BIBLICAL BRIEFS 111
NP Van Wyk Louw, the Afrikaans poet, says in one of his poems: “What is written in the stars ablaze / We rewrite in dust.” To a great extent, this is a core description of man’s inability to comprehend the greatness of God’s being, his creation and to understand his plan. When we try to express it, it can always only be merely “always approaching, never reaching”. Especially when we talk about time and space, and argue from the limits of our boundedness to time and space, we speak in total incomprehension, especially as astrophysics point out that the universe extends centrifugally at three million kilometres per hour. God is outside time and space. Solomon in all his wisdom understood something of this when he prayed, ” The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you …” (1Kin. 8:27). Indeed, as Job (37:23) has said, it is difficult to get to know a God within our limited time-space capacity, specifically if He is by definition way way more unfathomable than how we try to fit Him into our pea size brains. God functions in dimensions other than those to which human beings are confined to. In Isa. 57:15, those dimensions hosting God are called “eternity” – clearly without the time association we usually have with eternity. If Gen. 1:1 begins with: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth …” it is clear that God could of course not created the universe if He was part of it – He is beyond time and space. From a human point of view, the universe is infinite, in every respect. If you – like the Psalmist in Ps. 8: 3-4 – merely see the visible sky (= the expanse: Gen 1: 8), “the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained”, you immediately experience a feeling of this immeasurable God you’re encountering and also exclaim: “What is man that You take thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him?” Think about it again: God was outside of the earth and God was outside heaven. According to the theories of physics concerning particles and relativity, at least ten spatial dimensions existed at the time of the creation of our reality. With the creation of the earth, what scientists like Stephen Hawkins refer to as the “big bang”, time and space have begun. Heb. 11:3 explicitly states that with God’s creation of heaven and earth the visible things were created from invisible things. From a multitude of invisible dimensions in which God has formed, the four dimensions (length, width, height and time) what we experience as reality has constructed our world. Our human consciousness can only function in this constraint. Time and space are function-dependent on matter. Or: matter is the ‘precipitation’ of any particle that moves slower than the speed of light. As creatures existing on the basis of such a continuum, it is virtually impossible to conceive anything beyond it. We can therefore only try to understand it, but we can also understand that a Being outside of these human dimensions is obviously not restricted by the laws that regulate these dimensions. We know from Scripture that God is Spirit (John 4:24) and therefore, by definition, he is “invisible”. But, Jesus, his Son, who lived in the spirit dimension before becoming human (John 8:58) physically entered the earth’s dimensions, with a physical body that also became hungry, sweated, tired, could be injured and of course could die. He was able to enable God to experience humanity in the four dimensions of “complete humanity” (1Joh.3:5), and therefore, “God is full of compassion and mercy” (Jam. 5:11), because He experienced for himself how it feels to inhabit a clay house, man whose “foundation is in the dust, Who are crushed like the moth!” (Job 4:19). He specifically gives us the Holy Spirit so that we can understand the “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35), and be able to bring “the hidden things” to “revealed things”. This wonderful thing we discover in our quest is the unexpected appearance of the unimaginable Origin itself, also WITHIN us and in our circumstances. Find peace in Ps. 25:14 – “The secret of the LORD is for those who fear Him, And He will make them know His covenant.” Through the Spirit of God’s work IN us, something locked up, hidden and secret, is unlocked, uncovered and revealed.
Dr Tom Gouws
