Perceptions #200402

"The Vastness Of God's Creation"

by Norman Bales

The vastness of God's involvement with creation is incredible. It is one thing to contemplate how God can be so personally involved with the 4-5 billion people who inhabit this planet right now, even down to such minute details as knowing the number of hairs on each person's head. That's a feat that no individual can possibly achieve, even with respect to his own noggin. But God not only has intimate knowledge of every individual, he also has detailed knowledge of all life on the earth. He even sees to it that the Arctic Terns make their long voyage from the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of South America and back every year.

But it doesn't stop there. He has command of the solar system and the universe, of which we are only a tiny part. We will never know what God might be doing on some place like the planet Pluto. I'm reminded of the words of Psalm 139:7, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain." We will never be able to understand all the activity of God, nor should we even try. We can know that which He has revealed to us in His Word, but even there our knowledge is limited. We are restricted from understanding it by our human frailties, biases, customs, culture, traditions and the influence of respected but fallible teachers. Sometimes we like to think we have perfect understanding of the Bible, because we just take the text for what it says without interpreting it. That's wishful thinking. No one who claims to go "just by the Bible" actually does it. I once heard Thomas Olbricht say, "Everyone who reads the Bible interprets it." I think Tom is right.

Well, I make it sound like we can know nothing about God or the Bible. Not at all. We know some very important things about God and those things are so clearly stated they can be understood by primitive people in isolated regions of the world. We can understand that God is love. We can understand that God loved us so much that He allowed His son to come to the earth and die on a cross for us - not just the mass of humanity, but for an individual like me. The concept of grace may well startle us so much that we have difficulty accepting it, but we don't have trouble understanding the simple fact that we sin and that Jesus paid the penalty for our sins on the cross. We can also understand enough of the Bible to know how to behave and treat our fellow human being. We can know how we need to respond to God with our love, devotion and beliefs.

What is God up to in the rest of the universe? I honestly don't know. It's not my job to figure God out. Someone said, "If I can know the mind of God, then God isn't God."

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