Can God make a rock so big even he can’t lift it? Or as Wayne’s World put it, “Can God microwave a burrito so hot that even he can’t eat it?” Many people have found this to be the single defining question that ruins any possibility of God existing. Some will tell you that if, in fact, God can make a rock he can’t lift, then he would've created something he can’t do and is therefore not all-powerful and not real. If you say he can’t make a rock so big even he can’t lift it they will give you the same answer saying that if he can’t make a rock so big he can’t lift, then there is something he can’t do and is thus not all-powerful and not real. I would say that these people have missed one thing in this argument, that is can’t vs. won’t. Unfortunately, I must now go a very long way around to explain why the short answer to this question is yes.
As a young man in the midst of some very intense moments of worship I have found myself saying over and over again, “Jesus I love you. Jesus I love you!” The need to repeat this over and over again is born out of the feeling that once is not enough and despite the fact that I know he heard me the first time, God is often so overwhelming that I feel those words can’t be said enough, that’s when we start to speak the language of emotion.
This idea of emotional communication is not entirely original, it is partially stolen from C.S. Lewis, however I hope my explanation is a little clearer and my expansion on this idea still somewhat original.
When you think about your friends and family, or anyone else you encounter in your life, what is the first thing about them that you think of? When I ask someone, “Hey do you know so-and-so?” how do they respond? Usually it’s with, “Oh I love so-and-so!” or, “I don’t like that kid.” This is because the first thing that comes to mind when we think about people is how they make us feel. When I think about my friends, the first thing that comes to mind is not, oh yeah they have blue eyes, or brown hair, it’s how they make me feel.
One could even say that how someone makes you feel is even more relevant to who they are than any other aspect about them. I, like everyone, occasionally find people attractive upon meeting them, however, if I begin to feel that this person looks down on others, doesn’t love their family, or doesn’t care about anyone I can never feel attracted to that person again. They don’t make me feel love and as such I can’t feel attracted to them. Most people don’t pick their friends because they are, “tall, dark and handsome” they pick them because they enjoy spending time with them because of how they make them feel. Thus, we choose our companions based not upon sight or sound but upon… feelings. This is why I choose God.
It’s true you’ve caught me. I’ve never seen God, heard God’s audible voice, smelled him touched him, or tasted him, though I would count the works of his hands as being awful close to it. No, my five senses are not convinced he is real. However, I have emotionally touched him and heard from him and spoken to him. These things, as I have just shown, are far more important to our experience of who people are than any or all of the senses combined. Emotion is the sense that most of us, whether we like it or not, find to be the most real and the most important, because it is, to us, the most real sense we have, even if no one else can experience it.
God doesn’t bother with being physically tangible because we can experience him on a higher level than sight or sound. I only wish that the feelings that I emotionally/spiritually communicate to God could be expressed to other human beings, but they can’t. When we try and verbally explain our feelings, we have to reduce them too far for them to be experienced as they were originally intended and as such people will never know how God really makes us feel. Instead, when I want to use my mouth to communicate God’s love to others I have to reduce him, which is getting closer to the point about God’s burritos.
As I may or may not have said before, God is bigger than human comprehension; this is beautiful to some, beyond frustrating to others, and wholly unacceptable to others still. Thus, God reduces himself so that we can experience him without our heads exploding. Some people would ask, “Why would God bother to walk through my trials with me when he already knows how they will turn out?” The answer? Because he loves you. When my drum teachers showed me how to play they reduced themselves to a fraction of what they were capable of in order to teach me and show me how it is done. Did this diminish their capacity? Not at all, it simply made a big idea manageable for a young student. God does the same for us; he shows us a fraction of the bigger picture so that we can take in who he is. He reduces himself because that’s the only way we’ll ever begin to understand him. God could look into our futures, know where his angels will step in and out, let it happen, think no more of it and give us a pat on the back as we walk through the pearly gates, this is the what those practicing deism believe. Instead, he wants to come down to our level to show us how to keep a beat, hold a stick, and play a perfect rhythm, and as we learn he wants to share in the joy with us and even though he knows we’ll get it eventually, he’ll ignore that so he can experience the best moments, and the worst ones, with us. William Young gives a wonderful depiction of this in his The Shack.
In The Shack the main character, Mack, is sitting down having a conversation with God incarnate. God the father is a large black woman, God the son is a Jewish carpenter, and God the Holy Spirit is a translucent Asian woman. They sit down for dinner one night and as they are all eating together they ask Mack how is children are doing. As Mack responds he quickly realizes that they must already know how his children are and that they don’t even need to ask him. He also at this point realizes they don’t need to be eating with him either. Mack then asks God (all three of him) why he (they) asked about his children and why they are eating. God the father responds explaining that while he doesn’t have to eat he does enjoy eating with Mack and would rather reduce himself to having hunger for the sake of eating with him. He also tells Mack that while he could know exactly know Mack’s children were at that moment he would rather hear it from Mack and hear about what Mack is experiencing. Now back to God’s burritos.
Can God create a task so great even he can’t perform it? This is the question, enter rock lifting or burrito eating or whatever as the said task but this is the core of it. The answer to this question is a simple yes. Why? Because God can and will place limits on himself for our sake. He will make himself incapable of completing the task and will not ever reverse that inability because he is a just God who will not go back on his word. Yet, God could have at one time done said task, but as I already explained, self-enforced limitations do not affect one’s capability of doing. God would have the strength and everything needed to complete the task but would be entirely incapable of completing it because he made a law for himself saying he wouldn’t. This doesn’t make him any less capable, only unwilling and because he is just (a rule he made for himself) he could never make himself capable of doing the task.
