God Is Not ‘Big’
Even heaven, the highest heaven, cannot contain you. - 1 Kings 8:27
Have you ever watched those clips where the camera backs away from Earth to show the size of the universe (here’s one)? It’s mind-boggling. The distances are so huge that even if we understand it, we can’t really connect with it. How do you grasp a distance of 93 billion light-years?
Have you ever tried to imagine how big God is? While the Bible occasionally gives metaphors to help us (Isaiah 40:12), the idea of bigness really has no meaning when referencing the infinite. The biggest you can imagine means nothing in a world without spatial measurement. Any “size” for God is a constraint.
God is not “big”; God is Spirit. Even though He can freely enter the spatial, He is other than that. We can say that God is bigger than our problems, but we probably mean God is sovereign and controls everything.
We see the struggle between our small frame of reference and the infinite play out when Moses asks God for His name (Exodus 3:13). In other words, Moses is trying to fit God into a role or a “box” like all the other gods. God comes back with, “My name is I AM.” He is not the god of fertility, the sun god, or the god of war. He is not confined, limited, or dependent; He is the great I AM – completely holy, just, loving, and sovereign.
When God took on flesh, He willingly confined Himself to this place and to the hate and violence and evil we are part of. Only the Perfect could take our sin upon Himself so we could become His children. And what does God want from us? Willful trust and dependence.
Jesus, I am too confined and broken to understand Your goodness the way I should – I’m sorry. Thank you for coming to rescue me. I want to see You the way I should and think of You the way I should. Please open my eyes.
Song: Wonderful Merciful Savior