What is the infinity of God?

Question 2094

When we speak of the infinity of God, we are confessing that there is no boundary, no edge and no measuring line that can be laid against Him. Everything we know in the created world has a limit somewhere, a beginning, an end, a size that can be weighed or counted. God has none of these. The infinity of God is the truth that He is without limit in His being and in every perfection that belongs to His being.

This is not an abstract puzzle for philosophers. The God who made you is infinite, and that touches your prayers, your fears and your hope. Scripture never argues for it as though the matter were in doubt. It simply shows us a God whose greatness runs out past anything the mind can trace, and then it calls us to bow and worship. To grasp even a little of who God is, we have to begin with the truth that He has no limit at all.

What the infinity of God means

To say that God is infinite is to deny that He has any limit. The word comes from the Latin in-finis, meaning without end or boundary. When theologians speak of the infinity of God they are not picturing an endless quantity, as though God were an enormous amount of something. They mean that He is not the kind of being that can be measured at all. He is not large where we are small. He belongs to another order entirely, and that difference is one of kind and not simply of degree.

Charles Ryrie helpfully describes infinity as the perfection that qualifies all the other perfections of God. His love is infinite love. His knowledge is infinite knowledge. His power has no ceiling and His holiness no shadow. So the infinity of God is not one attribute sitting beside the others on a shelf. It is the manner in which every attribute is held by God, fully and without restriction. The way His perfections relate to one another is a subject worth pondering on its own, and we have explored it in our study of how God’s attributes relate to one another.

Because God is infinite, we can never reach a point where we have understood Him completely. We can know Him truly, since He has made Himself known in His Word and in His Son. We cannot know Him exhaustively. The finite mind handling the infinity of God is like a child cupping the sea in two hands. What is held is real water and real sea, yet the ocean is not diminished by a single drop, and the child will never carry it home.

Infinite in being, not in size

It is easy to slip into thinking of God’s infinity as sheer size, a being so vast that He fills all space and then keeps going. Scripture pushes us past that picture. God is Spirit, as Jesus told the woman at the well, and a spirit has no dimensions to stretch out across the sky. We have looked more closely at this in our answer to the question of what it means that God is Spirit.

The infinity of God is therefore qualitative before it is quantitative. He is infinite in the perfection of His character, in the fullness of His life, in the completeness of His knowing. When Solomon dedicated the temple he grasped this with reverence, praying that the heaven and the highest heaven could not contain the Lord, never mind a house built by human hands. God was not struggling to fit inside the universe. The universe could not begin to be a container for Him, because containers belong to the world of finite, bounded things, and He stands outside that world as its Maker.

This guards us from two errors at once. We do not shrink God down into a manageable object that sits within the world, and we do not spread Him out so thinly that He simply becomes the world itself. The infinity of God means He transcends the whole created order while remaining present to every part of it. He is nearer to you than your own breath, and higher than the heavens you cannot see the end of.

The infinity of God in Scripture

Although the Bible rarely uses the bare word infinite, the reality saturates its pages. The psalmist sings that great is our Lord and abundant in power, and that His understanding is beyond measure (Psalm 147:5). Beyond measure is the very language of infinity. There is no instrument that reaches the end of God’s understanding, because there is no end for an instrument to reach.

Job is brought to the same place. After chapters of questioning, he hears the Lord speak from the whirlwind and is undone, confessing that he had spoken of things too wonderful for him, which he did not know. The infinity of God silences his complaint, not by crushing him but by lifting his eyes to a greatness he had badly underestimated. Paul reaches a similar summit at the close of Romans 11, breaking into praise at the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God, whose judgments are unsearchable and whose ways are past finding out.

Notice that in each case the truth leads to worship rather than to despair. The men of Scripture do not grieve that they cannot fathom God. They rejoice that He is greater than their fathoming. A God small enough to be fully comprehended would be a God small enough to be replaced, and the infinity of God means there is no rival and no substitute anywhere in heaven or on earth.

Infinity and God’s other perfections

The infinity of God shapes how we understand His eternity, His presence and His changelessness. His eternity is infinity with respect to time. He has no beginning behind Him and no end before Him, and He is not carried along by the clock as we are. We have considered this in our discussion of God’s relationship with time, where His life is an undivided present rather than a stream of passing moments.

His omnipresence is infinity with respect to space. Because He cannot be measured or bounded, no place lies outside His presence and no corner of creation is too far for Him to reach. The same God who upholds distant galaxies is wholly present at the bedside of a dying believer, giving none of His attention away in order to be there. His changelessness, His divine immutability, follows as well, for an infinite being cannot improve or decay. To grow would mean He had been incomplete, and to diminish would mean He had been more than infinite before. Neither can be true of the God whose fullness has no edge.

This is why the older theologians spoke of God as actus purus, pure actuality, with no unrealised potential waiting to be filled in. The infinity of God means there is nothing lacking in Him that creation might supply. He did not make the world in order to complete Himself or to relieve some need, a truth we unfold further when we ask whether God needs us. He made the world out of fullness, not out of want.

What the infinity of God is not

We should clear away a few misunderstandings. The infinity of God is not pantheism. The teaching that God simply is the universe, the sum total of all that exists, confuses the Creator with His creation. An infinite God is distinct from the world He made, even while He fills it with His presence. The world is finite and dependent on Him for every moment of its existence. He depends on nothing and on no one.

Neither is the truth a licence to imagine Him doing self-contradictory things. To say God has no limit is to say He has no limit proper to His perfect nature. He cannot lie, He cannot deny Himself, and He cannot cease to be holy, because these would be defects rather than boundaries. A line drawn by His own truthful character is not a wall closing Him in. It is the bright radiance of who He already is.

Nor does the infinity of God leave us with a cold abstraction. Some fear that an infinite being must be remote and impersonal, a force rather than a Father. The opposite is the case. Only a God without limit can give Himself fully to each of His children at once without being stretched thin or spread out. We take that up directly when we ask whether God is a personal God, and the answer is bound up with His infinity rather than threatened by it.

So, now what?

The infinity of God is meant to enlarge your worship and steady your heart. When your troubles feel endless, remember that they are finite and your God is not. There is more grace in Him than there is guilt in you, more wisdom in Him than there is confusion in your circumstances, and more nearness in Him than there is loneliness in your darkest night.

It also keeps us humble. If God is infinite, then our theology, however careful, is always a true map of a country far larger than the map. We hold our knowledge of Him gladly and firmly, yet we hold it as those who are still learning and will go on learning. The infinity of God invites a lifetime of discovery that death will not end but only deepen.

Let this truth drive you to prayer rather than away from it. You are not bothering an overstretched deity who has run short of patience or attention. You are coming to a God whose resources never thin out, whose love for you is not rationed by the hour, and who has infinitely more to give than you have yet learned how to ask for.

“Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.” Psalm 147:5