Answers to Tricky Questions

Here's our short answers to some of the stickier, trickier questions that come our way from time to time. Try these on your friends as conversation starters.

If God is all-powerful, can He create a rock so big that He can't lift it?

No. God cannot do the logically impossible, any more than He can act out of character with Himself. God cannot, for instance, create a square circle, stop being good, or cease being God. God can do everything that is possible to do, which includes those acts for which there may be no simple, immediate, apparent, human explanation, i.e. miracles. For further study, see Jeremiah 32:17, Matthew 19:26, Hebrews 6:18, and 2 Timothy 2:13.

If God created Satan, and Satan is evil, is evil God's fault?

No. God did not create Satan (or men, for that matter) as evil—only with the capacity for evil. (Isaiah 14:12)

Could Jesus have sinned?

Only if He had wanted to sin.

Could Jesus have really ever wanted to sin?

No. Not really. Not ultimately.

In His humanity alone, the answer would be “yes,” which is why the temptations that Jesus faced (Matthew 4:1, Hebrews 4:15) were indeed very intense and real. Nevertheless, though Jesus was fully human, He was not only human. And in terms of His Divine nature—when it came right down to it—He would never, and could never, have actually ever willed to sin. To have done so would mean that He (as God) had actually willed to occur what He actually willed not to occur, which makes no sense at all.

The Bible says in James 1:13 that God (i.e. by inference, the Divine nature of Christ) cannot be tempted by evil.

For further insight, see: Could Christ have sinned? Answer (ChristianAnswers.Net/q-acb/acb-t003.html)

If God is everywhere, is He in Hell?

Yes. Insofar as Divine omnipresence implies access and involves, or interrelates to, the other Divine attributes of infinitude, omnipotence (control), and omniscience (awareness), God is present even in hell. No door anywhere is closed to God. No room is locked. No corner of the universe or reality is off-limits to Deity. The Bible affirms this truth in texts like Psalm 139:7-10, Colossians 1:17, Amos 9:1-4, Isaiah 66:1-2, Jeremiah 23:23-24.

God, however, is not relationally present with, or available to, those in hell. That is, He is not present to bless, deal with, or grant even common grace and light in hell, which explains the terrifying sense of Matthew 25:41, the external extrapolation of a spiritual separation that occurs even now when sin is present (Isaiah 59:2, Matthew 27:46).

Leviticus 11:7-8 says that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean. May I still play football if I wear gloves?

You may still play football. And you don't even need to wear gloves. Just receive Christ as Savior, read Acts 10:15, and get with the times, for this is the New Testament era, friend. And by the way—most footballs these days are made from cowhide, not pigskin. In fact, one source reports that it takes 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's supply of footballs.

Couldn't life on Earth be the result of mere chance? Thomas Huxley is reported to have once stated that if enough monkeys randomly pressed typewriter keys for a long enough time, sooner or later Psalm 23 would emerge.

First of all, monkeys don't type.* But even if they did, chance alone could never adequately account for the growing number of factors being cited by the Intelligent Design movement, e.g. irreducible complexity (Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Behe), the generation of complex specified information (Intelligent Design, p165ff, by William Demski).

* Instructors at Plymouth University, England, once put six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys in a room with a computer and keyboards for four weeks. One monkey frequently typed the letter “s,” but the other monkeys ignored the keyboard. One eventually smashed it with a stone and the others then began to repeatedly urinate and defecate on it. —with thanks to columnist Dennis Prager in “Monkeys and Atheists.”"

Answers to more questions

Author: Daryl E. Witmer of AIIA Institute.

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