Divine Infinity

There is nowhere where God is "not" and he cannot be contained by anything; not by any imperfection, not by time, and not by space.

The second installment in our explainer video series examines God's incommunicable attribute of "Divine Infinity."

Our full explainer video series on the incommunicable attributes of God can be viewed on our Clearly Reformed YouTube channel. Click To Watch Now

Transcript

God can be described by his attributes, those properties that he possesses, and some are called his incommunicable attributes, those attributes that he doesn’t share with his creatures. One of those incommunicable attributes is his Infinity. We can think of Divine Infinity in three ways.

First, God is infinite in relation to himself. Theologians call this his absolute perfection. All that God has, he is, and all that God is, he is ad infinitum to the uttermost. He possesses love and grace and sovereignty and all of his attributes not largely or mostly or partially, but in infinite measure. His greatness is unsearchable, the psalmist tells us. His power and perfection know no limit. God does whatever he pleases; no one can thwart his plans or purposes. “O Lord God of our fathers, are you not The God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you.” Isaiah 40 tells us the nations are as a drop in the bucket. Psalm 115 says, “Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him.”

Second, God is infinite in relation to time. Theologians call this God’s eternity. God has no beginning and no end. He is Immortal, invisible, the only wise God. He is from Everlasting to Everlasting, Psalm 90 tells us. He does not have time as we understand time. When we talk about God existing outside of time, we don’t want to think of some parallel universe that doesn’t have clocks, but rather we want to understand that God does not have before and after like we do. There never was when God was not. God has always been God, and he has always been. Therefore, he does not have time in the way that we do. Time and Eternity are two different ways of experiencing duration. God and his creatures both have duration, but God’s duration is eternal, meaning it’s non-successive. There’s no unfolding, there’s no before and after as we know it with God. Eternity then is not so much a property of God as it is a property of what we think of as time, but what can more precisely be called duration. Theologians have wanted to maintain this creature-Creator distinction and to make sure we don’t conceive of God as having any kind of mutation or learning anything moment by moment. We want to safeguard that there is no becoming in God; he is pure being.

Third, God is infinite in relation to space. Theologians call this God’s immensity. He is not in any way constrained by physicality or geographic location. Think about Paul’s speech in Acts 17: “The God who made everything in heaven and earth does not live in temples made by human hands.” We read in Jeremiah 23, “Am I only a God nearby, declares the Lord, and not a god far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him, declares the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth?” Even Heaven and the highest Heaven cannot contain God, First Kings 8. Immensity then is the attribute of God’s Transcendence, that he is beyond all space and physicality. There is nowhere where God is not, and he cannot be contained by anything—not by any imperfection, not by time, not by space. God is endless, unlimited, inexhaustible. The good news is that we who are finite have the amazing privilege to know and to worship this God who is infinite.

Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary.