Reflections on the mind-boggling vastness of God

I have been on vacation in Egypt, and in between cruising by boat on the Nile and visiting the great temples of antiquity, I read a classic Christian text by Andrew Murray on the importance of being humble and surrendering all that we are to God. In my ponderings, and as I viewed the immense Egyptian desert, I began to appreciate, more fully than usual, the mind-boggling vastness of God. His presence is found in everything beautiful and life-filled, and he is the source of all that is good and everlasting (James 1:17) – including our love, our friendships, our joy, our laughter, our creativity, our art, our ingenuity, and as we reach out with respect and awe to the world beyond ourselves in all its glorious guises (Psalm 36:5-9). Moreover, we have been given the privilege of contemplating God’s vastness throughout his creation and that this vastness is also reflected through us (Genesis 1:27) and as the Kingdom of God is even within us (Luke 17:21).

Then, in the middle of my mind being boggled, I was also struck by his wholly generous and abundant spirit (and see Psalm 23:5-6: Ephesians 3:20: 2 Corinthians 9:8), and that our only response to this reality (and indeed his reality living in us) is to thank him and submit to him – to thank him that he is, for sure, on our side as hallmarked by the life, death, and resurrection of his son Jesus Christ; and to recognise in complete humility that we, as a result, have nothing to boast about, nothing to assert of ourselves, nothing to prove, nothing we can claim as our own – that everything wonderful and life-giving comes from him (2 Corinthians 10:12-18)! Once I saw this truth afresh, and let it rest a little in me (Psalm 46:10) and so stopped trying to figure it all out (Proverbs 3:5-6), I felt a deep peace and stillness, and then I smiled. 

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