Omnipotence of God

— For nothing will be impossible with God. Luke 1:37

God’s omnipotence is his infinite power to do all that he wills, whatever is not contrary to his own nature (Ps. 115:3). It is not a power added to God from outside, but his very nature and essence, his eternally before any created work displayed it.¹ Scripture calls him alone Almighty (Rev. 1:8) and says nothing is too hard for him (Jer. 32:17). This power never conflicts with his other perfections: since he cannot deny himself (2 Tim. 2:13), his inability to lie or sin is not a limit on his omnipotence but one of its marks.²

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession names God “almighty” in the same single sentence as the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration, both of which use the identical word: God is “immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute.”³ Westminster’s own chapter states the same list, word for word.⁴ This is Reformed teaching generally, not a Baptist distinctive: all three confessions fold omnipotence into their single opening description of God rather than devoting it a separate chapter, naming it alongside his other incommunicable perfections rather than treating it as a topic needing its own defense.

Biblical Basis

Scripture states God’s power in its most sweeping form, without qualification: he “made the heavens and the earth by [his] great power and by [his] outstretched arm,” and “nothing is too hard” for him (Jer. 32:17). Gabriel states the same truth to Mary as a settled premise rather than an argument: “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37), and the LORD puts the same claim to Abraham as a question expecting no other answer: “Is anything too hard for the LORD?” (Gen. 18:14). Job, after God’s own extended interrogation from the whirlwind, confesses it as the lesson learned: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2). Paul prays to the God “who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Eph. 3:20), and the final vision of Revelation greets his reign with the acclamation “the Lord our God the Almighty reigns” (Rev. 19:6). Daniel’s Nebuchadnezzar learns the same truth by humiliation rather than instruction, driven from his throne until he confesses that God “does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can stay his hand” (Dan. 4:35).⁵

Historical Development

Augustine already tied God’s inability to lie or die to his omnipotence rather than against it. Commenting on the creed, he wrote that “God, because he is omnipotent, cannot die, cannot be deceived, cannot lie. For if he could die, he would not be omnipotent; if he could lie, deceive, be deceived, behave iniquitously, he would not be omnipotent. For if these things were in him, he would not be worthy to be omnipotent.”⁶ This patristic pattern, locating omnipotence in what fits God’s nature rather than in sheer unbounded capability, set the terms later Reformed writers would formalize.

Late medieval nominalist theologians severed God’s “absolute power” from his own nature, a move John Calvin rejected as profane. Building on a scholastic distinction between God’s potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata, some nominalist theologians held that, by his absolute power apart from what he has actually willed, God could sin, err, suffer, die, become a stone or an animal, do contradictory things, or make what was true false and what was false true.⁷ Calvin rejected this scholastic notion of an absolute power untethered from God’s own character as a “fiction of absolute power,” calling it profane.⁷ Scripture and Christian orthodoxy hold instead that God cannot deny himself and that his will and being coincide, so that his absolute power still never contradicts his own nature.⁷

Reformed orthodoxy kept the potentia absoluta/potentia ordinata distinction but bound it to God’s nature. Petrus van Mastricht devoted a full chapter of his Theoretical-Practical Theology to “The Authority and Power of God,” arguing at length against both the Socinians, who denied that God’s power is infinite in itself, and the Weigelian “fanatics,” who concluded from God’s omnipotence that he can do even contradictory things.⁸ John Gill, the Particular Baptist theologian, gave the doctrine its own chapter in his 1769 Body of Doctrinal Divinity, defining absolute power as “all things which are not contrary to his nature and perfections, and which does not imply a contradiction; even though he has not done them nor never will,” and ordinate power as what God has actually willed and brought to pass.¹ Both writers treat the things Scripture says God “cannot” do, lying, denying himself, making a contradiction true, as proof of the fullness of his power rather than any defect in it.

Charles Hodge carried the same distinction into nineteenth-century Reformed orthodoxy, defining potentia ordinata as God’s efficiency exercised through the ordered operation of second causes, and potentia absoluta as his efficiency exercised without them, evident in creation, miracles, and regeneration.⁹ Hodge insisted the two are not really distinct powers but one infinite power considered under different modes of its exercise, and that omnipotence so understood, power that does whatever God wills because his will is itself determined by his nature, remains untouched by his inability to act against that nature.¹⁰

Opposing Views

Process and other forms of relational theism deny or radically limit God’s omnipotence, chiefly to relieve him of responsibility for evil. On this view God is one participant within a cosmos he cannot unilaterally direct, “incapable of directing history by his power to its appointed end,” changing the world even as the world changes him.¹¹ Craig Carter cites the process theologian Catherine Keller’s own statement of the reasoning: “If the God of justice is to be counted all-powerful, that God must be held accountable for all injustice.”¹¹ On this account God does not prevent evil but suffers alongside creation instead, a move Jürgen Moltmann develops as “the suffering of Christ as the suffering of the passionate God.”¹¹

Objections and Responses

Does God’s inability to lie, sin, or deny himself mean his power is actually limited? No: Reformed writers treat these “inabilities” as marks of perfection rather than defect. Mastricht answers directly that lying, sinning, and self-denial “are not objects of some power, but rather objects of impotence. For to be able to lie, to sin, to deny himself, and so forth, do not speak of power and perfection, but rather of impotence and defect.”² Hodge makes the same point from the other direction: because God’s will is determined by his own nature, it is “no limitation to perfection to say that it cannot be imperfect.”¹⁰ An ability to sin or lie would be a weakness, not an added power, since it would require God to act against his own perfect character.

If God can do all things, could he make a stone too heavy for himself to lift, or otherwise bring about a plain contradiction? Reformed theology answers no, and treats the question as resting on a confused idea of what omnipotence covers. Mastricht frames the underlying question directly, “Can God through his absolute power do contradictory things?”, and answers that he cannot: to do so would mean God could deny himself, contrary to 2 Timothy 2:13, and could say what is false, contrary to Titus 1:2 and Hebrews 6:18, since to lie is itself nothing but sustaining a contradiction between word and reality.⁸ Gill draws the same line: God “cannot do anything that implies a contradiction; he cannot make contradictions true; a thing to be, and not to be at the same time,” yet this “no prejudice to his omnipotence, nor proof of weakness,” since a contradiction describes no possible object of power at all, not a task God’s power falls short of.¹ A stone too heavy for omnipotence to lift is not a task, on this reasoning, but a self-canceling form of words, no more a real possibility than a square circle.

Related Doctrines

References

John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 8, “Of the Omnipotence of God.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 20, “The Authority and Power of God,” 478-79: “All those things are not objects of some power, but rather objects of impotence. For to be able to lie, to sin, to deny himself, and so forth, do not speak of power and perfection, but rather of impotence and defect.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 10, “Is God All-Powerful, All-Knowing, and All-Wise? Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnisapience.” ↩
Augustine, On the Creed 1, quoted in Mastricht, 2:478. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God,” “Omnipotence.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Mastricht, 2:480-82. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 1:409-10. ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. V, “Nature and Attributes of God,” 1:409. ↩ ↩²
Craig A. Carter, “Classical Orthodoxy and the Rise of Relational Theism,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 1. ↩ ↩² ↩³