Updating our Picture of God: Part 2, God is Bigger

Over the past several years, I have made three major updates to my picture of God.

God is bigger than I used to picture; God is more loving than I used to picture; and God is more internal than I used to picture.

God is Bigger

There is a verse is in the Old Testament that contains an image of a pretty big deity. The verse begins, “This is what the Lord says: ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool’” (Isaiah 66:1). Picture that literally. God is sitting on a huge thrown out in there in the sky somewhere, and God’s feet are propped upon Planet Earth, as if it is a footstool.

If taken literally, that provides a mighty large image of God.

Yet even the most conservative Bible scholar will concede that this description cannot be taken literally. I have been 35,000 feet above ground in an airplane, and nowhere did I spot a thrown in the sky. Beyond that, humans have traveled in space to heights much greater than airplane cruising altitudes, and so far no reports of giant legs propped up on the Earth. Further still is the view we can get through a telescope. Looking thousands of miles into the sky, we haven’t found a deity upon a throne.

So the image is meant to be taken figuratively. What a figure it is! Imagine a God so big that our entire planet, which would take longer than a day to fly around, being a sufficient footstool. That’s a really big picture of God.

Yet our knowledge of the expanse of the universe has grown tremendously since the time that this description of God was recorded in the Book of Isaiah.

I will share some thoughts here from Paul R. Smith’s book “Is Your God Big Enough, Close Enough, You Enough” to illustrate how big the universe is now known to be. Smith cites huffingtonpost.com from December 2010 to say that there may be over a “septillion” stars in the universe. A septillion is a one followed by twenty-three zeroes. Honestly, I feel incapable to speak intelligently as to whether that estimate is plausible or not. But if that number is correct, or even close, then the universe is larger than I can even understand.

Smith goes on to quote Carl Sagan: “How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘this is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge” (citing Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994).

It turns out that Isaiah’s image of God seated upon a throne in the sky with feet propped upon the Earth may not be subject to criticism in that it pictures God as too large. It may be subject to criticism in that is pictures God as too small! I’m not picking on the ancient author. I am merely pointing out that such imagery is based on an understanding of God from a time when the known reaches of all reality was much, much smaller than the known reality today.

If there is a prime mover behind all that we now know exists, then that prime mover would have to be much larger than the ancient images to which humans often cling.

So I have had to update my picture of God to acknowledge that God is bigger than what I used to picture.

Admittedly, this can be an unsettling update to install. If you stop updating after this initial change of perspective, you may not have helped yourself navigate daily life much at all. In fact, it might be frightening and intimidating. I am grateful for the second update, which I will discuss in my next post in this series.