Why doesn’t God stop the world from its wickedness if he is capable of making all things possible?
All
thing are possible, but certain ideas we come up with or our notions to do with reality aren’t truly possible
things, they’re not circumstances or events that can truly happen, they’re
nonsense word combinations that we assume can be real.
Example: “Dear God, please
force my ex wife to
love me again. Amen.”
Anyone who understands that love is volitional and involves choice will know that
forced freely given love is a contradiction in terms, it’s not one of the
things that are possible with God because it’s
not a thing at all.
The man might as well have requested
“dear God, :£45erus gusyigxde!!! ,/-34568”&@))!!!!!! Can God toad an 11????????? Amen!”
It almost
sounds reasonable when he asks for God to make his wife love him in plain English, but in essence, that mess of nonsense about toad an 11 is what he’s actually doing when he asks for love by divine force.
Example:
“Can God create a stone so heavy he cannot lift it. If he can’t he’s not all powerful.”
Like the first example, it’s just a nonsense. Being all powerful doesn’t mean having all of the powers or the power to do or create absurd non events.
Again it’s
“Can God toad an 11?” disguised as a reasonable challenge.
The stone would lose all of the properties that make it a stone and God would be stripped of everything that makes Him God, it’s just a mess of language we demand that God navigate upon our behalf.
The
“stone” and
“God” are just placeholders for an argument that doesn’t shake out, it can’t be a
thing that’s possible. We strip words of their meaning and want to carry on under those changes, we do this all the time.
Why doesn’t God stop the world from its wickedness if he is capable of making all things possible?
The point about freely given love probably best answers here. God could have created a world where your close friend wasn’t physically harmed by the effects of sin,
@Agallagher. But it would be a poor excuse for your friend.
God could constantly heal everyone of every illness, both illnesses of genetic disorder and illnesses of reckless lifestyle choice, but something tells me we wouldn’t live in a more loving, Spirit filled world from that, probably we’d go in the opposite direction.
We want the right to choose things, but we dislike facing the consequences of the thing we’ve chosen. We want to eat cake, but hate being called chubby. We want to sleep around but hate the rep that sleeping around causes.
For anyone who suffers from physical illness brought about by
birth defect or genetic predisposition, I’d recommend meditating on John 9. Try a verse by verse read through and really let the content sink in.
I imagine if we were allowed a looking glass to help see into that sinless, harmless world I mentioned before, I doubt your friends and family would recognise themselves in the reflection of a perfect, unharmed, imprisoned world. A world where people couldn’t say boo to a ghost and forever lacked the knowledge to know they were naked etc.
The Father thought sin and its consequences
(e.g. illness and the cross) a price worth paying for people to be truly alive and active in the world, making choices, having wild passions and loving one another not out of divine compulsion, but out of a willing desire to love.
Notice though we take the illness, He took the cross
and on account of fellow feeling suffers our illnesses. We can never understand His cross, but He understands our ills and suffers on account.
God didn’t let your friend suffer alone, nor does He strip us of the type of humanness we’ve felt because of freewill and sin, rather Christ steps in and suffers too, bridging the gap, calling your friend His friend.
