BASIC BIBLE DOCTRINE

Understanding God

Lesson Twelve: Comprehending the Incomprehensible

Infinite God cannot be understood by finite man.  Another way of saying that is, any understanding of God we can gain is limited—and understanding unlimited God is infinitely beyond our limited abilities.  In order for our finite minds to grasp Him we must try to recognize his attributes as He relates to us and try to break down or reduce them into categories so that we can comprehend them.  But we can’t break down the unbreakable.  We cannot reduce the irreducible.  Nevertheless we are going to attempt to gain a tiny portion of understanding of the nature of God in this series, just as long as you keep in mind that what we are attempting is ultimately impossible—it is only possible in a very limited sense.

UPDATE!  In the section of this lesson dealing with the concept of infinity we used the idea of fractals to demonstrate the concept of infinitely small.  We now have an animated GIF that zooms in on a Mandelbrot fractal to illustrate this concept.  To view this click on “More” below and scroll down about a fourth of the way through the lesson.

BASIC BIBLE DOCTRINE

Understanding God

Lesson Twelve:

Comprehending the Incomprehensible

by John McReynolds

As is our custom in these studies, before we begin we remind you to be sure that you are cleansed of sin and filled with the Holy Spirit.  This is especially important as we enter into the studies in front of us, for understanding the essence and nature of God is particularly difficult—it can only be done in the filling of the Holy Spirit.  With that in mind, be sure you have confessed all known sins to the Father before you continue:

Thank You Father for the opportunity to study what You have revealed to us about Yourself.  Give us grace to aid in our understanding as we undertake this challenging subject, for we ask it in Christ’s name—amen.

When I considered where we were going in our studies in Basic Bible Doctrine after we left our last subject of prayer, I hesitated before deciding to delve into this next subject—the Essence and Persons of God.  The longer I have been in the Word of God, the less I find that I really understand about God—and the more I find that I am unqualified to teach about God.  But then when I research what other—far more qualified men than me have written about Him—men with advanced degrees in Theology from well respected seminaries who have spent their entire professional lives in the pursuit of theological understanding—I find that there comes a point when even these accomplished theologians must stop and confess that they don’t really understand Him at all.  The reason for this is that the finite human mind cannot grasp the infinite essence of God.  Ultimately every person who pursues an understanding of God’s nature must arrive at a point where they have no choice but to fall on their faces before Him and worship, or they must turn away from Him and flee.

Of Jugs and Coins and Grains of Sand

For us humans the problem really boils down to boundaries.  Let’s look at two words we just used—finite and infinite.  According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, finite means:

1 a: having definite or definable limits (as in “a finite number of possibilities”) b: having a limited nature or existence (as in “finite beings”)
2 : completely determinable in theory or in fact by counting, measurement, or thought (as in “the finite velocity of light”)

According to this definition then if we say we are finite beings it just means that we are limited—there are limits that define our existence—we are of limited size, ability, capacity, and duration.  If we say the world we live in is limited it means—theoretically at least—there comes a point where we have discovered everything about it we can.

Have you ever seen one of those big glass or plastic jugs filled with coins of various denominations, with a sign in front saying you can win all the money in the jug if you can guess exactly how much is in it?  There are a lot of coins in such a display, and while we can make a pretty good guess at how much it is, if someone gets it right just by looking at the coin filled jug, it’s really just luck.  But if we could empty the jug onto a big table we could accurately count all the coins and come up with the correct amount. That’s the meaning of finite: the bottom, walls, and top of the jug limit the amount of coins it can hold, and the amount of coins in it can be determined by counting.

But now let’s look at the word infinite.  Again, according to Merriam-Webster infinite means:

1) extending indefinitely;
2) immeasurably or inconceivably great or extensive: inexhaustible (as in “infinite patience”);
3) subject to no limitation or external determination;
4) a: extending beyond, lying beyond, or being greater than any preassigned finite value however large (as in “an infinite number of positive numbers”) b: extending to infinity (as in an infinite plane surface).

The human mind cannot truly grasp the concept of infinity except in the theoretical sense. In the practical realm we can approach the idea of infinite only if we think of terms like “immeasurable” or “uncountable”.  An example would be trying to count the grains of sand on all of the world’s beaches and in all the world’s deserts.  That would be a task impossible for any human—there’s no way anyone could live long enough to do that—not to mention the near “infinite” patience such a job would require.  But, although it changes constantly because rocks are being broken down into sand constantly, at any given moment there is a finite number of grains of sand in the world.  One source I looked at conservatively estimated the number at 7,500,000,000,000,000,000,000.  That’s 7 sextillion, 500 quintillion.  Even our national debt is puny by comparison.  Counting at the rate of three grains of sand per second, it would take nearly 80 trillion years to do the job!  Whatever the actual number is, it is incomprehensively huge!  Only God knows what it actually is.

So there’s the idea of infinitely large—but there is also such a thing as infinitely small.  When I was a boy my parents bought me a microscope.  I used to get some water from a stagnant pool near our house and look at it under the microscope.  It was amazing!  Twisted strands of algae, microscopic creatures such as amoebas and paramecia—I could see a whole host of microscopic fauna and flora with that microscope. There is a whole other world in a drop of dirty pond water beyond what can be seen by the naked eye.

The Greek natural philosophers came up a novel concept of determining how small is small, strictly by deductive reasoning.  They reasoned that if you took a knife and cut a piece of gold in two, then took  one of the pieces and cut it in half, and kept going in that fashion, eventually you would get to something you could not cut in two.  These Greek philosophers theorized that matter was made up of particles that could not be split or broken down into smaller parts, and came up with the idea of atoms more than 2,500 years ago!  In fact the word “atom” comes from the Greek word atomos (ἄτομος) which means uncuttable or undividable.

Today scientists know that even atoms are made up of smaller particles of matter—protons, neutrons, electrons, and a whole host of even smaller sub-atomic particles.  Today’s scientists have succeeded in taking pictures of of individual atoms, but we cannot resolve the components of atoms.  Even with today’s technology there are limits as to how small we can see.  But theoretically there is no limit to the idea of “small”.

This can be demonstrated with fractals—mathematically generated images that are infinitely complex.  These images can only be explored with computers.  Today software is available that runs on personal computers that can resolve beautiful, complex, infinitely varied images of fractals.  One can progressively “zoom in” on portions of these images and discover that these tiny portions are as complex as the parent image.  The only limit to how small the portions can be is how small a number the computer can process.  Here we have an animated GIF file that shows the effect of zooming in on a Mandelbrot fractal.  At the scale of the smallest image in this loop the parent image would be 2,000,000 miles across! (Click on the above image to see it from the beginning.)

Why am I going to such lengths with this?  Because I want you to see that even with our Hubble telescope with which we can see millions of light years into space, we have only seen a tiny fraction of what is there.  With our scanning electron microscopes and other marvelous technology we can actually image molecules and even atoms.  But we know that there is far more than we are able to  see in the smallest portions of creation.

But God can not only see all of creation, both as far as it extends in all of its incomprehensible hugeness, and as small as it is in its tiniest complexity but He exists everywhere in it, and infinitely beyond it.  In other words, as an infinite Being, God extends unendingly beyond any concept our minds can conceive, either large, far, or small.

Infinity is a tough concept to grasp, isn’t it?  Understanding God is even tougher. Fortunately God has told us a lot about Himself in the pages of Scripture.  In the several lessons in this series, Understanding God, we will be exploring what God has to say about Himself.  You see, God intends for us to know Him—He designed us for the purpose of knowing Him and fellowshipping with Him, both in this life and the next.  This is the primary aim of Bible study—to know God.

Attempting the Impossible

Infinite God cannot be understood by finite man.  Another way of saying that is, any understanding of God we can gain is limited—and understanding unlimited God is infinitely beyond our limited abilities.  In order for our finite minds to grasp what He as revealed about Himself we must try to recognize his attributes as He relates to us and try to break down or reduce them into categories so that we can comprehend them.  But we can’t break down the unbreakable.  We cannot reduce the irreducible.  Nevertheless we are going to attempt to gain a tiny portion of understanding of the nature of God in this series, just as long as you keep in mind that what we are attempting is ultimately impossible—it is only possible in a very limited sense.

In an effort to gain some understanding of God, what theologians have attempted to do is categorize the truths that are revealed in Scripture about God.  This has resulted in them coming up with a number of different attributes or qualities of God.  Now there are probably as many different numbers and combinations of attributes as there are theologians that are attempting to capture the essence and attributes of God.  We have adopted a particular list of Divine attributes as best describing the essence of God, and it is primarily this list we are going to be examining over the next several lessons.

Before we get any further into this we need to make sure we have our terminology straight.  I’ve been throwing around words like “attributes”, “essence”, and “qualities”, so let me start by giving some definitions of these words.  These are not necessarily dictionary definitions, but they are working definitions that we can use strictly for the purposes of this study.

The first of these is essence.  When we refer to the essence of God we are talking about the ultimate nature of God.  God’s essence includes the qualities and attributes of Deity that makes Him what He is.

Under the concept of essence we have qualities.  When we speak of God’s qualities we are speaking to those aspects of His essential nature that relate more to His absolute excellence than to how He relates to us as humanity.

When we refer to God’s attributes, we will be referring to those aspects of His nature that become more evident as He relates to humanity. There are more words we can use—and probably will—but these three should serve us adequately for purposes of this study.

We will begin with a list of some of the most obvious qualities of God.  Remember that God’s qualities refer to His excellence.  These qualities are:

• God is Infinite.
• God is Immense.
• God is Absolute.
• God is Unapproachable.
• God is Undiminishable.
• God is Eternal.
• God is Unity (one).

Now before we get into a discussion about the qualities of God let’s just set down a list of God’s attributes.  Remember that in our working definition God’s attributes refer to His characteristics as He relates to us as humanity:

• God is Sovereign.
• God is Righteous.
• God is Justice.
• God is Love.
• God is Eternal Life.
• God is Omniscient.
• God is Omnipotent.
• God is Omnipresent.
• God is Immutable.
• God is Veracity (truth).

We will do a study on each of these attributes, but for now let’s start then by looking at the list of the qualities of God that He possesses by virtue of being infinite and absolute. Again, these are the qualities of infinite God—remember the working definitions we gave earlier.

God is Infinite

We have already had a fairly intensive look at the concept of infinity. But just to review, infinite means endless, unlimited, without bounds or boundaries of any kind.  We have looked at the concept of infinitely large, and infinitely small.  But there are some other concepts related to infinity that we have not explored yet.  One of these is timelessness, but we will explore that when we look at God as eternal.  Another is absolute or perfect, which we will look at shortly.  But there is another term that relates to the concept of lack of boundaries I want to explore first, which we have listed separately as a quality of God:

God is Immense

God is immense.  The word “immense” comes from a Latin word, immensus.  It literally means immeasurable, unknowable, without discoverable boundaries.  Immense does not mean merely big—it means God extends endlessly beyond His finite creation; He has no boundaries or limits. God extends without end beyond space and time, because space and time—where we exist—is finite. Thus He transcends His creation, which means He cannot be contained—even partially—by His creation.  As King Solomon said at the dedication of the temple he built for God, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You, how much less this house which I have built!”—1 Kings 8:27.

Not only does God extend endlessly beyond the capacity of His creation to contain Him, He extends infinitely beyond the capacity of His creatures to understand Him—including angels and men.  “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!” —Romans 11:33.  “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it.” —Psalm 139:6.

This is something of the meaning of the statement “God is immense.”  And as unfathomable as that concept is, at the same time that God cannot be contained—even partially—by His creation, He is also present, in His entirety, at every point in His creation!  “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there Your hand will lead me, and Your right hand will lay hold of me.” —Psalm 139:7-10.

And at the same time that infinite God must always remain unfathomable to us, His creation, He desires that we know Him—not as slaves groveling in fear—but as children who know their Father and are His heirs: “For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ The [Holy] Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God [the Father] and fellow heirs with Christ” —Romans 8:15-17a.

God is Absolute

God’s perfections are absolute.  This means that His qualities and attributes are perfection itself, and cannot be improved in any way.  This means that His character is perfect and not flawed in any way with even a hint of sin—which also means that He cannot tolerate sin in the least.

Years ago I worked as a chemist for a large chemical company in Houston.  This was back in the days when environmental concerns were beginning to emerge in the public consciousness and government standards were starting to be set as to how much of certain pollutants could be released into the environment by an industrial facility.  I remember once having a conversation with an engineer who was complaining about new Federal regulations limiting the amount of a certain chemical that could be present in the wastewater we put into the Houston Ship Channel.  The standard was 30 parts per billion (ppb)—the concentration of the chemical in our effluent wastewater could be no more than that.

The engineer stated that 30 ppb was the equivalent dissolving a cup of of sugar into a million gallon municipal water supply—nobody would be able to taste it.  I pointed out that it would also be the equivalent of someone pouring four ounces of urine into that same water tank.  Just how keen would he be to drink a glass of water from a water tank—even a million gallon one—he knew that someone had urinated into?

God’s standards for “sin pollution” are far more stringent that that—in fact they are infinitely more strict.  God cannot tolerate any sin in any amount.  Even if in all the history of mankind only one tiny “white lie” had been committed by humanity that would have been enough to condemn the entire human race—and Jesus Christ would still have had to die for that one sin in order to save humanity.  God is absolutely pure—and no amount of sin is acceptable to Him.

God’s absolute nature also means that anything that proceeds from God is also absolutely perfect—His thoughts, His words, His judgments, His creation.  I can just hear someone out there saying, “Now hold on preacher! How can you say creation is perfect?  People die all the time from natural catastrophes like tornadoes, hurricanes, like Katrina and Ike that killed hundreds in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, tsunamis like the one in the Indian Ocean that claimed the lives of thousands, earthquakes, like the recent ones in Haiti and Chile.  That doesn’t sound like perfection to me!”

And you’re right, nature is far from perfect—in many ways it is flawed.  But it is not flawed because God made it flawed.  When God created the world it was perfect—“God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” —Gen. 1:31.  In that verse the Hebrew phrase translated “very good” actually means absolutely good or perfect. But nature today is flawed, and that is because of sin.  After Adam’s original sin in the Garden the earth became cursed, and nature became twisted.  Before the Fall the earth provided all of Adam and Eve’s physical needs with little or no effort required on their part.  But after their sin all that changed.  “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; by the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” —Gen. 3:17b-19.

God is Unapproachable

Infinite, absolute God is unapproachable.  This is not talking about approaching the Throne of Grace through prayer—that’s a grace provision of God, as we have learned in previous lessons. When we say God is unapproachable, we mean that God in His essence cannot be approached by any of His finite creatures, unless God makes it possible for us to approach Him.  In fact, it is fatal to fallen humanity to be directly exposed to the essence of God.  He must shield us as it were, because He is an “all-consuming fire”—Exo. 24:17; Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29.  In fact, in Exo. 33 Moses desired to directly see Yahweh (God).  He only allowed Moses to view His back, because as Yahweh said in verse 20, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!”

It also means that His perfections, or His excellencies cannot be attained by the improving of any of man’s relative qualities. We cannot approach God or attain His perfections by anything we can do, and no one else has ever done it either, or ever will.  In other words no one will ever become God by self-improvement, multiple reincarnations, or any of the other goofy ways that some people have imagined.  “For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me …”—Isa. 46:9.

God is Undiminishable

God is undiminishable. There are at least two aspects to this quality of undiminishability. The first is that Gods resources are infinite.  When He gives help or bestows blessings His resources are not diminished in the least.  He cannot be impoverished by any act of His creatures, or even by any act of His own.  As King Asa said in 2 Chron. 14:11, “… it is nothing with thee to help …”  The hymn writer Annie Johnson Flint put it very well in the well known hymn, He Giveth More Grace:

His love has no limit;
His grace has no measure;
His power has no boundary known unto men.
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus,
He giveth, and giveth,
And giveth again.

Undiminishable also means that His qualities and attributes cannot be diminished from their state of perfection.  As we will see later in this study God is not some person who improved and improved until one day He became God.  He always was God with all of His infinite and absolute attributes, and He always will be thus in a state of total and complete perfection.  He did not progress from imperfection to perfection; He was always perfection, always perfect existence, and will always be perfect existence.  Since He did not become God, He cannot “unbecome” God.  He cannot be reduced or diminished in any way.

God is Eternal

Another aspect of God’s infinite nature is that God is eternal.  The Divine quality of eternity is what relates to man’s perception of time.  We view time as similar to a river.  What is downstream from us is the past—what has already occurred.  What is upstream from us is what is future to us.  But God’s infinite perspective on time views the river of time as a single whole—from its headwaters in the mountains of eternity to its destination in the sea of eternity.

God created time—and thus He exists outside of time.  He transcends time in other words. God has always existed, and always will exist.  From our perspective His existence extends endlessly into the past, and endlessly into the future—God is therefore timeless, His existence is not dependant on or affected by time in the least.  The eternity of God encompasses all of time with its succession of past, present, and future events.  For God there is no past or future—there is only one infinite now.  But not only does His eternity encompass historical events and future events, it also encompasses every shade of contingency from the impossible, the improbable, the possible, the likely, and the certain.

While men view time as a succession of events, God sees it as a unified whole.  One theologian, Dr. Berkhof, defined eternity as, “that perfection of God whereby He is elevated above all temporal limits and all succession of moments, and possesses the whole of His existence in one indivisible present.”  In other words, as men we see the events of our lives as a flawed perception of present reality, a fading and usually flawed memory of past reality, and no reliable perception of future reality.  On the other hand from His eternal perspective God sees everything as one eternal now, and His perception is one of absolute clarity, unimpeded by the temporal limitations we humans have.

Time is really the sum total of the succession of an incomprehensibly vast number of events—immensely more numerous than all the grains of sand in the world.  Each event is dependent on a previous event, and gives rise to another event.  All these events are separated from each other by intervals of time—some long intervals, some vanishingly small. From our perspective then, time results in a separation of causes and their effects.  And because from our perspective time flows in one direction only, from the past into the future, causes always precede their effects.

However, this is not necessarily so from God’s perspective.  From the perspective of God’s eternality, time vanishes to zero, and with it all intervals of time separating causes and effects.  So from God’s perspective all causes and all effects of all events in time and history exist together in one infinite, eternal now.

You may be wondering why I am straining to communicate this aspect of God’s eternality, but it is important to an understanding of certain paradoxes that arise when considering the essence of God—one of the most famous being the apparent conflict between the sovereign will of God and the free will of man.

We will explore this further when we get into our next lesson.

God is Unity

God is unity (one)—Because God is absolute, His attributes or perfections are—from the standpoint of His essence—indistinguishable and inseparable from each other. This means that his essence is undividable. He truly is One. All of the qualities and characteristics we attribute to God are limited; God gave them to us to help limited man understand His unlimited and infinite nature. But in reality all of His qualities, perfections and attributes are the same thing; they are inseparably united as one unified whole in the Person of God. Some theologians refer to this quality as “simplicity”.  That is to say from the standpoint of His essence God is not made up of “parts.”

If you have followed this somewhat rambling lesson to this point, you will have noticed that when I begin talking about God’s absoluteness, I end up talking about His immensity.  When I talk about His immensity, I end up talking about His eternity.  When I talk about His eternity, I end up talking about His infinity.  The reason that happens is because of His unity.  All of these perfections that He has revealed to us and we have have catalogued into categories, are really only aspects of the same perfect, infinite, immense, absolute, unapproachable, undiminishable, eternal, One God.

Looking at the perfections of God is somewhat like looking at a perfect, unflawed, exquisitely cut diamond.  You look into one facet and are entranced by the beautiful color emanating from its depths.  Then you turn the gem slightly to get a slightly different perspective, only to have the color you perceived before be transformed into an entirely different color.  We will see this phenomenon frequently as we progress in this series, Understanding God.

In our next study we are going to begin with the first attribute in the list of attributes we gave earlier—the sovereignty of God.

We are thankful, Heavenly Father, that You have condescended to reveal Yourself to us, and that You have done it in such a way that we can understand what You want us to know about You, while at the same time withholding from us knowledge of You that would certainly destroy us.  Yet we know, Father, that someday when You have transformed us into creatures that are unimaginable to our imaginations that we will know far more about you—in fact we will have an eternity to learn what there is to learn about you—and we will never exhaust the new things we will discover, for “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now we know in part, but then we will know fully just as we also have been fully known.”   So thank You Father, for Your revelation of Yourself.  May these studies challenge us to live in such a way as to honor and glorify our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, for it is in His name we ask it, amen.

To the reader:  If you have read this lesson, I would greatly appreciate any feedback, questions, or comments you have.  Getting feedback from my readers is very helpful and encouraging to me.  I promise to respond to all legitimate questions or comments as appropriate.  But please, do keep your questions and comments appropriate and constructive.

Thank you very much.

In His Service,

John McReynolds

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