Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Our sense of limit, of the finite, needs to go when it comes to our contemplation of the attributes of God. He is limitless and, 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 greater apprehension of the endless deeps of the divine character is a vital call for all His children, and from more than just the standpoint of “head-knowledge”. It is also necessary to our sanity. We live in a world of imperfection. We embodied this imperfection especially in our pre-conversion nature, but also exhibit it 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. This is because the transformation we need in order to truly live is totally impossible for us to attain on our own. If we are to grasp the reality of the power of God to redeem and sanctify us we must have a growing belief in certain attributes of His character, and the fact that they are without limit.
What are some of these attributes? They include His faithfulness, goodness, justice, 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. However the ones for which we need to have some recognition 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 and enabling our sanctification. The sense of the vastness of our own sin alone makes knowledge of the infinitude of our Lord’s power to atone for 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 and 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 permanent place for us to inhabit. In each case we require knowing more than the fact that these qualities exist in our Redeemer; we also must know they exist in such quantity as to forever secure the remedy for 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 (and we will not know its likely most profound fruition in us until we meet Him face to face.) In His perfection He has ordained that human beings learn things in this progressive way. For this reason patience with ourselves is an important part of coming into a deeper 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. For this reason we would do well to always be looking to that divine attribute of all-sufficiency to put our minds and hearts at rest in the process. He is more than able to give us whatever degree of such knowledge we need at just the right moment in our existence.
After all, His timing is infinitely perfect too.