God is without limit
“O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD” (Ps. 139:1–4).
But might there not be some secluded hideaway, some remote corner of the universe to which even the Deity has no access? Might we not there sin freely? Might we not there sin secretly? But where is “there”?
“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. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you” (Ps. 139:7–12).
It is not merely the omniscience of God but His omnipresence as well, noted Charles Spurgeon, that makes it dreadful work to sin,
“for we offend the Almighty to his face, and commit acts of treason at the very foot of his throne. Go from him, or flee from him we cannot: neither by patient travel nor by hasty flight can we withdraw from the all-surrounding Deity. His mind is in our mind; himself within ourselves. His spirit is over our spirit; our presence is ever in his presence” (III, b:260).Inexhaustibly Infinite in Space
When we speak of God as infinite, we mean that He is without limit, that He is in all relevant respects inexhaustible, subject to no conceivable calculations, in no way saddled by the imperfections of the creature. Infinity, in sum, is that in virtue of which the Deity embraces all His perfections in the highest degree.
Infinity may thus be predicated of God in several ways. God is infinite, for example, in relation to time, knowledge, power and space. To say that God is infinite with respect to time is to predicate “eternity” of the Divine Being (He is everlasting, without beginning or end). To say that God is infinite with respect to knowledge is to predicate “omniscience” of the Divine Being (He knows all things, and that infallibly). To say that God is infinite with respect to power is to predicate “omnipotence” of the Divine Being. But here we shall speak of God as infinite with respect to space and thus predicate of Him “omnipresence” and “immensity.”
A slight distinction between immensity and omnipresence ought to be noted. Whereas immensity affirms that God transcends all spatial limitations, that His being cannot be contained or localized, omnipresence signifies more specifically the relationship which God in His whole being sustains to the creation itself. In other words, omnipresence (being positive in thrust) means that God is everywhere present in the world; immensity (being negative in thrust) means that He is by no means limited to or confined by it.
This means that it is probably inappropriate to speak of God as having size, for this term implies something that is measurable, definable, with boundaries and limitations. Is the question, then, “How big is God?” theologically inappropriate?
God, of course, is not “in space” in the sense that, say, we or the angelic host are. We who have material bodies are bounded by space and thus can always be said to be here and not there, or there and not here. That is, a body occupies a place in space. Angelic spirits, on the other hand, as well as the dead in Christ now in the intermediate state, are not bound by space and yet they are somewhere, not everywhere. But God, and God alone, fills all space. He is not absent from any portion of space, nor more present in one portion than in another. To put it in other terms, we are in space circumscriptively, angels are in space definitively, but God is in space repletively.
Storms, S. (2006). Attributes of God. Oklahoma City, OK: Sam Storms.
