Infinite God

Revelation 20     Eric Boberg

Last week I was toiling with the difficulty of understanding a future universe without evil or perhaps even the possibility of it. As you might recall, weeks earlier I had concluded evil could not be allowed to run on forever - there must be an end game, a day of judgement. While I don't want to minimize my emotional anxiety in wrestling with these matters, I also hope I didn't cause anyone undue discouragement or to lose hope.

As I continued to wrestle this week, I was thinking about levels of knowledge and how we know what we know. Obviously our personal understanding of this world and the universe changes as we grow. I was trying to think of some visual representation of the process. If we would construct a simple bar graph of people's knowledge-base, we might note that a baby enters this world knowing very little. But at age one that knowledge has increased 50 times; at age five perhaps another 50 times and on and on without a setback, unless you consider the teen years (but that's another story). In the full flower of adulthood that knowledge has increased thousands of times. For some, the growth of knowledge has been spectacular to such an extent that we might dare to call them wise.

But it's not just our individual knowledge that increases as we grow and mature; collective human knowledge is also increasing. Science writer David Russell Schilling notes, "Buckminster Fuller created the 'Knowledge Doubling Curve'; he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II, knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple, as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. But on average, human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours."

I think the rate of increase has a lot to do with the number of processing units, living things, people, computers, and the number of connections - internal and external - they can make. Yet, one really has to wonder about the usability of knowledge that is expanding so rapidly. It still has to be interpreted, filed and used. It is possible, I think,to be bogged down and killed by information-overload, much like one who dies of thirst floating on a life raft in the ocean. Water, water everywhere ... and not a drop to drink.

But what about God? How could you even dream of trying to graph His knowledge-base? He not only has a vast amounts of information (all of it!), He has a system to sort through all of it. Consider the things He knows as the Creator and because He has existed forever. Then there are those connections He has with every part of the universe and all the people in it. And it's not just little temperature probe, hot or cold connections, but rather every intimate detail. Any graph for God would extend off the page and up through the atmosphere, past our space junk, the moon and planets in our solar system. It would go on through galaxies we can only glimpse - and beyond. God's knowledge is more infinite than the universe, if that is even possible ... to be more infinite than infinity. It's mind-blowing. And remember, just going by what we know right now, when we get to the farthest star that we can see with our most powerful telescope - God not only knows about that star, He knows its exact chemical composition. More than that, He knows about every part of it, every grain of sand!

So back to last week, when I consider my logical difficulties about questions surrounding a universe without evil or contrast, they seem small in a relative way. I'm finding that usually God does not answer my difficult questions, rather He overwhelms me with His largeness and His brilliance.

This week I find a passage that is startling - shocking really - when I consider it in light of the infinite knowledge of God.

Revelation 20:4 (NIV)
I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

People, yes mere people, who by their very nature know so very little compared to God; they are allowed to judge and reign with Christ. Relatively, they know little; yet there are certain truths and ways of seeing and understanding that open the door. God provides the filter, the way to sort through all the information and get to what is essential. Realizing their lack and accepting the righteousness of Jesus, they are qualified by their simple faithfulness, perseverance, suffering and finally by death. They follow the example of Jesus, who was made perfect by suffering. Hebrews 2:10

I find this deeply mysterious and incredibly beautiful. With all the big and evil entities clashing and crashing in the book of Revelation, it is comforting to know that simple spiritual disciplines - things we can practice every day - will eventually win the day.