In my on-line class on Revelation the professor commented on the Abyss or bottomless pit in Rev 9:1. He said that there could be no such thing as a bottomless pit because if it was bottomless then it wouldn’t be a pit, it would just be some kind of a hole. So therefore, the Abyss in Revelation is not a bottomless pit.
That kind of took me aback. Before he said that I had no problem with the idea of a bottomless pit because I assumed that if God willed there to be a bottomless pit, there would be a bottomless pit. How is that different from any other supernatural act of God? If God wills that water flow uphill it flows uphill. I have no problem accepting that. So why is the idea of a bottomless pit any different? God can do miraculous things.
Welll? They kind of are … I don’t know how to say it … different kinds of impossibility. There’s physical impossibility, like sticking my head up a part of my own anatomy where the sun doesn’t shine. That is physically impossible NOW, but I have no doubt that if God wanted me to do that He could make it physically possible for me to do that. (Praise God that He has not seen fit for me to do that, to date anyway. Although if that were His will, I would.)
Then there’s kind of a logical impossibility due to the essential meaning of something. Could God make a square circle? I think of the impossibility of sin existing in Heaven as being this kind of impossibility. If it were possible then it wouldn’t be Heaven. Or it wouldn’t be sin. Or it wouldn’t be square, or wouldn’t be a circle. (???)
And then there’s kind of a theoretical meta-impossibility, e.g., could an omnipotent God create another God just like Himself? Or greater than Himself for that matter? I have no idea but if He could then there would need to be a higher order Being who bestowed God’s power upon Him. So that would make God a creation of the higher Being, who would really be God, while the God we think of as God would just be empowered by the higher level God whom we haven’t known about due to our human limitations. But this can’t be true because God doesn’t lie and in Deuteronomy 6:4-7 He says that He is the only God.
So could there be a bottomless pit if God willed it? I don’t know.
It’s easier for me to contemplate logical paradoxes like this one that I learned in college:
This sentence is false.
It can’t be true, and it can’t be false either. Think about it.
Happy Sunday!
GodChild 