canaanites living in Zephath, and utterly destroyed it. So the name of the city was called Hormah.
 18 And Judah took Gaza with its territory and Ashkelon with its territory and Ekron with its territory.
 19 Now the LORD was with Judah, and they took possession of the hill country; but they could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had iron chariots.
 20 Then they gave Hebron to Caleb, as Moses had promised; and he drove out from there the three sons of Anak.
 21 But the sons of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem; so the Jebusites have lived with the sons of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day.    (Jdg. 1:16-21 NAU)

Evangelical Christian scholars who accept biblical inerrancy are unable to explain how iron chariots could hold back the sovereign intent of God for Judah to win that battle, except to speculate that "presumably" Judah must have lost its nerve at that point in the battle...despite the fact that the biblical text provides the reason God's hand did not prevail...it was because the enemies he was fighting had iron chariots: 

 In our text (v. 18a) the narrator explicitly attributes Judah’s successes in the hill country not to equivalent military power but to the presence of Yahweh. Then why could they not take the lowland? Why is Yahweh’s presence canceled by superior military technology? The narrator does not say, but presumably the Judahites experienced a failure of nerve at this point, or they were satisfied with their past achievements.

Block, D. I. (2001, c1999). Vol. 6: Judges, Ruth (electronic ed.).

Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 100).

Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

Keil & Delitzsch, ultra-conservative in their Christanity and theology, comment on this verse but carefully avoid discussing why the iron chariot held back the sovereign hand of god.

Wallace continues:

God’s choices, however, are always consistent with His moral and logical nature; He never sets out to do something contrary to who He is as God.

Which can only mean that when God causes rape and parental cannibalism (Deut. 28:30, 53), takes "delight" to inflict such ravages (v. 63), causes unbelievers to brutally slaughter Hebrew children and forces women to endure abortion-by-sword (Hosea 13:15-16), this is consistent with the notion that God is always "good".

!?

Do ya think there might be the slightest chance that J. Warner Wallace's interest in biblical inerrancy ultimately rests on something other than sincere genuine persuasion that this doctrine is true?

One has to wonder: if God is good despite causing such atrocities, what worse type of evil would God have to cause before conservative Christian inerrantists would change their mind and start saying the god of the bible isn't as good as the bible says?.

What could possibly be worse than hacking children and babies to death as the mother's arms are amputated by sword and she shrieks hysterically in her fruitless efforts to protect them?

Maybe refusing to purchase your forensic faith gimmicks would be a worse sin?   If you can justify slaughter of women and children as described above, there's every chance you'd seriously believe a person's refusal to purchase your materials is a sin.

When someone asks, “Can the all-powerful Christian God create a stone so heavy he cannot lift it?” they are asking a logically incoherent question. It is the equivalent of asking, “Can God create a ‘square circle’?”

No, as explained above, because human beings can create an object so heavy they cannot lift it (for example, creating a steel beam that weighs 4 tons), then the question is no more illogical than

"Can a human create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"

Since the question is legitimate and can be legitimately and correctly answered "yes", the question will remain perfectly logical and legitimate regardless of whoever happens to the actual person named in the challenge:

"Can Bill create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"  YES
"Can Susan create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"  YES
"Can William Lane Craig create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"  YES
"Can J. Warner Wallace create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"  YES
"Can God create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"  YES

So then, there is one logically legitimate action that God cannot do, therefore, he is not all-powerful.

There is nothing illogical about sinning, otherwise you'd have to say humans cannot sin, so if God cannot sin, there's another act within the realm of the logically possible, that he cannot do: sin.

However, the notion that God cannot sin constitutes nothing but willful salivating blindness on the part of biblical authors and the modern Christians who swallow such garbage hook, line and sinker, as has been demonstrated from Deut. 28:63 (supra) and as will be demonstrated from Ezekiel 38-39 (infra).

Circles and squares are mutually exclusive by their very definition. As a result, the question nonsensically queries the creation of something similarly nonsensical.

Then human beings must be more powerful than God, because under your logic, the examples I just gave must then indicate human beings can achieve the logically impossible.

God cannot create square circles for the same reason He cannot sin; He acts dependably in a manner consistent with His moral and logical nature, and our universe is the beneficiary of God’s dependable nature.

And nothing about this changes when he forces people to sin and then punishes them for acting the way he forced them to act, such as is taught explicitly in Ezekiel 38:4 through ch. 39.

God forces the future armies of "gog and magog" to attack Israel, describing the force with the metaphor of "hook in your jaws", which is clearly the wrong mental image for the person who thinks God always respects human freewill:

 1 And the word of the LORD came to me saying,
 2 "Son of man, set your face toward Gog of the land of Magog, the prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him
 3 and say, 'Thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal.
 4 "I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords;
 5 Persia, Ethiopia and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet;
 6 Gomer with all its troops; Beth-togarmah from the remote parts of the north with all its troops-- many peoples with you.
 7 "Be prepared, and prepare yourself, you and all your companies that are assembled about you, and be a guard for them.
 8 "After many days you will be summoned; in the latter years you will come into the land that is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered from many nations to the mountains of Israel which had been a continual waste; but its people were brought out from the nations, and they are living securely, all of them.
 9 "You will go up, you will come like a storm; you will be like a cloud covering the land, you and all your troops, and many peoples with you." (Ezek. 38:1-9 NAU)
 16 and you will come up against My people Israel like a cloud to cover the land. It shall come about in the last days that I will bring you against My land, so that the nations may know Me when I am sanctified through you before their eyes, O Gog."
 17 'Thus says the Lord GOD, "Are you the one of whom I spoke in former days through My servants the prophets of Israel, who prophesied in those days for many years that I would bring you against them? 18 "It will come about on that day, when Gog comes against the land of Israel," declares the Lord GOD, "that My fury will mount up in My anger.
 19 "In My zeal and in My blazing wrath I declare that on that day there will surely be a great earthquake in the land of Israel.
 20 "The fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, the beasts of the field, all the creeping things that creep on the earth, and all the men who are on the face of the earth will shake at My presence; the mountains also will be thrown down, the steep pathways will collapse and every wall will fall to the ground.
 21 "I will call for a sword against him on all My mountains," declares the Lord GOD. "Every man's sword will be against his brother.
 22 "With pestilence and with blood I will enter into judgment with him; and I will rain on him and on his troops, and on the many peoples who are with him, a torrential rain, with hailstones, fire and brimstone.
 23 "I will magnify Myself, sanctify Myself, and make Myself known in the sight of many nations; and they will know that I am the LORD."' (Ezek. 38:16-23 NAU)
Ezekiel 39:1 "And you, son of man, prophesy against Gog and say, 'Thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal;
 2 and I will turn you around, drive you on, take you up from the remotest parts of the north and bring you against the mountains of Israel. (Ezek. 39:1-2 NAU)

After these future armies are forced by God to be the means by which God punishes Israel, supra, then God will punish these future armies for the attacks on Israel which God had forced them to engage in:

 3 "I will strike your bow from your left hand and dash down your arrows from your right hand.
 4 "You will fall on the mountains of Israel, you and all your troops and the peoples who are with you; I will give you as food to every kind of predatory bird and beast of the field.
 5 "You will fall on the open field; for it is I who have spoken," declares the Lord GOD.
 6 "And I will send fire upon Magog and those who inhabit the coastlands in safety; and they will know that I am the LORD. (Ezek. 39:3-6 NAU)

Sorry Wallace, but you need to learn some basic English.  "preaching to the choir" does not constitute "apologetics", and certainly doesn't equip your audience to do anything more than get slaughtered, should they dare choose to take your stuff and use it to confront an atheist knowledgeable of the bible, as I am.