Can God sin? If God cannot sin, is He truly omnipotent?

The confounding moral infinitude (that is, absoluteness of perfection) with extension, which I have noticed is a very great blunder. But then I freely own that in strictness we cannot speak of attributes in God (moral ones). It is only a human way which (speaking reverently) divides God into parts. God cannot be or do evil: to say this is a limitation of power is only a delusion. If I say that He cannot do what He pleases, for He cannot do evil, the "cannot" applies to "what He pleases," not to the power of God. As to acts of power, He can do everything. It is morally impossible that there should be in Him the contrary of what He is, that is of good and right. But this is not limiting power or anything; it is denying a limit to goodness, and saying it is absolute. Infinite goodness means merely goodness always perfect as goodness. That this is after an imperfect thought as to God I admit, because it takes one characteristic by itself (that is through our finite nature), for nothing in God is characteristic (that is, special and in part). It has been noticed elsewhere how thus Christ had no character, but was always what He ought to be wherever He was. Perfect goodness He was, but not goodness by itself as we conceive it. He was firm and severe where He ought, and good in that; He was tender and affectionate where He ought, and good in that; He was seemingly hard and deaf to seed, and unchanged in goodness in that - in all love to His Father, and obedience. The divine nature in man which produced one produced all, perfect in each place in relation because perfect in itself.

136 But this thought of God's acting according to laws involves a great fallacy from using the term in a double sense. God does act according to His nature, or, if you please, according to the laws of His nature, that is, its uniform unchangeable principles when He acts, and the manifestations of which constitute His glory. He is righteous and holy; He cannot lie, and He cannot be not Himself. His acts manifest Himself. Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father; but this was no physical effect of a cause operating without will in itself. God has ordered a system of cause and effect, but there is no will in it. We call its laws, established fixed laws, because the effect is uniform, regularly and always produced, though I doubt not the causa causans is always operative, and necessary to the effects. But in the acting of God, though all such acts are consistent with His nature, and must be so, it is not the cause of acting. God's will is the cause, though we readily understand His will cannot act contrary to His nature; nay, His nature may set His will in activity.

"God so loved the world, that he gave," etc. This is not a material necessity imposed apart from will in what acts; it is moral, displaying a nature by a will. "Without holiness no man shall see the Lord"; but this does not make holiness something necessarily producing an effect, as gravity acts universally in matter. There is nothing to do with cause and effect in it. So miracles of goodness prove God's nature when wrought because He works them, but they are not always wrought as a natural consequence attached to anything. God acts. These, when they are wrought, are according to, and display, His nature: but they are not the necessary and constant effects of that nature as a producing cause. God is always such, and, if He acts, so acts as not to deny Himself — it were impossible; but He does all things according to the counsels of His own will. To confound the physical laws of the creature, always operating as constituted by the Creator, with the sovereign power who constituted that order, to whom none can say, What doest Thou? is a great moral blunder.

Here is the key to the meaning of a term about which there has been so much perplexity, and so great a variety of thoughts. God Himself is limited in a certain way, as we all realize. He cannot lie; He cannot repent. This is no limit indeed, save that of His own perfections: He cannot act in contradiction to His attributes. Thus, though He be Love itself, yet love cannot with Him, even in the least degree, overbalance justice. "He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord" (Prov. 17:15). So His own Word declares, and how can He then clear the guilty? Did He not, when He gave the law, say distinctly that He could not? (Ex. 34:7.)

I would muse and rest a little upon this. As to God, His irresistible power knows no check whatsoever. But as sure as this His power is irresistible, so sure likewise is it that He has a character of His own, which in no case will He violate. Morally, He could not violate His own character. He knows, as God, how the well-being of dependent creatures throughout the universe hangs upon, in their various measures of capacity, their knowledge of Him, and so being cheerfully subject to Him.

C.C. — If God has a purpose, it must be a holy purpose. In a certain sense, we may say there are no limitations with God. His sovereignty is not a delegated sovereignty, it is intrinsically His. With men, in kings and rulers, it is a delegated sovereignty, with limitations. Not so with God, except by the exigencies of His own nature and character.

But our Hindu friend expressed a wish that, in order to forgive him, God would set aside His law. Impossible! You may ask perhaps, Cannot God do anything that He likes? Certainly, anything He LIKES. But remember, He must ever act in consonance with His own nature. He cannot do those things that are a contradiction of His nature and being. For instance, “It is impossible for God to lie” (Heb. 6:18).

Now for God to depart from His just laws in order to forgive would be in the nature of a lie. In other words He would have to set aside His own words and decrees to do such a thing as that. He would cease to be consistent. That could not possibly be.

9 Goodness or love, omniscience and omnipotence, involve in them perfect wisdom; only all this supposes a God, with a free will to exist, before any attribute can be assigned to Him. If not free to act, omniscience and omnipotence are simply null.

Omnipotence is involved in this - the power to do whatever it is His will to do. Omniscience is involved in it also. Did not God know all things, He could neither know what to do rightly, nor judge morally. Supremacy is involved in our very idea of God as one, and active in power. They are inherent in our idea of God, and (when once the heathenish additions of what are confessedly imaginations are removed) cannot be separated from the idea of God. That which it is important to get fast hold of is, that there is a will in God. No moral being can be without it; a will guided by righteousness and holiness, and to which omnipotence and omniscience are subservient, but which is the source and origin of all that exists outside Himself, not of its state, for moral beings have a will, but of its existence.

This line of argument Scripture itself suggests to be the true one. The conflict with evil is ever represented in it as a real thing, and a necessary, not to be dispensed with by the mere fiat even of Omnipotence: and that because Omnipotence in God means necessarily Omnipotent Wisdom, as it does Omnipotent Love. Thus He "willeth not the death of a sinner," yet they die. Who will say He wills their sins? and yet they sin. And when we are told of some that "it is IMPOSSIBLE to renew them again unto repentance," (Heb. 6:4-6) if we are to take such words in their full and apparent sense, must we not believe that Omnipotence had in their case found its limit? or can we say God would not still have renewed them, if He could? In the face of His own repeated protestations, can we believe that through His pleasure sinners, however much sinners, could not be renewed?

Men die because of their own will, not of God's will; yet they die. And men crudely ask of God's omnipotence why He cannot convert them all. But omnipotence itself must needs be limited by His other attributes. What Infinite Wisdom can do I must be myself infinitely wise to know.