Pondering His character is always profitable. Just remember to stay tied to the text of Scripture so you don’t float off into a sea of human invention and creativity. Therefore, thinking about how God is not limited by space, and yet is also not contained in any place, while totally foreign to us finite creations, is still a very profitable use of our minds.

Recently, I have been working through a few books of Systematic Theology. That topic simply means that you take what the Bible says about a certain topic and then summarize it all in one place. Technically, you have more going on depending on the purposes of the author writing the book (history, philosophy, etc.), but the parts that I find the most interesting are those drawn from the biblical text. Recently, I read something that I found both intriguing and encouraging.

When you think about what God is like, you encounter many perplexing truths. God is infinite when it comes to time. I have a beginning. Everything I see has a beginning. I won’t have an ending. Other things I see will have an ending. I understand beginning, ending, and going on forever. Those don’t perplex me that much. Even the thought of living forever is not really perplexing; it’s just a longer version of what I am experiencing right now. But God never began. That is difficult to grasp with my mind. My life is like a line that has a beginning point and no end. My computer has both a beginning point and an ending point, but I don’t know when that is (but I hope it nears infinity!). But to have a line that goes eternally forward and backwards with no end…that simply boggles the mind.

But what I read that really perplexed me was about God’s relationship to space. Now, we aren’t really talking about the final frontier here. “Outer space” is included, of course, but we mean to speak about all space. You could think of space here as referring to all the places. Yes, all the places. If you can think of a place, that is what we are talking about.

Because God is infinite, but I am finite (limited), this will be perplexing to think about. Millard Erickson says,

God is not subject to limitations of space. By this we do not mean merely the limitations of being in a particular place–that if an object is in one place it cannot be in another. Rather, it is improper to think of God as present in space at all. All finite beings have location. They are somewhere. This necessarily prevents their being somewhere else…God is the one who brought space (and time) into being. He cannot be localized at one particular point.¹

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