God is Infinite

One time I asked my dad to take one of my dogs to the vet to get spayed. I said that Duff needed to go to the vet, but I couldn’t leave work at the time that they needed her there. My dad called me to see if he had the correct dog, since I have two dogs, and they are both black. 

He was calling Jules (the wrong dog) by the name Duff (the right dog) but ultimately he had the wrong dog. 

I think that sometimes, we think we are talking about the one true God, but because we don’t truly know who He is and what His character is like, we have the wrong god. 

If we are going to have a faith that lasts, we need to know who we are putting our faith in. We need to make sure we have the right God.

We also need to know that this side of heaven we will never understand our God fully. We won’t truly know Him until we get to meet Him face to face. The Bible says that His ways are higher than our ways, and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9). 

Even still, He has given us the Bible so we can know Him as well as our minds can comprehend here on earth. My goal is that in this life, I won’t let anything come between me and my study of the Bible so that I can know God as fully as my human brain will allow; and I want to introduce you to Him.

When starting to learn about His characteristics, I think we need to start in the beginning. The Bible opens up in Genesis 1:1.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

In the very beginning, God was there. We know that God had to be God before the heavens and earth to have been able to create them. So we can gather that He always was. In John 1:1-3 we get a little more detail about what it was like at the creation. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

The Word that this is talking about is Jesus. By this we can know that Jesus and God were both there before the beginning, so they have no beginning. Revelation gives us even more detail and says that God is the beginning and the end. 

As humans, we all have a beginning. There is a day that we were born, and none of us will get to escape the day that we will die. We all have a defined beginning, and a defined end. Our God exists outside of that. 

Human beings also have a body. There is very defined matter that is a human, and it can be measured where that body stops. Contrary to humans, God cannot be contained in all of heaven, and much less can be contained inside a body.

Solomon when building the temple for God in 1 Kings 8:27 said:

Even heaven, the highest heaven, cannot contain you, 

Much less this temple I have built.

He knew that God could not be contained, yet humanity has tried over and over again, creating cast idols trying to put an image or a being to who God is. But God is more vast than we could ever imagine, and cannot be measured. 

Psalm 145:3 speaks of this as well, saying:

Great is the Lord! He is most worthy of praise!
    No one can measure his greatness.

So what does this have to do with us? Why should we care about the greatness and infiniteness of God?

Well, first it proves that we are not God (just in case that may have been in question). Since we can be measured, and we have a definite beginning and end, when held up to the standards God has set for being God, we don’t measure up. We fall short. This should cause us to walk humbly with God, knowing that He is greater, and knows better than we do.

Second, it can assure us that God is big enough to handle our questions. God is not threatened when we ask Him big questions like “why,” or “how?” He knows the answers, and He wants us to draw close to Him to find comfort in the questioning. Our questions are not a threat to God, and are even encouraged. God is more than big enough to handle them all. 

Third, knowing that God is infinite, and that the whole universe cannot contain all of Him, we know we are never far from where He is. He is everywhere, all around us. He is the air we breathe, we cannot hide from Him, there is no where we can go that He is not also there. Psalm 139:7-8 says we can’t go anywhere to escape from God. No matter where we go, He is there. 

So this week, what are some ways you can acknowledge God’s infiniteness?

How does God’s infiniteness change how you relate to Him?