Our Immense God

1 Kings 8:27-28
27 "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You. How much less this temple which I have built! 28 Yet regard the prayer of Your servant and his supplication, O Lord my God, and listen to the cry and the prayer which Your servant is praying before You today: NKJV

Solomon’s temple was magnificent in its beauty and its size. The finest stones, wood and metals were used in its construction. The Bible's description of Solomon's Temple suggests that the inside ceiling was 180 feet long, 90 feet wide, and 50 feet high. The highest point on the Temple that King Solomon built was actually 120 cubits tall (about 20 stories or about 207 feet) {Jewish Virtual Library}. Although the temple was majestic in human standards Solomon understood it was paltry in comparison to the beauty and the vastness of God. The temple was to be God’s dwelling place on earth, but Solomon knew this was impossible. The temple could not contain God, nor could the earth, nor heaven, nor the heaven of heavens. The sphere of the visual universe is 93 billion light years {Wikipedia, Observable Universe}. God is more vast than all the universe and cannot be contained in space nor time. Yet, the understanding of God’s immenseness did not deter Solomon from crying out to his Creator and pleading with Him to hear his prayer. God may be greater than time and space, yet He hears our every cry no matter where or no matter when. We should each stand amazed as Solomon and even his father who wondered, “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him?” (Ps 8:3-4 NKJV). We serve an omnipresent God. There is no place where He is not, yet He is concerned enough that He hears the prayer of each of His children.