If I wrote Joe a book, and said: Joe, my ways are so high above your ways you can't understand it; Joe can't fathom that, in his world, I can go behind him; and in front of him. He can't understand that, because he's stuck in 2-D.
Let's get their attention: I take my hand, and I stick it through their world - they're going to see my hand in 2-D. What does my hand look like in two dimensions? #1: it's flat; #2: it would be five dots, coming through their world at differing times, followed by a series of dashes.
Joe says: Jane - did you see that? That's five dots, followed by a series of dashes! Jane says: no, I think it was bigger than that. I think that was the ‘hand of Shane’. He says: man, are you smoking something?
What if I took this ring, and I stuck it through their world - what would they see? That would just be one dot, which then separates into two dots, which then come back together as one - and then it disappears. He says: did you see that? That was roughly 20 dots that went like this. She goes: no, no - that was Doug's ring! He says: man, are you smoking...
What if I put my face up close to their world? She goes: do you smell that? Smells like curried chicken; I can feel something! Joe goes: no, no - that's the face of Shane - I can sense his presence. Who's right, and who's wrong? None of them - it takes faith to believe it all.
In two dimensions, the ring is a circle; but when you turn it (in 2-D) it's a rectangle. Are there ever enough dimensions to make a circle a rectangle? Yes, you need 3-D. We just need an axis to turn it on, to make a circle into a rectangle - but in their world it can never be. Mathematicians refer to a ‘dimension’ as a ‘degree of freedom’.
If this is a space in a jigsaw (2-D puzzle), and this is the piece that's supposed to go in the puzzle space, can you ever squeeze that into that, in two dimensions? No, you have to pick it up, move it over the top, and put it down. You need to have another degree of freedom in order to do that.
My point is this: that we are 4-D people. We live in 3x ‘space-dimensions’, and 1x ‘time-dimension’. We can only be at one place at one time - that's our limitations, that's our world. We are stuck to perceiving things that only exist right in front of us, something we can see, something we can touch, feel. We exist in three space dimensions, and one time dimension, so we are 4-D.
These are the complications that exist when a 4-D person tries to communicate with a 2-D one. These are the complications that exist.... They will never understand me; I would simply be pleased with the fact that: they even noticed; that they were giving it a go. Someone stuck in 2-D has no hope of understanding a 4-D person. All they can know is what I tell them; and even then, what I tell them is limited to their way of understanding things.
Imagine the complications that exist when an infinitely-dimensional God, tries to communicate to four-dimensional people? Can you imagine the intricacies? That's why God just kind of covers His bases. He says: “As far as the heavens are above the earth, so great are My ways above your ways.” You can't get your head around Me.
In Deuteronomy He says: “If you can imagine it, it isn't Me”! I'm so much bigger than you, that if you took your imagination to its furthest bounds, whatever's there - I'm bigger than that. Every aspect of Me is bigger than that.
If you just take “my love”; how wide, and how deep, and how broad, and how great, is the Love of God - that you can't even get your head around it. So before we go any further: God is infinitely big; and we're going to talk about this when we talk about the second commandment.
God is infinitely big; He's also infinitely small. Have you ever heard of the ‘Butterfly Effect’ (not the scary movie)? The phrase was coined by a MIT physicist in 1960; so this was a guy really, really smarter than us. He wanted to come up with a way to predict weather patterns with greater accuracy; so he was working with an algorithm on a computer program.