The Greatness of God

The Greatness of Our God
Isaiah 36-40
“Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and marked off the heavens by the span, and calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, and weighed the mountains in a balance and the hills in a pair of scales?

How does the finite grasp the infinite? How can we who are nothing more than a speck on a plant that is a speck in the Milky Way, which is nothing more than a speck in the vastness of the cosmos? One of the audacities of humanity is that we elevate our importance, power, and influence to the point that we believe we can control our own destiny, determine our own morality, and even save the planet from any impending disaster. In the arrogance of our thinking, we believe that God should conform to what we think, and we create God in our image. So, how does the finite grasp the infinite? By making the infinite finite. We conform God to our image and our likeness and believe that he should act and do according to our own perspective. However, a God that we can control and conform to us, is a god who is ultimately smaller than us. We desire a God that answers us rather than a God to whom we must answer. So when the Bible says something that disagrees with our modern, “enlightened” morality, we attribute it to unenlightened and biased writers. We affirm the Bible is true, but only the parts that we find agreeable and acceptable to us.

Isaiah 40 breaks upon the scene in a time of darkness and fear in the land of Israel. The Assyrians are a growing threat to national security, and the nation is descending into moral chaos as the people embrace the sexual and religious perversion of the nations around them. For the righteous, it seems as if God has abandoned them, and evil is winning the day. They were facing the same internal moral and political collapse we are seeing in our own country. What the nation needed most was not a stronger military; they needed a fresh view of God. This we find in Isaiah 40. Through the prophetic voice of Isaiah, God reminds the people of his supremacy and greatness by contrasting the frailty of humanity with the unrelenting, undiminished power of God. In verse 12, we gain a glimpse of God's infinite nature when Isaiah states that God measures the expanse of heaven by the expanse of his hand. When I want to measure something without a ruler, I often use the span of my hand (from the tip of the little finger to the tip of the thumb). For me, that is 9 inches. It is estimated that the observable universe is approximately 93-billion-light years across the universe. Thus, it would be 93 billion light years way. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. We would arrive at the moon faster (1.2 seconds) than I can type this sentence. Our minds cannot even begin to fathom the vastness of space, yet compared to the infinite nature and power of God, it is less than the span of his hand. If God is powerful enough to create the universe, is he not powerful enough to ensure that the prophets recorded His words and His moral law without error?

The audacity of man is that we think we can not only understand God in his infinitude, but that he is somehow accountable to us. We conform God to our image and our perspective. Isaiah reminds us that not only is God unfathomable, but also that he cares for and watches over us. Therefore, we do not need to be afraid. Fear arises, not because of the overwhelming magnitude of our problems, but because of our failure grasp the unchallenged and unfathomable power of God. The size of our God is revealed by the fears that we have. If God, who measures the expanse of space with nothing more than his hand, watches over us and protects us, then we never need to fear, for there is nothing beyond his control and power. Instead of looking at the problems you are facing, look to the infinite God and rest in him.