Reality Check 101

It is fairly easy to think of God as being spiritual. He is, after all, not able to be seen as a physical person. We talked about that and went a little deeper with the “three-in-one”(Trinity). But there are so many more things that are important to understand.

How big is God and how long has He been around? Does He move around to hear or see different events or places? By the way, just how much does He know about our private lives or, for that matter, the lives of our enemies? These kinds of questions have to do with figuring out how  long God lives, where He lives, and how much power He has. This can be challenging stuff if we are willing to dig deeper than the surface. There are certain things from chapter three that should make sense but need to be looked at anyway.

Foreverness Without Borders

 In the world we live in, every living thing has a beginning and an end, a birth, and a death. The only exception to that rule is mankind – if he is indeed the handiwork of a living God who has the power and desire to not only create the soul, but to somehow also be in a relationship with it. If death is to be a different kind of experience for us, God also has to have some more important qualities than simply spirituality and “three-in-oneness”.

For one thing, God has to always live, to be eternal and immortal, without a beginning or an end, which means that time does not apply to Him. This is how an uncreated spiritual God exits. For we humans, it is massively important for the kind of “looking forward”, getting beyond death, which is the goal of the vast majority of people that have ever lived.

This built-in expectation is recorded in everything from cave walls to graveyard tombstones. These kinds of hopes only make sense if God has always been, and always will be, present at the moment of death. Because He always lives, He will always be Master over everything and everyone. And because He is, as we will see later, also eternally pure and holy and expects those qualities in His presence, at the moment of our death we have to be either endlessly with Him in perfect life separated from all evil or be forever separated from Him living endlessly saturated in evil.

God also has to be limitless, infinite in every conceivable way, as long as it doesn’t run against anything that makes Him perfect. That includes contradicting things like being in control of everything or having perfect love. Sometimes it is tempting to ask questions like, “Can God make a boulder so big He can’t move it”? But questions like that make no sense with God because it pits His perfect power against his perfect creativeness. For anyone who understands how perfect God is, those kinds of challenges simply have no meaning. It would be like asking if a man could make a car so perfect it couldn’t be driven.

The wonderful thing about God’s infinity is that that makes Him Master and Creator of  endless possibilities for our lives on this earth and going on into eternity. Living in this world does not need to be a dead end proposition. It means God has endless resources for remaking the dreadful things of life out of its ashes. The old can quite literally become new.

Another couple of things to cover before the next section. First, God’s character and abilities never change. He is complete, with no need for any more maturing. He is permanently who He is. He is, for example, always wise and always keeps His promises. That means anything He says about Himself and His relationship with those who embrace His program, is totally and completely dependable without failure. This world and the people in it are notorious for unpredictability and constant change, sometimes even turning on their own. But God is the one Being in the universe that will never be a part of those kinds of corruptions.

Finally, how much power would it take to manage everything we have covered so far? Think about the power needed to live forever or be without limits or exist above and beyond the universe! It is pretty obvious that that power would have to be total, what theologians call omnipotence. But God’s absolute power means more than being able to make stars or create life. It means, there is no weakness in Him. He cannot be tempted to do evil and cannot be defeated by anything or anyone in existence. His purity cannot be weakened, nor can His righteous character or the depth of His love.

Where is God?

There is, of course, much more. There has probably never been a time in history when people have not looked for, I mean, literally, looked for, God. At times they have looked for Him in all kinds of things like animals, the weather, trees, and even the sun, moon, and stars.

One time when the Apostle Paul in the Bible was talking with some Greek philosophers, he couldn’t help but notice that all over the city of Athens they had statues erected for every type of human-looking “god” they could think of and even had one installed that was named “To the Unknown god”! It was like they were trying to look everywhere while at the same time trying to cover all their bases.

As it turns out, the Greeks, like so many others in history, were operating by a deformity of what is real. They had figured out that God was “out there” (what theologians call being “transcendent”) but they imagined Him to be similar to men and women. I am saying that it was a deformity because for God to be who He is, He has to be radically different from anything in the physical world or the universe. For example, He is not the same as nature nor part of nature but is beyond and infinitely greater than nature – can even be called Master of it. He has to be above and beyond it all as the Creator because, in the end, He is the only one who can manage and hold it all together!

But that is only half of it. What mankind has always missed until the rise of Judaism and Christianity, is that God is, and must be, incredibly involved in everything down to the smallest detail (what theologians call  being “immanent”). If you really think about it, everything that exists survives and thrives in very tightknit relationships and in incredible harmony. That is the amazing nearness and personal involvement of God in His creation. That same activity of God follows through to mankind as well.  Remember the Apostle Paul and his conversations with the Greeks? He put it best as he was finishing the conversation by saying “In Him (God) we live and move and have our existence.”

Another way to talk about God’s nearness is to say that He is everywhere at the same time. That is to say, that “farness” and “nearness” has no meaning in God. To be and do everything He is and does, requires He be everywhere.

The impact on everyone is vital to understand. God does not have blind spots. We can’t outrun Him, and we can’t hide from Him. That means that even the mind and the soul are open to His observation without limit. The good news is that just as He sees someone trying to avoid Him, so He sees the person who runs to Him.

Which brings us to one final greatness of God. Being more than and above creation, while at the same time being intimately involved, means knowing everything. Look at it this way: Our brains get crammed with useless facts all the time. Either we can’t use them, or they don’t affect us. For God, that has to be impossible. He makes no mistakes and never gets surprised because He is everywhere, managing everything.

All this means is that He knows every person completely, the whole person inside and out, from the moment of conception to the moment of death and beyond. He knows the history of our lives in the smallest detail. It is that depth of knowledge which He uses for both guiding and disciplining.

God’s positions of being outside of and beyond us (and everything else) while at the same time being intimately involved, gives us stability and security in the big picture. His power means that there is nothing in this world that is beyond His ability and authority to deal with. He has the capability and the desire to be a rock of strength and security. On the other hand, because God knows the hairs on each of our heads, He can be very personal. In other words, He has the authority, power, and personal investment to judge us or to rescue and remake our lives or the lives of anyone else who is willing.