The Immutable God: God is infinite, infinity doesn't change
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Infinity is a hard thing to write about. It seems paradoxical to write about something that has no beginning. Or, how will I end an article about something that has no end? Outside abstract mathematical concepts, nothing we know of is infinite.
Cosmologists know that space-time is not infinite. The most liberal estimates are that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago. That’s longer than I would estimate, but the universe had a beginning nonetheless. It is not infinite. Time began, and space itself seems to have limits. An older theory of the size of the universe holds it to be 27.4 billion light years wide, but newer estimates put it around 156 billion light years. That’s big, but it is not infinite. It has a limit.
We can talk about something that has no beginning and no end, but a picture of what that looks like remains elusive. Infinity can only be discussed in the most abstract, mathematical terms.
What we know about infinity is that it cannot change in nature. Infinity plus one is still infinity. We know that infinity cannot ever be exhausted. The same way nothing can be added, nothing can be subtracted. Everything lacking anything is not everything.
We also know that while the concept of infinity is not new, the term “infinity” and its corresponding mathematical symbol are about 1,500 years newer than the Bible.
Instead of “infinity,” the Bible uses the word “eternal” to describe the infinite nature of God.
The first time Abraham began to “call on the name of the Lord” after Isaac was born and God changed his name to Abraham in Genesis 21, Abraham planted a tree in memorial of a treaty with a neighbor, and for the first time in the Bible, identified God as eternal. But we don’t need to wait 21 chapters to guess at God’s infinity. The very first verse of the Bible says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Before the beginning, if that phrase makes sense, God was already there. Before time and space began, God already existed.
The Psalms confirm this. Psalm 90:2 declares, “Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” God exists just as infinitely in the past as he does in the future. He does not have a beginning. Nor does he have an end.
The New Testament agrees with this characteristic of God.
As I researched for this column, the first verse that came to my mind was Revelation 1:8, which says, “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.’” It’s interesting that both the first and last books of the Bible affirm this eternal nature of God. I have this habit of looking key verses up in Greek. The phrase “who was, and who is, and who is to come” is interesting in the Greek. The Greek wording was more concerned with how a verb happened than when it happened. Time was secondary to aspect. Often, something gets lost in translation. I think the New Living Translation translates the phrase best: "I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come."
From the beginning of the Bible to the end, God is affirmed to be infinite, having no beginning and no end. We know from some pretty basic math that infinite things cannot change. Nothing can be added, and nothing can be taken away. Its nature is static.
Other details of God’s nature remaining constant will be explored later, but whatever that nature is, it does not ever change. God is now as he has always been and as he always will be. Not only do the Old and New Testaments say the same thing about the same God, but the logical inference from what the whole Bible says about God’s infinity is that he must be the same in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and even now.