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No Limits

I have seen a limit to all perfection, but your commandment is exceedingly broad. Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day.  — Psalms 119:96-97, ESV

Every day we are confronted by limits. Many externally imposed limits on us are for our health and safety (“drive on the right side of the road,” “don’t open the airplane door when in flight”, etc.) However, we also have more fundamental and personal limits. Each of us is likely very aware of the limits to our mental and physical abilities and the increasingly annoying increase to these limits as we age.

Fascinatingly, even at the most fundamental levels of nature, there are still limits. Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorems (published in 1931) proved that even in the “pure” field of mathematics there exist truths that cannot be proven to be true. Further, any reasonable mathematical system itself cannot prove its own consistency. In 1927, Werner Heisenberg formulated the Uncertainty Principle in physics that proved there are fundamental limits to the existence of properties of every particle in the universe. Similarly, there are conditions in the universe so extreme that the known laws of physics don’t apply. So, for almost a century, the fields of mathematics and physics have determined inescapable limits to its own progress toward knowledge and understanding.

Although at times both mathematicians and physicists have been guilty of thinking that their discipline would be the means to perfect knowledge and truth, this utopia will never be. Psalms 119:96-97 (above) explains that, although we inevitably see such limitations to perfection, God’s word transcends these limits! So much more can be said on the perfect and unlimited nature of God and how we, as Christians, benefit from, and can gaze into, this perfection (e.g., Luke. 1:77, Eph. 3:16-19, Phi. 4:19, Rom. 11:33-36, Pro. 25:2-3), I want to briefly encourage you during this Easter season to consider how Christ overcame even the gravest limitations of this world (pun intended). His perfection has no limits. We, as fallen and rebellious children, can rest and revel in Christ’s perfection and not be weighed down by the constant reminder of our limits here today. We have the privilege to elevate our sights, and our hearts, this Easter as we cling to our only hope in life and death and transcend the limits of this imperfect world, to the glory of Christ, our risen Lord!

Pastor Aaron