God’s Attributes – He is Infinite

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.]

Have you found that the longer you live, the more you realize your own finitude? Perhaps you used to think you could accomplish anything, but you’ve grown to realize you can do what God has enabled you to do and what your own fragile mind and body will allow you to do. You can’t be in two places at once. You can’t make everybody happy. You can’t get treatment for every disease, and you can’t be twenty years old again if you’ve passed that mark. These are not bad things. They are just that quality that we properly and wisely accept: finitude.

We live in bodies that keep us located in one spot at one time. They break; they disintegrate; they fall to pieces. We only know so much, and the more we learn the more we realize how much we do not know. Our knowledge leaks out of these buckets full of holes we call minds. We can build impressive machines, but we are virtually powerless before a tornado or the surges of the ocean.

In every way that we are finite, God is infinite. God is all-knowing (omniscient). He doesn’t grow older, doesn’t become mentally limited, doesn’t show emotional fragility. His power (omnipotence) exceeds that massive energy that holds all matter together. God is present at all times in all places (omnipresence). “‘Am I only a God nearby… and not a God far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him? Do I not fill heaven and earth?’ declares the Lord.” (Jeremiah 23:23-24). When the Hebrews built a spectacular temple in honor of God, wise king Solomon dedicated it by confessing that even that divinely-initiated place would not “locate” God. “The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built” (1 Kings 8:27).

So what does it mean for us that God is present at all times and in all places? It means…

… we don’t need to convince God to come and be with us; he is already here;

… we can’t hide from God, so we should give up trying;

… even when we are in some dark place, we can call out to God;

… God is at work every place in this troubled world, even though we may not see it;

…in our prayers we don’t need to shout, God is not far away;

… being close to God is not limited to Sunday morning;

… our relationship with God is a reality of every moment of our days.

How does that seem to you, today?

Omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. God is God in ways that only could be true of an absolute God. The implications for prayer and our dependence in faith are enormous. Our prayers do not inform God of facts he is ignorant of. Rather, our prayers are an engaging conversation in which we wait to learn something we didn’t know before, or to simply receive the comfort of talking to the God who knows our needs before we even ask him (as Jesus put it in the Sermon on the Mount). Because we pray to an all-powerful God, it is not the prayer itself that has power, but God. So we should be careful in talking about the “power of prayer.” It is not our vocalizations that accomplish anything, and certainly we should never see prayer as some kind of incantation. The power comes when we open ourselves to the all-powerful God, when we become more fully aware of how God stands in the midst of our circumstances, a giant who cannot be ignored, who is never afraid, and who elicits proper fear in people. Omnipresence means that prayer is as effective when offered in your car as in your church, in garbled words or moaning or crying. Prayer requires no antenna pointed in just the right direction at the right time.

Because God is great, something powerful is already at work the moment we say, “Dear God…” Even if the only thing we can say is “Dear God.”

Excerpt from Putting the Pieces Back Together: How Real Life and Real Faith Connect. Click for more.