Infinity (for Brass Quartet)

INFINITY (2009)  Premiered February 21, 2010, Providence Brass, Providence Church, Avon, OH      

 for brass quartet
2.5 min.

I. Infinity

[The infinity of God] does not involve His identity with the sum-total of existed things, nor does it exclude the co-existence of derived and finite things, to which he bears relation…it should not be confused with boundless extension, as if God were spread out through the entire universe, one part being here and another there, for God has no body…” (Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 59.)

The Creation Museum outside of Cincinnati, Ohio features a planetarium exhibit that displays a computer animated representation of the universe based on years of data collected from telescopes around the world.  The perspective begins with earth and travels outward, first toward the moon, the farthest man has ever ventured in space, which took three days to reach at the speed of a bullet. That distance is a drop in the bucket compared to the size of our solar system; it would take a cube six hundred billion miles on a side to contain it. Even more mind blowing is the fact that it would take over 4,200 of those cubes stacked end to end to reach the next nearest star. As the presentation continues, the view zooms out to show our Milky Way galaxy, in which the earth is invisible and the sun is reduced to an insignificant point among millions of stars, planets, moons and nebulae. But the universe doesn’t stop there. Man has catalogued thousands of these galaxies of all shapes and sizes millions of billions of miles from the earth with countless others yet to be discovered. I was left speechless and humbled by the depiction.

To understand the great size of the universe only glimpses the magnitude of God’s enormity and power. After all, the creation of the universe is summed up in a phrase, “He made the stars also.” (Genesis 1:16) Our human minds cannot even fathom or calculate his handiwork in a single day, much less comprehend God himself. God has no beginning and no end. He invented space and time, and He transcends it. He has no limits, no boundaries. God is infinite.

I Kings 8:27, Job 11:7-10, Ps. 90:2; 102:12; 139:7-10, 145:3, Isa. 66:1, Jer. 23:23-24, Matt. 5:48, Acts 7:48-49; Acts 17:27-28, Eph. 3:21