The Attributes of God - God's Infinitude (PT 1)

Volume 1: A Journey into the Father's Heart, (Pages 4-6 by A.W. Tozer)

  Infinity Cannot Be Measured

"Infinity cannot be measured. We've got to eliminate all careless speech here. You and I talk about unlimited wealth, but there's no such thing—you can count it. We talk about boundless energy, which I don't feel I have at the moment, but there's no such thing—you can measure a man's energy. We say an artist takes infinite pains with his picture, but he doesn't take infinite pains; he just does the best he can and then throws up his hands and says, 'It isn't right yet, but I'll have to let it go.' That's what we call infinite pains, but that is a misuse of the word.

The words 'boundless,' 'unlimited,' and 'infinite' describe God; they don't describe anything but God. They do not describe space, time, matter, motion, or energy. These words do not apply to creatures, sand, stars, or anything that can be measured.

Measurement is a way created things have of accounting for themselves. Weight, for instance, is one way we account for ourselves by the gravitational pull of the earth. And then we have distance, the space between heavenly bodies. Then we have length, the extension of a body into space. We can always measure things. We know how big the sun is, how big the moon is, how much the earth weighs, how much the sun and other heavenly bodies weigh. We know approximately how much water is in the ocean. It seems boundless to us, but we know how deep it is and we can measure it, so it really isn't boundless at all.

There's nothing boundless but God and nothing infinite but God. God is self-existent and absolute; everything else is contingent and relative. There's nothing very big, nothing very wise, and nothing very wonderful—it's all relatively so. It is only God who knows no degree. The poet says, 'One God, one Majesty; there is no God but Thee, unbounded, unextended Unity.' For a long time I wondered why he said 'unbounded, unextended Unity.' Then I realized he meant that God doesn't extend into space; God contains space.

C.S. Lewis said that if you could think of a sheet of paper infinitely extended in all directions, and if you took a pencil and made a line one inch long on it, that would be time. When you started to push your pencil, it was the beginning of time; when you lifted it off the paper, it was the end of time. And all around, infinitely extended in all directions, is God. That's a good illustration. If there were a point where God stopped, then God wouldn't be perfect. For instance, if God knew almost everything but not quite everything, then God wouldn't be perfect in knowledge—His understanding wouldn't be infinite, as it says in Psalm 147:5.

Let us take all that can be known—past, present, and future; spiritual, psychic, and physical—everywhere throughout the universe, and let us say God knows all of it except 1%. He knows 99% of all that can be known. I'd be embarrassed to go to heaven and look into the face of a God that didn't know everything. He has to know it all, or I can't worship Him. I can't worship that which is not perfect."