What a God Can Do

There’s only two rules worth following, advises Captain Jack Sparrow. “What a man can do, and what a man can’t do.” From a position of logic, this is a good concept to grasp. Certainly civilized people (as opposed to Pirates) recognize that what a man can do should be restrained by what a man ought to do. It is also not always possible to know exactly what a man can and cannot do. Wisdom does not demand that you rise or sink to the expectations of possibility when those expectations are not aligned with reality. And Christians must allow that despite what man cannot do, there are some things God can do anyway.

Christians are quite frequently discussing what God can do. Some even believe He can do anything. Omnipotence is not without its limitations. Those boundaries are merely excluded from affecting the power involved.

In the issue of Creation, many Christians (whose theology is based on philosophy, and not on Scripture) profess belief in a God who could do anything. He could create in six seconds, six days, or six trillion years. And in the question of power, He could.

Where we run into problems is when we add a word and say that God could have created in any amount of time. This is impossible, and I will tell you why.

I believe in a God who cannot lie. And this God, the one God, can communicate to His creatures (whose understanding He created for this purpose) clearly. He did communicate to us, in the Bible. That’s the only way we know who this God is in the first place. If we’re going to throw out the Bible, we might as well toss God away with it. What God says in the Bible is that He created in six days. It is not difficult to understand this from the passages. If that was not what He meant, then God had a failure of communication. Remember. Lying is something God cannot do.

The only timeline, therefore, in which God could have created, is that which He told us: six days.

To God be all glory.