Message summary: As God's children redeemed by faith in Christ, let us find great assurance and deep-settled peace in the theological truth that God is all-knowing. Since we know only in part, seeing only through a glass darkly, let us not attempt to lead, but follow the leading of our omniscient God!

Listen to our message on your audio player.

"Great is our Lord and abundant in strength; His understanding is infinite" (Psalm 147:5). "He knows everything" (1 John 3:20b).

Buzz Lightyear is a fictional character well-known and often imitated from the 1995 Toy Story movie. He is most famously known for his zealous phrase, "To infinity... and beyond!" If you've ever seen the movie you can probably hear him saying that! (video clip).

I asked several friends and inquired as to what they thought would be the most popular usage of of the word "infinity". Without hesitation they recalled Buzz Lightyear!

Years ago I heard a speaker share his testimony at a Christian Businessman's luncheon who had a doctorate in engineering and of course he was quite proficient in math. He shared the following story:

Many years earlier he had a wooden plaque carving with the symbol shown to the left on his desk. His little daughter came up to him, picked it up, and said, "I know what this is Daddy". She then turned it on its side and showed him that it was an eight! (Brooksyne's note: My observation would lead to the same conclusion, by the way.)

The plaque carving is actually the symbol for infinity, a concept that was far beyond his little daughter's understanding. Infinity is a concept in mathematics and philosophy that refers to a quantity without bound or end. By its very definition it's a concept hard to grasp. Infinitude is a noun which means "the state or quality of being infinite or having no limit".

Google is a popular search engine, probably used by most readers. It's named after a rather obscure number called a googol. It's been quite a few years since I studied math which was never one of my stronger subjects, so I have a hard time even expressing this figure, which is 10 to the power of one hundred or 1 with a hundred 0's after it.

This is more than all the hydrogen atoms in the universe, but the article didn't specify who counted them. I suppose that's about as close to infinity as one can get on this side! However, infinity is way beyond this by its very definition.

Infinity is also a word that describes God's knowledge, an attribute known to theologians as omniscience. The first daily Scripture states, "His understanding is infinite". The second daily Scripture portion succinctly describes this attribute in three words, "He knows everything". Omniscience is the capacity to know everything infinitely, to be "all-knowing". Now that's really hard to grasp, I suppose actually impossible with our finite minds!

Elsewhere the Scriptures teach this truth using illustrations such as the individual hairs on our head being numbered (every hair on every head, present tense). In Scripture the purpose of expressing this knowledge is to give the believer an assurance of God's care. In the case of our hairs being counted it's in the context of "Why do you worry?" In the case of the second daily text it's in regard to the assurance of our hearts understanding God's forgiveness.

Today we can receive tremendous encouragement from the truth that God knows everything. He is active both in the macroscopic and microscopic. He is involved not only in the macroscopic big picture (the stars are all named), but in the microscopic minute details of our lives (such as knowing the number of hairs on our head). Several weeks ago we shared a message using the quote, "There are no maverick molecules in the universe".

So, as His children redeemed by faith in Christ, let us find great assurance and deep-settled peace in the theological truth that God is infinite and all-knowing. Since we know only in part; seeing through a glass darkly (see 1 Corinthians 13), let us not attempt to lead, but follow the leading of our omniscient God!

Be encouraged today, Hebrews 3:13.

Stephen & Brooksyne Weber