“God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9)

When on a clear and frosty night we look up at the sky sparkling with stars and strewn with the stardust of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, we sense the wonder of it all but we do not really comprehend it.  It seems vast indeed, but not unimaginably so; remote yet friendly and secure.  And it is easy to forget that there are hundreds of millions of other galaxies far beyond the range of human sight, so that for all the vastness of what we see, it is only a relatively minute part of the whole.

And the same is even truer of our vision and understanding of God.  For all man’s confident and sometimes critical discussion of him, he is infinitely beyond the bounds, not only of the human intellect but of human imagination.  And at the spiritual level, our ability to understand God’s character and to enter into communion with him has been vitiated by our rebellious attitude to his will and by our deliberate choice of wrong in preference to right.