The Bigness of God

In Genesis 11, humanity, united in the generations after the flood, decides to apply the pinnacle of human technology in an attempt to reach the heavens. This technological marvel will allow them to come face-to-face with God. Humanity has created the brick, and they mean to build a tower to the heavens.

It is not long before God confounds their speech and scatters humanity to the four winds. Was this a rebuke of human pride? Had God picked that moment to create a multi-cultural and multi-lingual world? Or, was God simply revealing a microliter of his power, so that we would take solace in His strength and knowledge instead of our own? The answer is probably yes. Yes to all three. Yes to more.

A Glimpse at the Human Picture of God

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. And, our all-powerful, all-knowing, always present God is big. Really big.

Humanity continues to stack bricks on the Tower of Babel. We have flown higher than where the heavens were thought to begin. We have a word for a number bigger than all the others. We have mapped the human genome. Our scientists have seen the edges of the universe. We have built bombs powerful enough to bring an end to all life on earth.

We are so powerful. We know so much. We have been so many places.

In fact, in our scan of the heavens, scientists have recently (within the last few decades) discovered quasars. Quasars are interesting, because humanity had no knowledge of them before the 1950’s. To my understanding, quasars are vaguely similar to stars, powered by supermassive black holes, surrounded by a disk of illuminated gas, and impossibly big. How big? According to Wikipedia, quasars “[emit] up to a thousand times the energy output of the Milky Way, which contains 200-400 billion stars.”

God hid sparks of light and energy throughout the universe that are three hundred quadrillion times more bright than the average star in our galaxy!

When numbers like quadrillion must be applied, mathematicians get excited. Mathematicians have all kinds of numbers. They have natural numbers, which the layman calls counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, and so on. They have fractions, rational numbers, irrational numbers, real numbers, and even imaginary numbers. Almost sounds spiritual.

The idea of nothing as a number happened for most forms of mathematics within the second millennium. Zero is still newish.

Infinity dates back further, probably 500 years before Christ. But, the idea that there is a number bigger than all others has occurred to just about every 2nd grader when describing how much stronger his dad is than his friend’s dad. Infinity plus one is the first step towards taking the game to the next level.

We know there are those things that we would like to quantify but can’t due to impossibility. This is different than those things that are seemingly impossible to count, like the grains of sand on a beach or the drops of water in the ocean. The number of different ways a circle can be cut in half: infinite. The number of years in forever: infinite. A mother’s love for her child: infinite.

I believed God to be infinite, as He is utterly unquantifiable. I now believe He is past the infinity plus one category. For our purposes, perhaps infinity is big enough to describe God. But, personally, I believe it limits our view of how big He actually is. Perhaps, infinity, is merely the number zero in God’s mathematics. This is probably still limiting the bigness of God.

The Limitations of Humanity

Let’s return to science, our language for describing the physical world. And, so much of science and what we know of the universe around us is based on the observable. Observable does not simply mean what can be seen with our eyes, but it is limited by the human ability to perceive and discern. And, the instrument most often used throughout human history to observe has, however, been our eyes, our utterly remarkable eyes. With our eyes, we can see shape and movement, we can discern emotion and danger, and we can see color! So many colors!

Well, actually, humans have trichromatic eyes. That is, we can only see three colors: red, green, and blue. Obviously, we can see the combinations of these colors, but only combinations that consist of red, green, and blue. Most other mammals are dichromatic, seeing two colors—think black and white. Some insects are trichromatic like us, but see blue, green, and ultraviolet. Imagine those combinations! Even more spectacular, fish and birds typically see in four pigments, tetrachromancy. Imagine the jump from being able to only discern two pigments to three. The difference between black-and-white and all of the colors that humans can enjoy. Imagine how much farther the color spectrum expands by simply adding one more cone receptor to the eye that is capable of discerning one extra color. Like describing the color cerulean to a blind person, how would a tetrachromat individual describe their colors to us? What would a rainbow look like? What does color look like to a God not even limited by infinity?

The simple addition of one dimension of pigment opens up a whole new magnitude of color palettes. Dimensionality is another domain in which we can expand our understanding of the indefinable bigness of God. Humans exist in a three-dimensional world, at least spatially. We can go up and down, forward and backward, and left and right. Videos of Carl Sagan, one of the imminent astrophysicists of the late 20th century, can be seen where he attempts to describe the fourth dimension to the layman. To do this, he begins by having the viewer imagine that instead of living in three dimensions, he lives in two dimensions: Flatland. In Flatland, denizens can move forward and backward, left and right, but not up and down. In fact the idea of up and down does not exist. Seeing up is impossible. The two dimensional universe is infinitely thinner than paper. Dr. Sagan then has the viewer imagine a three dimensional cone suspended above this two-dimensional world. The cone will drive through the plane in which the two-dimensional viewer is pretending he exists. Now, the viewer’s two-dimensional avatar cannot even imagine what a cone is, let alone see it suspended above his universe. To him, it is outside the universe in another dimension. But, as the tip of the cone drives through the 2D universe, a dot is seen on the landscape. As the cone pushes through, the dot becomes a small circle. As the cone continues through, the circle increases in size until it suddenly disappears when the cone has completely passed through.

Now, Dr. Sagan, was unmistakably not a Christian. But, our big God uses his believers and non-believers alike. My friend Matt Duerstine, expanded on Dr. Sagan’s Flatland theory. Imagine that a benevolent three-dimensional hand the size of a city were to drive through Flatland. The thumb might be going through the suburbs, the index finger through downtown, and the ring finger through the industrial district. To each of the Flatland inhabitants close enough to see the phenomenon, a shape similar to a circle would appear to be changing in width at each of these intersections. Few would realize that the five circles (cross sections of fingers and a thumb) were all part of the same hand, much less connected to an unimaginable being.

A Bigger Picture of God

Instead of a God who has only one more dimension than us and a hand the size of a city, we worship a God that is beyond infinitely present. He reveals Himself to us in thought, prayer, dreams, actions, and experiences. He is the still, small voice in our heads. He is Jesus come to earth. He is in all places at all times. He always was and alway will be. He is the Creator of all that is seen and unseen.

When we forget how big God is, we forget who God is. We limit Him.

Quasars aren’t even big enough to be a subatomic particle to God. Math, Science, Art, Music, Language are but letters in His alphabet, gifts given to us to describe the beauty of His creation. A billion years are His nanosecond, and He can experience a nanosecond as a billion years. Infinity is his number zero.

The irony of the story of the Tower of Babel is that we do not worship a God that requires that we build a heavens-tall tower to reach Him. Even with His beyond infinite magnanimity, He loves us and makes Himself available to us at every thought. He knows the number of hairs on our head, he created our inmost being, and he knit us together in our mother’s womb. We are loved.