Question from a reader:

I am reading Heaven for the fifth time. I do not doubt God’s power and that God’s presence is everywhere, but science is revealing so much new information about the infinite number of stars and galaxies in the universe, and the idea of infinity is very difficult for me to comprehend. My career was in engineering, so I like to understand how and why things work and exist. How do you comprehend the idea of infinity?

Answer from Randy Alcorn:

Personally, I think it is marvelous that the universe is so vast and that God is said to have created it with His fingers. Effortless. No big thing. "He made the stars also" (Genesis 1:14), like a universe 150 billion light years across. If we could wrap our mind around the vastness of creation, it might make us think that it is small and we are bigger than we are. The truth is that creation is incomprehensibly vast and we are indeed very small.

But God is infinitely bigger than His creation. If we could wrap our minds around everything in the world God created, we might think we could wrap your mind around Him. We can’t. We can know Him genuinely, but He will always be bigger and greater than the most we can comprehend. He is infinite, we are finite. That is as it should be, and should not cause us perplexity or fear, but wonder. Even the term monstrous universe has a negativity to it. It should be our vastly wonderful universe, pointing us back to the wonderful God who created it and loves us so much that He sent His Son that we could live forever with Him in a resurrected universe without sin or suffering.