A Launchable Idea:

Thy manifold mercies.

(Nehemiah 9:19)

Rachel thanked me for that last blog about God’s spaciousness; so, I’ll keep working on it. The idea of God’s spaciousness came from my reading of that impossible book The Beauty of the Infinite by D.B. Hart. It had to do with the Trinity and the eternal spaciousness of the Godhead.

A non-Trinitarian god would lack complexity, wonder and spaciousness—would be boring of himself. But our spacious triune God has all sorts of eternal wonders dancing around within Himself—the dance of the Father, Son and Spirit. There’s infinite space within the Godhead for love and joy between the Three in One. That’s why the Bible says, “God is love”—of and within Himself.

It’s not as if I got it, but it got me; and launches me to places the author may not have had in mind. Like when this eternally spacious God creates the heavens and the earth, you might expect something of his vast spaciousness to shine through. As Psalm 104 goes:

How manifold are your works, O Lord!

      In wisdom you have made them all;

      the earth is full of your creatures.

There’s nothing singular or oppressive about creation. It’s vast and spacious, like God, with all sorts of space for all kinds of wild creatures. Even “leviathan who rollicks in the sea” (vs 26).

The first thing we notice about the universes is its unimaginable spaciousness accommodating stars and massive galaxies along with all sorts of strange stuff like pulsars and boomeranging nebula and black holes. Same is so of the micro universe of an atom. I’m told that if we were to drop in on an atom we would be baffled by its vast spaciousness. It’s 99% space—just like the big universe. How can matter be so specious? Maybe it’s because its Creator is so spacious.

We too bare this image of our Creator. He gives us space. Authentic relationships allows the other space—sacred space given by our Creator. To violate that space through violence or tyranny or cunning is a sin against our Creator. It’s God who gives us space to see and honor the beauty of the other; and, of all creation.

That’s my one big idea from The Beauty of the Infinite. That’s all we can ask of any great thinker like Augustine or Lewis or Bonhoeffer—just one or two launchable ideas is more than enough.