Omnipotence is perfect power, free from all mere potentiality. Hence, although God does not bring into external being all that He is able to accomplish, His power must not be understood as passing through successive stages before its effect is accomplished. The activity of God is simple and eternal, without evolution or change. The transition from possibility to actuality or from act to potentiality, occurs only in creatures. When it is said that God can or could do a thing, the terms are not to be understood in the sense in which they are applied to created causes, but as conveying the idea of a Being possessed of infinite unchangeable power, the range of Whose activity is limited only by His sovereign Will.
Omnipotence is all-sufficient power.
The adaptation of means to ends in the universe does not argue, as J.S. Mill would have it, that the power of the designer is limited, but only that God has willed to manifest His glory by a world so constituted rather than by another. Indeed the production of secondary causes, capable of accomplishing certain effects, requires greater power than the direct accomplishment of these same effects. On the other hand even though no creature existed, God's power not be barren, for creatures are not an end to God. In the Old Testament there are more than seventy passages I which God is called Shaddai , i.e. omnipotent. The Greek and Latin Fathers unanimously teach the doctrine of Divine omnipotence.