Putting God in a Box

Grant Montgomery – Grant’s Rants on Putting God in a Box

Even some very well-meaning people attempt to put God in a box, whether this be the confines of a church building dogma, or a box of mental understanding of a certain shibboleth, or their personal interpretation of a long-held belief, or simply a general lack of open-mindedness.

God may see fit to reveal some aspect of Himself to us, but all in all God is far above Man’s understanding. Consider the following, as Mark Batterson presents in his book “Circle Maker“: The Biblical prophet Isaiah gives us a glimpse of God’s omnipotence and omniscience with a comparison to the size of the universe. The distance between His wisdom and ours, His power and ours, is likened to the distance from one side of the universe to the other:

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

The basic unit of measurement is a light-year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, which is so fast that in the time it takes to snap your fingers, light circumnavigates the globe half a dozen times.

To put the size of the universe into perspective, the sun is 94.4 million miles away from the earth at its farthest distance from us. If you could drive to the sun traveling 65 miles per hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would take you more than 163 years to get there. The light that warms your face on a sunny day, on the other hand, left the surface of the sun only 8 minutes ago. So while 94.4 million miles may seem like a long distance by earthly standards, it’s our next-door neighbor by celestial measurements.

The sun is the nearest star in our tiny little galaxy known as the Milky Way. There are more than 80 billion galaxies in the universe which for the record, equates to more than 10 galaxies per person!

In one minute, light travels 11 million miles. In one day, light travels 160 billion miles.

But that’s just one light-year.

The outer edge of the universe, according to astrophysicists, is 15.5 billion light years away! If that seems in-comprehensive, it’s because it’s just virtually unimaginable.

Yet God says that this is the distance between His thoughts and our thoughts!

So here’s my thoughts:
– Your best thought on your best day falls 15.5 billion light-years short of how great and how good God really is!
– Even the most brilliant among us underestimate God by 15.5 billion light-years!
– God is able to do 15.5 billion light-years beyond what you can ask or imagine!

[Inspired by the writings of Rob Bell]

Grant Montgomery – Grant’s Rants on Putting God in a Box