The Immensity of God

God permeates all things.

Psalm 139:7–12 ESV

Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.

The things that matter

We get so busy, tied up in day to day things, school, sports, friends, and homework that we neglect thinking about the one thing that maters most. I know you have heard me say,

Matthew 6:33 ESV

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

but have you every thought about what that means? I have spent many messages extorting you to read your Bible everyday. I have told you about the many thing you can lose if you do not read your Bible daily. Things like, being manipulated by the world, or not knowing if you are saved, or even getting to heaven and being ashamed or worse hearing Jesus tell you

Matthew 7:23 ESV

And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

Today we are going to come at the topic from another angle; what do we gain from being in our Bible on a daily bases.

Who is God?

If you go on my website, aaronthale.com, you will find a Statement of Faith in that you will read these words about who God is:

“We believe in one God that has eternally existed from eternity past to eternity future in one essence and three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: The Holy Trinity having all goodness and sufficiency in Himself to whom belongs all praise, glory, and the allegiance of all created.”

Today I want to impress upon you how big God is. The reason I am talking about this is that we are privileged as Christians to be adopted into the family of God. This means to be in relationship with Him. The more you learn about God the more privileged you feel to be able to have a relationship with him. If we spend some time thinking about how big God is, I think it will give us a scene of awe that he wants to have a relationship with little us.

God is Big.

Immensity is actually a poor word to use to describe how big God is. Something that is immense can be measured. Like the Ocean or the Moon. God cannot be measured. Another good word would be infinite or never ending. But we cannot full get our minds around never ending and never beginning because this is outside our experience. So immense and other adjectives will have to do. So how Big is God? God is so big that all of time is inside him. The universe is inside God, God exists before the universe and he exists after it. Notice how I said that, he exists before and after the universe. Right now, God is before and after the universe. Lets talk about spatial and material existence.

Can anyone tell how far the universe is across?

No you cannot, from our perspective it is does not have an ending. However, it does have an ending

Isaiah 40:12–13 ESV

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord, or what man shows him his counsel?

Have you ever cupped a little water in your hand? God holds all the Oceans in in his hands. Have you ever look out at the night sky and wondered how far it goes? God can measure it with his hand? Think about that.

How about the smallest particular in the universe?

Quarks and preons are subatomic partials that we cannot even see. We can measure that they are there but we cannot see them but God exists where they are as well. He can see them, and weigh them, and knows where they are and what they are doing. Not only that he knows where everyone of them are and what they are doing, at all times.

So God can measure the universe and be out side the universe while at the same being inside the universe.

Here is an example, Imagine that God is the Pacific ocean and the universe is a bucket. If you take that bucket out to the middle of the Ocean and let it fill with water and sink. That would be what all time is like in God. God is inside time all the way down to the littlest part and all the way outside time at the same time.

Do you ever feel you are Coram Deo?

Have you ever been praying or worshiping and felt God really close to you? Like he was in the room or even sitting beside you? After all we just talked about the questions we should be asking is why don’t we feel God all the time. He is always there, no mater where we are, so why is it that we can feel him some times and not others. This is relationship, and this is where your bible reading comes in. The more you are like God the more you can have a relationship with him. Paul tells us

Romans 8:29 ESV

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

By doing our daily reading we become more and more conformed to the image of Jesus. The more conformed we are the more we are going to feel God close to us. When we feel close to God that is a moment of Coram Deo (in the presence of God). We can call this communing with God.

Here is an example, we can be friends with a dog but we cannot commune with a dog. (might need to explain commune verse friend) We are just too different from the dog. They cannot understand us on a deep level. This is a lot like what it’s like communing with God. When we are on God’s wave length (tuned into God’s channel), when we are thinking about the things of God, we take on more of God’s nature, we become more like God, in a very small way and when that happens we are able to have our own Coram Deo (meeting with God).

Do you want to meet with God?

This is the greatest reason for reading your Bible. We are going to be exploring more about God over the next month or two and I hope you will start to see that God is the reason we read the Bible. Doing it because we do not want to be being manipulated by the world, or even getting to heaven and being ashamed or worse. Those are things we have to take into account, however, Jesus said

John 14:15 ESV

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

This is why we read the Bible, because we love God and we want to know him more and Jesus said,

John 8:31 ESV

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples,

Being God’s disciples is how we avoid all of the other things.