[ 2 ] Angels in heaven see God’s immensity as the divineness of his
underlying reality and God’s eternity as the divineness of his capacity to
become manifest. They also see God’s immensity as the divineness of his
love and God’s eternity as the divineness of his wisdom. The reason is
that angels remove space and time from divinity; this gives rise to the
concepts just mentioned. Since we on earth cannot help basing our
thinking on ideas that are spatial and temporal, we cannot conceive of
the immensity of God before there was space or the eternity of God
before there was time. In fact, if we try to conceive of them, our mind
more or less loses consciousness, like a shipwrecked person who has fallen
in the ocean or like someone being swallowed in an earthquake. Indeed,
if we rashly persevere in that pursuit, we can easily go insane and end up
denying the existence of God.
[ 3 ] Once I myself was in a state like that. I thought and thought
about what God did from eternity, what he did before the world was
constructed. I wondered whether he debated the act of creation and
worked out a sequence he would follow. I pondered whether mental
debate was possible in a pure vacuum, and other useless questions. To
prevent these considerations from driving me insane, the Lord lifted me
into the atmosphere and light of inner angels. As factors related to space
and time in my former thinking were somewhat removed there, I
became able to understand that God’s eternity is not an eternity of
time. Since there was no time before the world came about, I realized
that it was completely pointless to ponder such questions about God.
Furthermore, since the Divine “from eternity,” that is, the Divine inde-
pendent of time, did not involve days, years, and centuries—they were
all an instant for God—I concluded that God did not create the world
in a preexisting context of time; time was first introduced by God as
part of creation.
[ 4 ] In addition, I would like to relate something worth mentioning.
At one extreme end of the spiritual world, two statues of monstrous
human forms appear with wide open mouths and gaping jaws. People
whose thinking about God from eternity is pointless and insane seem to
themselves to be swallowed up by these statues. The statues are really the
delusions people hurl themselves into when they think discordant and
unseemly thoughts about God before he created the world.
5. From many things in the world, enlightened reason can see the infinity 32
of God.I will list a number of things that human reason can view as evi-
dence of God’s infinity.
§32 god the creator & creation 43