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A Big God
“For in him we live and move and have our being.” —Acts 17:28
When I consider the vastness of God’s presence, I am overwhelmed. I know I write about this often, but I still struggle to comprehend just how universal His presence truly is.
Everything that exists—exists in Him.
Let that sink in.
Imagine the stars. Have you ever seen all of them? I remember camping by a lake on a frigid winter night. The sky was so clear, so full, it looked like a garment wrapped around the earth. Thousands upon thousands of stars. Later I learned there are an estimated 350 billion galaxies in the known universe, each one home to billions—if not trillions—of stars. The number is somewhere around 10 to the 25th power. That’s ten followed by twenty-five zeros. Ten quadrillion. That’s a really big universe—which suddenly feels like the biggest understatement of all time.
Now consider this: the entire universe exists within Him.
He holds the stars in His hand.
If God were a gingerbread man, the entire universe would get lost in His bellybutton.
Are you beginning to get the picture?
God is big.
Bigger than you. Bigger than me. Bigger than all of us combined.
Bigger than everything that has ever existed.
It all exists within Him.
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” —Psalm 139:7–10
God is everywhere.
God is all the time.
Let me say that again:
God is everywhere. God is all the time.
Everything we do, we do within Him.
And there’s nothing we can do about that.
We can’t escape Him. We can’t hide from Him.
It’s pointless to run. Where would we go?
We are in Him.
And everything that has ever happened—or ever will happen—is happening within Him right now.
It’s hard to wrap our minds around. I know.
I’ve been thinking about this for years.
And the more I think about it, the more I realize:
I’ll never fully comprehend it.
At least not this side of heaven.
So what does that mean for my sin?
I used to take great comfort in this verse:_ “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” —Psalm 103:12
I imagined my sin moving away from me—and from God—faster than the speed of light. Forever.
But now I think that’s only partly true.
My sin isn’t moving away from God.
It can’t.
Because it happened within Him.
So it remains within Him.
What does He do with it?
He saves it.
There’s a stunning scene in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, where a man is tormented by a lizard whispering lies into his ear. An angel slays the lizard—and to the man’s amazement, it transforms into a magnificent stallion. He climbs onto its back, and the two of them dash off—bounding through the mountains of heaven.
I wonder if that’s how it will be.
Will the sins that hounded us our entire lives be transformed into the very tools that carry us into glory?
Laura Story asks, “What if the trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise?”
What a question.
I believe the answer is yes.
Today’s stumbling blocks become tomorrow’s building blocks.
Prayer:
Father, You are bigger than my imagination can grasp. Thank You that nothing in my life is outside of Your presence. Take my sins, my struggles, and my trials, and transform them into instruments of grace and glory. Teach me to rest in the truth that in You, I live and move and have