“Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.” – Robert Henri
Having never, in the providence of God, been fortunate to live by the ocean, you may find it curious that I love the sea. My greatest wish as a child I can remember was to build a boat of my own and sail into the unknown. To do as John Denver sang so ably in Calypso, “to sail on a dream on a crystal-clear ocean; to ride on the crest of a wild raging storm.”
Of course, as a small child, I knew none of the realities of the world that would permit me to do what I imagined, but still, even today one of the items on my bucket list would be to hire a captain; board an old clipper ship and sail off into the unknown with nothing but a compass and my own imagination as a guide. To wander out into the blue of the South Pacific Ocean without a destination in mind but just an expectation and the wonder of where we’d end up. But for now, I’d settle for just sitting next to the ocean on a beach at sunrise, listening to the rhythmic waves tantalizing the shore with their lapping; the smell of the sea and the sound of gulls as they wing their way through life.
Why do I love the sea? Perhaps because it’s a reminder of how vast the infinitude of God really is.
Once upon a time, a man asked God how long a million years was to Him. God replied, “It’s just like a single second of your time, my child.” So then the man asked, “And what about a million dollars?” The Lord replied, “To me, it’s just like a single penny.” So, the man gathered himself up and said, “Well, Lord, could I have one of your pennies?” And God said, “Certainly, my child… just a second.”
Of all that can be thought or said about God, His Infinity is perhaps the most difficult thing to understand! For to say that God is infinite, is to venture into an area that is altogether unfamiliar to us!
For we can only understand our world from the perspective of matter, space and time. Three things which have both a beginning and end! Infinity is, of course, a word that refers to something that is limitless; something that possesses neither a beginning nor an end.
When we think of infinity, the pictures that often come to our mind are The Ocean or the Universe. We use words like “the infinite waters of the ocean” or “the infinite expanse of the universe”. We use the word, “infinite” in describing the ocean because as we stand at the water’s edge, it goes beyond the horizon; it goes beyond our line of sight. We describe the universe as being “infinite” because it is so massively huge, we know, that we could never in our lifetime get to the other side of it.
But even these things are not truly infinite; they are only infinite because they appear that way to us; in reality, nothing that has been created by God can truly be said to be infinite!
To sit beside the ocean and think of God? It’s humbling, isn’t it? We come off looking very puny in comparison to who God really is! The Scriptures acknowledge this when they ask this question of God, “What is man that you are mindful of him; the son of man that you care for him?” Why would an infinite God…care about me? He cares because he is infinite…infinitely loving! And it is his infinity that should cause us to bow our knees before him, to worship him, to trust him even when we do not understand him or what he is doing! As Spurgeon put it, “a gnat, might as well, seek to drink in the entire ocean, as a finite creature to comprehend the Eternal God.”
And yet when we sit beside the ocean, we are reminded of one other truth about God and his relation to it; God is the only one in the universe who can control it. In the book of Job, the Lord asks the defiant and arrogant Job a series of questions intended to humble his insubordinate servant, God asks, “Who shut up the sea behind doors…who said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt?’”
The sea by its very nature is uncontrollable and yet God expends no energy at all in deciding where it can go; and where it can’t. We’ve all seen the devastating effects tsunamis can have on the communities which lie in their path. How easy would it be for God to devastate the earth by allowing tsunamis to wipe it clean, but in his mercy, he shuts up the irrepressible sea behind lock and key.
I am told that the largest wave in recorded history hit the southern coast of Alaska in 1958. A wave that measured an estimated 1720 feet in height; that’s taller than what was the Twin towers in New York, which measured only 1368 feet. I have a hard time imagining a wave that tall. Now try and get your mind around the God who made it! It’s chilling, isn’t it! Can your mind conceive of a God who has such power at his disposal? Yet in contrast to what we find to be utterly frightening, we find a God, who is utterly and completely in control of all of it!
God’s power is so infinite that it is just as easy for him to make a storm as it is for him to quiet one. God makes a ripple in a pond from a breath of wind, as easily as he makes a tsunami in the open ocean! Each is as effortless as the next. The fact that God can calm a storm to a whisper, reveals to us how effortless it is for him to do the impossible. He possesses the infinite power to displace the laws of nature to accomplish his will; to do all things, the simple and the impossible with same effortless ability.
If this is true of the irrepressible sea; why do, we doubt his ability to handle anything we think impossible in our own puny little lives? From this, I walk away from my beach experience thinking, “Truly, God is a God without Limit!” In his Power, he reminds us…there is nothing he cannot do! Yet in his Goodness, he shows us the infinite lengths he will go to bring us safely home!
God is a God without Limit and I, for one, am glad of it!