Understanding God’s Nature and Dimensions

One of my favorite book titles and quotes is Your God Is Too Small, written by J. B. Phillips in 1953. The book’s theme is that humans are limited in understanding God’s nature. That issue continues today with questions concerning the spiritual realm. God is not a physical being, limited to physical dimensions. What does that mean?

We live in a three-dimensional world, meaning you can move up or down, left or right, straight ahead or behind you. In mathematics, we demonstrate this concept on the cartesian axes of x, y, and z, and we can plot each of those dimensions against time. You can go to the left or right, up or down, forward or backward at a certain speed until you arrive at a particular spot. Notice that each case requires the passage of time. You can’t put time on a cartesian axis because time is 4th dimensional. Just as God created the three dimensions, He also created the 4th dimension. We struggle with that concept because we can’t control the time dimension. It controls us.

The Bible describes God as a being outside of time, not limited by that dimension as we are. Psalms 90:4 (repeated in 2 Peter 3:8) tells us that “with the Lord, one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” Revelation 1:8 and 11, 21:6, and 22:13 describe God as “the Alpha and Omega – the beginning and the end.” We realize that has enormous implications for understanding God’s nature. When we pray, God hears our prayer outside of time. Revelation 21:3-4 is easier to comprehend if we realize that without time, all the bad stuff relating to time, including pain, suffering, death, disease, and war, are gone.

If God is outside of time and created time, He exists in a dimension higher than time. There are virtually unlimited dimensions in mathematics, and here we are struggling with one we can’t perceive physically. The Apostle Paul got a glimpse of this and tried to describe it in 2 Corinthians 12:1-5. God’s answer to prayer is frequently not in the time frame we understand. Our concept of heaven and hell is badly distorted by not understanding God’s nature and the spiritual realm outside of time.

The people who heard Paul speak at the Areopagus in Acts 17:22-32 struggled with understanding God’s nature, and Paul challenged them to think. For many of them, and many in today’s world, their God was and is too small.

— John N. Clayton © 2024