Day: May 1, 2012

Our sense of limit, of “finiteness” needs to go when it comes to our contemplation of the attributes of God. He is limitless and thus, by definition, so are the qualities of His Being. As finite creatures our unconscious limiting of the attributes of God comes naturally to us. We live in a world of scarcity and so we have trouble apprehending a God who is both eternal and infinite in every aspect of Who He is.

Entering into a deeper grasp of the endless deeps of the divine character is a call to all His children from more than just the standpoint of “head-knowledge”. It is also needful to our very sanity. We live in a world of imperfection. We, ourselves, embody this imperfection, especially in our pre-conversion nature, but even now as believers living on this side of Heaven. This is why coming into contact with the unbounded nature of God is vital to our very spiritual life. We need to know in our hearts that nothing is impossible for our Lord because the transformation we recognize we need in order to truly live is totally impossible for us. If we are to grasp the reality of the power of God to redeem us we must have a growing belief in the attributes of His character and the fact that they are, as He is, without limit.

What are some of these attributes? They include His faithfulness, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, love, wisdom, and sovereignty. There are many more than these (A.W. Tozer, in fact, lists 19 separate divine qualities in his classic little book, The Knowledge of the Holy.) God might even, as Tozer at one point suggests, have attributes we cannot perceive in our current state of existence. But the ones for which we need to have some comprehension of limitlessness are those which are vital to us in this life. For instance one prime example of such a crucial knowledge is the true conviction that God is omnipotent, in other words all-powerful. This is “a must” if we are to even begin to believe that He, in Christ, is capable of securing our salvation. The sense of the vastness of our own sin makes knowledge of the infinitude of our Lord’s power to eliminate it essential.

Another example of a “need to know” in our Christian walk is the unlimited nature of God’s love. This is because it is one thing to recognize He has the power to save us and quite another to believe He also has the desire to do so. Infinite love points towards the absolute reality of such a desire because he who loves something inherently wants the highest good for that something…or someone. If God loves us He wants to do us good and, because he is God, he wants to do us good beyond all limits. Infinite love supplies the desire, infinite power the means.

The other divine attributes also meet some absolute need in us. Because we live in a sometimes unfair world we need to know that our Lord is infinitely just and will eternally remedy that unfairness someday. Because we live in a place of uncertainty and change we need to know our God is immutable and will soon usher in a perfect and unchanging place for us to inhabit. In each case we need to know more than the fact that the quality exists in our Redeemer, we also need to know it exists in such quantity as to forever secure the remedy to the particular thing that ails us.

Like nearly everything else in the life of a believer, coming to viscerally know the truth of the eternal infinitude of God’s attributes will only happen over time. In His perfection He has ordained that we human beings learn things in such a way. For this reason patience with ourselves is an important part of coming into the knowledge of the all-sufficiency of God to remake us in the image of His Son. It does us no good to fruitlessly fret about not having what we would consider to be an adequate knowledge of these things by a certain point in our lives. That said we would do well to always be looking to the divine attribute of all-sufficiency to put our minds and hearts at ease in the process. He is more than able to give us such knowledge at just the right moment in our lives. After all His timing is infinitely perfect too.