That's How Great...

             For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; (Psalm 103:1-13)

The universe is said to be roughly 46 billion lightyears in each direction around the earth. I’m sure someone will complain that such an idea is ludicrous, because the earth isn’t the center of the universe. And they’d be right. But for the purpose of this post, let’s just accept it as the illustration it is. The universe is - according to those who reject the Bible’s claims about its age - about 14 billion years old. That means that the light from the stars at the edge of the universe is only about 1/3 of the way from that edge to earth. Of course, since the universe is supposedly expanding, the light from where the stars were may have reached us, but the star is no longer where it was at the time the light left it.

Now, some will claim that the heavens begin where the universe leaves off. It’s outside of the universe. So if God’s love is as high as the heavens are above the earth, then the “bottom side” of his love is greater than 46 billion lightyears in any given direction. Its easy, when we start talking about these unfathomable sizes and distances to shift the focus just a little, and start thinking about God’s love being 46 billion lightyears away in any given direction. If that’s where heaven is that has to be where God’s love is, right?

To complicate (or simplify?) matters, Romans 8 tells us that nothing can separate us from God’s love. It’s not just more than 46 billion lightyears away, it’s also closer than the air we breathe. So, this passage isn’t about where God’s love is. It’s telling us the size. We could accurately say that God’s love is infinite but that’s just another unimaginable term. And we need get a grip on the reality that we can’t limit, control, or measure His love as well as the reality that He does love us and that it’s not a long-distance love.

Moving onto the distance God has compassionately separated us from our sins, we find a bigger problem. The half of the world west of the Prime Meridian (which runs through Britain) is considered The West, and the half east of it is The East. That should mean that the distance between East and West is really about so small as to be invisible. On one side of an imaginary line (having length but no width) is East and on the other is West.

One might claim that the distance between east and west is about 8,000 miles, or the diameter of the world, using the idea of the eastern most and western most points on a 2D map. We might say 12,000 miles if we travel across the globe and not through it. None of these is circumstantially accurate.

If you got into a jet and started flying west, no matter how many times you circled the globe, you could continue to fly west. If you turned around, the same would be true of east. Yes, you would fly over and possibly refuel in the same city many times, but never find the end of west or the end of east. If one could travel around the universe in a similar way, you would never find the west end or east end of the universe. But, the moment you turn around, you’re facing east and you can travel just as far east as you did west.

That’s how great. That’s how far.