Some evenings I go into the backyard of my house before heading to bed. Out there under the star-studded Arizona sky, I often feel the presence of God. “Thank You” is all I can say to Him, but it seems to be enough. The God of all that I see and more has loved me enough to not just notice me but to join me. What an awesome God He is.
In a couple of previous posts, I’ve covered a little about God being infinite, and I thought I’d expand on that a little today. Forgive me if my math is wrong. I wasn’t a math major but a philosophy major, although some philosophers were great mathematicians like Pascal and DesCartes, it isn’t true of me.
This post stems from an interesting discussion I’ve been having with a Jehovah’s Witness about the Trinity and how God can be three Persons but one God. During this discussion, I have been trying to explain as best I can God’s infinity.
In past blogs, I’ve defined infinity as a number so great it cannot be counted. There are a lot of atomic particles in the universe, but there is not an infinite number of particles. They could be counted if we only had the time. It is estimated that the number is 10^80. That’s a lot. Not a weekend project, counting those. But infinity is even greater, and it comes with seeming contradictions. Infinity cannot be divided, added to, or multiplied with the result being a greater or lesser number. It can be subtracted from, but only infinity from itself, resulting in zero.
So, if God is infinite and He has three “parts” (I’ll use that word since there isn’t a word I know that describes a part of infinity), then each of the three parts is the same number as the combination of the parts. Each of the three parts/Persons is exactly equal to the other two.
To add to the issue, God is neither limited temporal nor is He limited spatially. On top of all that, God is equally and fully present at any spot in the universe. God is actually infinite, meaning He is infinite by nature, has always been infinite, and will always be infinite. You and I are potentially temporally infinite. We had a beginning, but we will potentially live an infinite amount of time going forward.
To get back to the contradictions involved, if the Son is infinite, then He is fully equal to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and with God as a whole. He is not equal to the Trinity since He is distinct from the other two Persons of the Trinity.
They are all equal in essence, equal in nature, equally infinite.
The reason this is so difficult to understand, besides my still thinking it through and not fully understanding it myself, is because we have no infinity to experience or observe ourselves to place it up against.
Time past is not infinite because infinity is a number that is beyond counting; we would have to cross an uncountable number of events to reach today. There could not even be a starting point for an infinite series of events.
It appears we don’t have an infinite in space either. Space is measured as the distance between two points. Once we run out of things (points), we might run out of space and enter a void. Some cosmologists believe there is a void outside of our universe. No matter the theory, the universe is still pretty big. According to the NASA/WMAP, the current estimate of the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across. That still isn’t infinity.
Why is this important?
Our God is an awesome God. He is located in every inch of that 93 billion light-years spatially and was there when the universe began (Gen. 1:1; John 1:3).
As you can see from the confusion I’ve laid out, and probably added to, anything our finite minds might create in an attempt to understand an infinite God ends up approaching babble. I don’t think we should stop trying to understand Who and What God is, though. He gave us a mind to use in our love and worship of Him (Matt. 22:37). I think He sees our meager attempts as acts of love. We’re trying to draw nearer to the great and awesome God of all.
Believers Armed and Dangerous 