Have you ever been stuck trying to figure something out? I’ve been stuck a lot lately, trying to figure out a way to understand just how great and loving God is. I haven’t succeeded. I don’t expect I ever will. It’s too much to wrap my mind around.

Yet I’ve discovered something: that God is greater than I ever imagined, and His love is far more astonishingly good than I ever dreamed.

Maybe words like that sound familiar to you. We hear them all the time in sermons and in praise songs. Still, I’d like to invite you to spend a few moments reflecting on God’s greatness in a way you’ve probably never thought about it before. This isn’t just an academic exercise. As you’ll see, it leads to some very important practical implications.

God Is Unimaginably Great

A couple weeks ago, in a talk I gave at a conference called Defend the Faith at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, I raised this question: “When God created space, where did He put it?”

Stumped? You should be. Or maybe you’re wondering why anyone would ask a question like that!

I’ve brought up that same question in conversation a few times, without building up to it gradually as I did in that talk. When I’ve done that, the usual response has been something like, “Umm, Tom, I’m just wondering here, don’t they keep you busy enough at work?” I wouldn’t be surprised if you were wondering the same thing.

The question has a point, though. Let’s work with it a while and I think you’ll see.

Before Creation God was all and all was God. He chose to make something, something other than Himself; and since then it is no longer true that God is all there is (Christians are not pantheists).

Think of what He did then, though: He thought of something absolutely, completely, originally new, unlike anything that had ever been before. Try doing that yourself. Try to think of something totally new, unlike anything that’s ever been before. A new sound? That won’t work, because sound has been before. A new sense other than the familiar five? You’re still thinking in terms of senses: ways to experience the world we already live in. Whatever you try to create in your mind, it’s certain to be a variation on something you already know.

God didn’t create a variation on Himself. Creation certainly isn’t another version of God, and besides Himself, there was nothing else to “vary.” He created our universe totally out of His infinite power and unparalleled imagination.

One amazing product of His imagination was space. Did you know that before creation there was no “space”? God wasn’t somewhere in space, nor was He everywhere in space. He wasn’t big in that sense at all. He was “big” in the sense that He was everything that was.

When He said, “Let there be light,” He wasn’t illuminating some dark place that had been that way since forever. Scientists tell us light and space both came into being together in the Big Bang, and though I don’t know, I suspect that’s indeed true of the way God did it.

But when He created space, He didn’t put it inside Himself: God doesn’t have an “inside.” He didn’t place it outside Himself for the same reason. He didn’t put it to His left or His right. He didn’t have a “left” or “right.”

So where did he put it? I’d say my daughter’s answer is the best one I’ve heard: “My brain hurts.” She got right to the heart of it there! The point of the question, you see, isn’t to figure out some scientific, philosophical, or theological answer. It’s literally unanswerable; philosophers would call it a category error. The point of the question is to help us think about what God is like, and to discover that He is so different from us, if we try to assess what He’s truly like, it’s bound to make our brains hurt.

And if that were the end of the story, we’d be in trouble.

It leaves us (so far, that is) with a picture of a God who is so unlike us, we could never know Him. We couldn’t begin to know why we’re here. We would have no way even to guess what happens after death. We’d be lost.

God Is Incredibly Close

But it isn’t the end of the story. God is unimaginably great, yes, but the good news is that His greatness doesn’t end with His infinite eternal nature and unparalleled creative power. He is also at the same time greatly personal and greatly loving. Honestly, this is the point where my brain really starts to hurt. How could such a huge God be so hugely loving? He certainly doesn’t need us. He never did. He never needed someone to love. He is Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, existing eternally in loving relationship. There’s room there for all of God’s love.

Yet he created us anyway. Why? I can answer that about as well as I can explain where God put space when he made it—which is to say, it’s a question beyond answering. All I know is that God made the world, and He made us in His image, and He loves us.

He loves us with the love the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit shared before the world began (John 17:23, 26). He loved us enough to become one of us. At this point, Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity, actually entered into a real, specific location in space, and He opened up to us the great mystery. He showed us what we could never know unless God Himself revealed it: something of what God is like in Himself.

Bonhoeffer rightly called Jesus “the man for others,” for we find Him always loving, always giving, never using His extraordinary powers for Himself but only for others. I don’t know of any other person in history—or even in literature, myth, or imagination—who had any unusual power, strength, or authority, and who used it only for others, never for self. Only Jesus did. Only Jesus lived a life of true, consistent, constant love.

God Is Great and Loving

This is a bit of what God is like. He is so vastly different that even when He became one of us in Jesus Christ, He was still unlike any human who has ever lived, in history or even in imagination.

So unlike us—yet so willing to enter into our world in love. If this line of thinking culminates anywhere, it’s in Romans 8:14-17 (ESV), where we find the Holy Spirit bringing Christ-followers into a continuing intimate relationship with our great God:

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

God is different, but He is not distant. He is with us. We are His children, He is our Abba Father. He has prepared for us a glorious inheritance, forever to enjoy His love in His eternal Kingdom.

I’ve spoken a couple of times here about how “my brain hurts.” There is a treatment for that pain. It isn’t aspirin or ibuprofen. It’s worship. Reflecting on God’s unimaginable greatness and His unfathomable love, over and over again I have fallen to my knees proclaiming, “My God, how great thou art! How infinite! How beyond understanding! And yet how intimately loving!”

I said there were practical implications to these ruminations. That very worship may be the most practical implication of all. Anything that helps us to fall on our faces before God is a good thing. Still there is one more thing, hinted at in the passage I quoted from Romans 8. It has to do with hard times. It’s especially appropriate in a world that’s changing as disturbingly as ours: When we suffer, we suffer “with Him.” We can count on being glorified with Him.

Or as Paul put it at the end of Romans 8:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? . . . No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

“Nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation”—because God is infinitely, unimaginably greater than all. And because He loves us.

We are secure in Him, no matter what happens. Let us worship Him for who He is!