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| God Has No Perimeter! |
| ... A Very Important Perspective ... |
It is very natural for us to try and understand God by relating Him to our experience of reality, but we need to remember that,
as the Creator of everything, His eternal infinity means that He exceeds any definition our minds can ever construct to contain Him!
as the Creator of everything, His eternal infinity means that He exceeds any definition our minds can ever construct to contain Him!
traditional theological definitions of –
omnipotence (all-powerful); omniscience (all knowing); omnipresent (present everywhere),
are human constructs to try and explain Him, but they cannot in any sense be the limit of human understanding of the source of all existence. Even space and time itself, which astronomy has helped us comprehend a little better, cannot contain Him!
He is beyond any limit!
But He has chosen to show Himself to us that we might be able to fulfil the unique purpose of our existence.
Christianity has tended to go the way of all religions in setting limits on God and His behaviour:
by seeing Heaven as His home, and seeing salvation as His way of cleaning up the mess caused by human disobedience.
God does not need a home. He is infinite spirit, in other words, His person is not defined or limited in any way by time and space.
He does not need a place, any place, to exist.
God humbled Himself to create all things, in entering into a direct relationship to that which is limited, which had a beginning.
It was in this self-limiting act of creating that His relationship to the rest of His own being changed, to the one whom we call the Father who now, therefore, represents the ultimate sovereignty of God's person. |
| The title "Son" refers to Jesus as Israel’s messiah (Psalm 2:7), and does not mean that He was created by the Father, as many have misunderstood. |
aspect of God is presented to us in the God's inspired book of Holy Scripture as being the person of Jesus, before He entered human identity. In other words, before His second step-down to now limit Himself to our human framework of existence, He had previously stepped down from His infinity to create all that exists, bringing time and space into existence. That is why the Bible tells us of this as –
| "His beloved Son [Jesus], in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn [head] of all creation. For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether [angelic] thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. " |
This is why the centre of the universe, of all that exists, is not God in His palace called Heaven. The Bible presents it as being a judicial court to which all its administrative officials are directly accountable, even the rebellious Satan and his associates, for all that exists falls under the administration of this judicial court, functioning in terms of the relationship which the Creator introduced after the near extermination of life on this planet, in what is referred to a the Flood of Noah, represented by a rainbow around the judicial throne and the four angelic beings bearing the representative likenesses of the four categories of biological life guaranteed by that Covenant of the Creator: humans (human head), wild animals (lion's head), domesticated animals (ox head), birds (eagle head).
This administrative structure as described in Revelation Four
symbolically portrays the current relationship of the creation to the sovereignty of God.
symbolically portrays the current relationship of the creation to the sovereignty of God.
The intrinsic limitlessness of the eternal infinity of God needs to to be understood as the background to His self-humbling in Jesus the Christ of God
and to the process involved in His continuing management of history through the plan of salvation
which eventually renews the whole creation limitlessly so that the end is greater than its beginning!
and to the process involved in His continuing management of history through the plan of salvation
which eventually renews the whole creation limitlessly so that the end is greater than its beginning!
To integrate this into human understanding, it could be seen as in two spheres: the metaphysical and the moral. So the metaphysical may be seen as
• ETERNAL INFINITY, and the moral as
• SELFLESS LOVE,
for which the New Testament uses the Hellenistic Greek word Agape. Or, as Charles Finney accurately put it –
• ETERNAL INFINITY, and the moral as
• SELFLESS LOVE,
for which the New Testament uses the Hellenistic Greek word Agape. Or, as Charles Finney accurately put it –
which moral character he then defined, in the terminology of his time, as "disinterested benevolence". (Finney CG, 1878:403).
