Pilgrim,

Your understanding of God's power isn't orthodox. You are effectively claiming that God's omnipotence consists in His ability to do all and only exactly what He has done. God was not powerful enough to create Adam with an extra hair, nor powerful enough to create an extra angel; God couldn't part the Red Sea at two places, and God couldn't make the North Star shine brighter in the third year of the world's history; etc. After all, if God didn't do these things, then God couldn't have done these things.

Of course, divine omnipotence doesn't mean that God can do anything without exception. He can't create a square circle, for instance. Nor can He create a married bachelor. These things are contradictory. Nevertheless, He can do otherwise than He did, at least relative to His power. Relative to His other attributes, there might be a legitimate debate about whether God could have done otherwise. Relative to His power, however, there is no debate. Orthodox Christianity--including the Reformers--affirm my view of divine omnipotence.

Just to quote one statement of the orthodox view, namely, that expressed by Francis Turretin in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology:

"I. The power of God (the executing principle of the divine operations) is nothing other than the divine essence itself productive outwardly (through which he is conceived as able to do whatsoever he wills or can will). Here (before all things) this comes to be distinguished from such a power or exousia as implies the right and authority to do anything, while the power of which we speak indicates in its conception only the force and faculty of acting....
III. The question [regarding divine omnipotence--JP] does not concern the actual and ordinate power according to which God actually and irresistibly does whatsoever he wills to do, yet in the time and manner which seems best to him: "our God is in the heavens; he hath done whatsoever he pleased" (Ps. 115:3). With regard to this, it is well said that from the actual power to the work or effect the consequence holds good, but concerning the absolute (through which he is conceived as able to do more than he really does, viz., those things which are not repugnant to his most perfect nature or imply no contradiction, through which God could have raised up from stones children to Abraham [Mt. 3:9] and sent twelve legions of angels to Christ[Mt. 26:53] ). With regard to the latter, we must remark that from the absolute power to the work, the consequence does not hold good because God can do many more things than he actually does." (Bold font emphasis added. See the Twenty-First Question ('The Power of God') in Volume 1.)

Notice that he endorses a view that God, according to His absolute power, "is conceived as able to do more than he really does." This is orthodox, and this is what I am claiming. It is not heretical, unorthodox, or anything like that to affirm that God is powerful enough to have done otherwise than He did. Your view is not expressing the standard Reformed position regarding divine omnipotence.

Kind Regards,
John P.

"He that hath light thoughts of sin, never had great thoughts of God." ...John Owen