The Futility Of Measuring The Immeasurable

Common Sense Commentary:  We neither comprehend the awfulness of sin, the infiniteness of God nor the awesomeness of His sacrifice of His Son Jesus for our sins.


We could use up all the positive adjectives of all human languages and a billion descriptive sentences and never scratch the surface of these three realities.  If we filled the infinite universe with our sincerest adoration, praise and worship it would equal a bare whisper of understanding, but is still the largest thing we can do.

Multiply your most magnificent concept of those three things by a quadrillion and your most noble conclusion might equal a spark beneath the blazing, million earths wide, blinding sun.

So how do I know so much? ...... I don't.  I have searched the depth and height and breadth of my mental and spiritual capacity for a lifetime and only learned one thing about these three truths.  After eighty years of life and sixty years of active, continuous study, I only comprehend,  (1) that the awfulness of sin is far  beyond my ability to define or measure it,   (2) that the glorious, infinite Holiness  of God is eons above my capability to measure it, and  (3) that the awesomeness of God's sacrifice of His Son Jesus for our wicked sins, is absolutely unthinkable in my most expansive imagination and study.

Though there is no way we can measure such eminent, holy concepts, there are two measurements we might hold up beside the eternal repulsiveness sin to our omni-holy God.  First, a single sin, "prideful rebellion", committed in heaven, by the Arch-Angel Lucifer (Light-giver) and one third of the ministering angels who followed him, resulted in the entirety of them being cast from heaven into earth where the lights went out at the moment they "fell away".  For Lucifer, now Satan, and those angels, now demons, there is no redemption for eternity.   They had already "been enlightened and tasted the heavenly gift .... fell away" and lost it.  Heb.6:4-6.  These verses address human believers but the general principle applies to angels who were also enlightened about Christ and  the Holy Spirit and of the Heaven's gift.  In Lk.15:10, Jesus said, Angels in heaven rejoice when one sinner repents. Also, I Pet.1:12 says, "which things angels desire to look upon."  So we know angels know the whole truth about these holy things. Being so enlightened, if they fall away, which a third of them did, there is no redemption for them forever.  Heb.6:4 says it is IMPOSSIBLE. The same is true with human believers.  True Christians CANNOT "fall away".  If it is not our goodness that saves us, our lack of it does not lose us.  Secondly, if the only adequate, qualified payment for our sins in the entire universe, was the propitiatory, sacrificial death of God's only Son, Jesus Christ, then we know how utterly, unthinkable a price it took to redeem our unworthy "human" souls.  We still cannot measure the awfulness of sin because we cannot measure the value of the self sacrifice God paid .... Jesus.


So don't tell this old preacher that by your puny, penny-ante good works you somehow qualified for God's acceptance of you or that YOU somehow keep your eternal salvation by doing these sweet little things and not doing those bitter things.  That is like holding out a grimie, tiny fist with a few soiled, sweaty pennies to God to pay for His painful sacrifice of His Son, Jesus to pay your unpayable debt of sin in eternal hell and thinking that squares you with God.  "Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needed not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth." II Tim.2:15. Jesus said, "The truth shall make you free." John 8:32.

Pass it on. RB