Infinity

Infinity is a tricky concept. How can you understand the idea of something continuing forever? No beginning and no end?

Although, as I think about it now, I wonder if its easier to imagine infinity when you’re younger because it seems like you’ll live forever. As you get a bit older life seems less permanent.

I think nature gives us some great images of infinity. The waves lapping backward and forward on the shoreline as the tide comes in and recedes, comes in and recedes again. The ocean reaches to the horizon, but you know that it goes on and on. The first time my children saw the ocean they just stood and stared. Sometimes we still do.

I once got to see the spectacular Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. It felt like I had never seen so much water, just pouring continually down forever. My brain couldn’t understand why it didn’t run out, there was that much water. A continually flowing waterfall is a great image of eternity.

Victoria Falls is called ‘the smoke that thunders’ because you can hear the falls long before you see them; a deep roar that builds to a crescendo. And the spray creates ‘smoke’ that drifts high and wide. Knock on effects of the infinitely falling water.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 says “He (God) has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

I love the phrase “He has set eternity in the human heart”. Perhaps that is why we rage against the dying of the light and death feels so wrong.

But yet, what is eternity? As humans we are completely bound by time so trying to get our heads around this idea is near impossible. Even the images of infinity mentioned earlier aren’t really infinite. Waterfalls do dry up.

Psalm 90:2 says “Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”

God is from everlasting to everlasting: no beginning and no end. Tense applies differently here, He is God; the Great I AM. This is a common translation of the name God gave Himself when meeting with Moses at the burning bush (in Exodus 3), but it could just as equally be ‘I will be who I will be’. When you look into infinity, tense loses its meaning.

At this stage of the blog post I’d like to wrap things up neatly and come to some kind of clever conclusion, but the idea of infinity doesn’t allow me to do that. I think that’s okay though. 

Faith and spirituality should lead us to moments of wonder and unknowing, recognising that we are small and finite and the God who is the Great I AM is other: wonderful and infinite, like an ever-flowing waterfall cascading down and down. Maybe wonder and worship is the appropriate response.