God is... Everywhere

But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!

1 Kings 8:27

1 Kings 8:27 records part of King Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the magnificent temple he had built for the Lord. Solomon readily admits that “the God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands (Acts 17:24). Solomon says that even the heavens themselves cannot contain God!

‌Add to that truth what God says of Himself in Jeremiah 23:24. “‘Do not I fill heaven and earth?’ declares the Lord.” So, more than just being bigger than the heavens, God says He fills heaven and earth. God is everywhere!

And if you were to try to picture God filling heaven and earth you would probably picture God as being very big. And that can be helpful. Thinking of God as being big helps us to fear Him. It helps us to understand His power. It helps us to understand our smallness and the smallness of our problems in relation to Him. But in actuality it's important that we understand that the idea that God is big is a metaphor. It helps us understand God, but it is not strictly true. 

God is not big. God is spirit. He has no physical body. He has no physical dimensions. To describe God as being big or small would be to suggest that He exists in space, but God lives outside time and space. We can’t say that God is here now and He will be there later, because for God there is no here or there or now or later. Those are things we experience, not Him. He does not have spatial dimensions. He is not limited by space in any way. God cannot be measured. He exists beyond space and location.

‌Now, that may seem a bit mindblowing to you. I am sure that I don’t completely understand it. But the point is that God is more than just big! God’s nature, His being is too different from ours and too wonderful for us to fully understand and wrap our minds around. ‌And that is a good reminder that God is in many ways beyond our understanding. 

Sometimes we can begin to think that we "get" God, that we understand Him and know who He is. But that can only ever be true by degrees. God is so wonderful and His being is so glorious and different from ours that the human mind cannot completely understand or comprehend who He is. Right now, we see only through a glass darkly, one day we will see God as He is and we will know Him fully in Heaven (1 Corinthians 13:12). For now, we can only know and understand Him in part. That ought to humble us, and help us remember that God is far more wonderful and glorious than maybe we had realized.