The omnipresent God of Scripture is bigger than our minds are capable of understanding. By omnipresent, we mean that the Lord is present everywhere.
His omnipresence could be seen as a frightening thing. There is never a moment of privacy, in which we may hide our actions from the Lord. He is everywhere. The Psalmist asked:
Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there Your hand will lead me, and Your right hand will lay hold of me (Psalm 139:7-10).
Yet to say that God is omnipresent still falls short of defining the scope of His presence. The Lord’s presence fills the entirety of creation, yet He is not bound by the limits of His own creation. He is the infinite God of our finite universe. The brilliant Saint Augustine once wrote,
Since, then, thou dost fill the heaven and earth, do they contain thee? Or, dost thou fill and overflow them, because they cannot contain thee? And where dost thou pour out what remains of thee after heaven and earth are full? For the vessels which thou dost fill do not confine thee.
The infinite God fills and overflows his own finite creation. Take a moment and absorb this truth. If we are honest, our minds can neither understand the concept of a finite universe, nor can we imagine an infinite God. Yet Scripture declares that both are true. If a divine messenger brought us to the edge of the created universe, our minds would immediately demand to know what lies beyond the its boundaries. We cannot fathom a point of non-existence. On the other hand, if the same messenger brought us before the infinite God of the universe, our finite minds could not possibly understand a God without limits. Our minds could not chase down the boundaries of an infinite Being.
It is quite humbling to realize that human minds can neither understand the finite nor the infinite.
The scope of our universe — with its incomprehensible stars and its expansive galaxies — pales in comparison to the infinite nature of our God. The size of God is mind-boggling! Heaven and earth cannot confine Him; He fills and overflows them. The prophet Isaiah tells us that God has marked off the boundaries of the heavens with only the breadth of His hand (Isa 40:12).
Stop and think about this for a moment. Earlier, we examined the enormity of our own sun. In the scope of our galaxy and our universe, the sun is but a speck of dust.
Our sun is one of at least 200 billion stars in our galaxy, and NASA scientists estimate that there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Andromeda, which is the galaxy closest to our Milky Way galaxy, is 200 million light years away. One light year (the distance that light travels in one year) reaches 5.8 trillion miles long. This means that the closest of the 100 billion galaxies is 1.17 sextillion miles away. On paper this number would read: 1,173,139,200,000,000,000,000 miles away, and this is the closest of billions of galaxies — all measured in the span of God’s hand!
The children’s song, “He’s got the whole world in His hands,” is the epitome of understatement.
The study of astronomy forces mankind to contend with the truth that man is very small, and our Creator is unfathomably big. It is this magnificence of God that led the Psalmist to marvel:
When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3-4).
Perhaps even more amazing than the inexhaustible size of God is the fact that He “made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Phil 2:7). The uncontainable God became a microscopic human embryo in the womb of a virgin — for you!
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