To attribute size to God is to make Him subject to degrees, which He can never he, seeing that the very idea of degree relates to created things only. That which is infinite cannot be greater or less, larger or smaller, and God is infinite. God simply is without qualification.

"I AM THAT I AM" is how He in condescending patience accounts to created intelligence for His uncreated Being.

Quality, as the word is used here, has to do with pure being, with intrinsicality, and does not properly admit of degree. For this reason we may attribute quality to God, but not size.

God made man in His own image and gave him intellect, emotion and will along with moral perception and the ability to know and worship his Creator. These attributes constitute quality of being and differentiate the man from the world around him and even from his own body. Material bodies have extension in space, weight and form, but they lack the ability to think or feel or love or yearn or worship. Because they lack this ability, and especially because they lack the power of will, they possess no moral or spiritual qualities whatsoever; and because they have not such qualities they are nothing in themselves, their only significance being that which may for the moment be lent them by God or by the man He made in his own likeness.

Man's moral fall has clouded his vision, confused his thinking and rendered him subject to delusion. One evidence of this is his all but incurable proneness to confuse values and put size before quality in his appraisal of things. The Christian faith reverses this order, but even Christians tend to judge things by the old Adamic rule. How big? How much? and How many? are the questions oftenest asked by religious persons when trying to evaluate Christian things. This is done by a kind of unconscious reflex, because in the world of matter, motion, space and time these questions have valid meaning. In the world of spirit they have no meaning at all, and yet we carry them over into the kingdom of God, evidence enough that our minds have been but imperfectly renewed.

Our problem is that we think as men. We savor not of heaven but of earth, and our psychology is not that of Christ but that of Adam. All the while we stubbornly insist that we are evangelicals, but it is to our shame that many of the pagan philosophers were more spiritual-minded than we. Socrates, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and a great many more could be brought forward to witness against us. They were wiser in their generation without the light of the New Testament than we are with that light.

The Christian faith engages a spiritual kingdom where quality of being is everything. "The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." With these words Jesus showed how far both Jews and Samaritans were astray in their argument over the proper place to worship. Not the beauty of a city nor the size of a mountain matters to the Father; truth and spirit and all the wealth of moral qualities that gather around them: these are all in all.

It is not uncommon to find college students whose faith in Christ has been badly shaken by their exposure to teachings of science. After a few lectures on astronomy and a look through a telescope their neat little universe begins to fall apart. The sheer hugeness of the heavenly bodies and the immensity of space overwhelm them. The earth is but a microscopic speck in the vastness of space, a man but an infinitesimal pinpoint on the earth's surface, and God somewhere out beyond the farthest star, billions of light years removed - how then could God become man and dwell among us? And of what account is a man, insignificantly small and pathetically short-lived?

To think in this way is to confuse size with quality; it is to think ignobly of the Most High God; it is to identify Him with matter and make Him a servant of time and space; it is to degrade our concept of Deity and to fall victim to unbelief.

The truth is that one soul made in the image of God is more precious to Him than all the starry universe. Astronomy deals with space and matter and motion; theology deals with life and personality and the mystery of being. The body of the psalmist David, for instance, though of average size, was so small that it might have been tucked away in a crevice among the mountains of Judaea and never found, though men had searched for a thousand years. That is size, and it is not very important. But in some inspired hour David wrote the Shepherd Psalm! That is quality, and how precious it is may be inferred from the sound of ten thousand voices singing that psalm every Sunday of the year around the whole world.