Omnipresence
“Am I a God who is near,” declares the Lord, “And not a God far off? “Can a man hide himself in hiding places so I do not see him?” declares the Lord. “Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?” declares the Lord. Jeremiah 23:23-24 NASB
I do not see him– God is everywhere. That’s what omni-present means. As God declares to Jeremiah, He is a God who is near. There is no hiding from Him. Ever.
Of course, this idea about God can have two radically different meanings for us. The first is that God is always available, involved, ready to comfort, empathizing with our traumas and struggles. His compassion radiates through the entire created order.
The second is a bit more ominous. Since God is everywhere, we can’t really get away with anything. He is always watching. No man can escape His gaze. There really is no point in covering up our sins. All excuses fail us. The Judge of all the earth stands over us each and every moment, ready to punish. Nothing escapes Him.
With this in mind, it’s startling to hear David say, “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; do not be silent at my tears; for I am a stranger with You” (Psalm 39:12) or “How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1).
David articulates the difference between the theological doctrine of omnipresence and the emotional experience of omnipresence . God might be everywhere (“If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there” Psalm 139:8), but that doesn’t mean we always experience Him as present. In fact, we often experience the absence of His presence as the emotional reality of our lives. During those times, God is everywhere not there. Of course, theoretically we know He is around. But that doesn’t help much when we feel His absence. Even if God tells us that He is the God who is near, our emotional reality often makes mincemeat of the doctrine. We feel alone. Pry up the postured public personae of most people and you will find a deep sense of abandonment. An ontological aloneness that invades our well being. Underneath it all is the universe of one. And it’s not a very friendly place.
When the prophet speaks, don’t we hear the words as if they are ours? “Why do you say, O Jacob, and assert, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, and the justice due me escapes the notice of my God’”? (Isaiah 40:27)[1]
This is the time when we need to listen to God instead of that gnawing moan inside. “Am I a God who is near?” He asks. The answer is, of course, “Yes, You are near.” And that’s an answer we need to tell ourselves when those moments of ontological emptiness raise their Medusa heads. Oh, it’s not easy to do this. The emotional sabotage is virulent, insistent and overwhelming. All the past abandonment triggers fire at once. But then there is Jeremiah’s God asking the world’s most important rhetorical question.
Better read it again. Then with Hagar you can say, “‘You are a God who sees’; for she said, ‘Have I even remained alive here after seeing Him?’”
Topical Index: omnipresence, Psalm 39:12, Psalm 13:1, Psalm 139:8, Jeremiah 23:23-24
[1]“He expresses the loss of all meaningful narrative; he cannot even conceive of a map of his life course, even from God’s perspective, that should make his experience intelligible.” Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 262.
A SHORT PERSONAL STORY OF THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD
Once upon a time, when I was going through a great grievous and distressing life experience, I was still awake in the very late hours of the night (the very early hours of the “morning”), so I decided to go outside into the night, to draw more near to God. I stood in the dark at the end of the driveway at my brother’s house where I was visiting, in a small rural neighborhood at the bottom of a small mountain in Pennsylvania. I was praying and quietly crying out to God as I looked up at the starry, full moon-lit sky as the clouds moved quickly by because of the windy season at the time, desperately asking Him to be my Helper, to be my Deliverer, to be my Healer. Being quite uncertain, or actually, to be more honest, quite doubtful, of deserving His mercy and favor towards me, and not strongly enough feeling His presence, love, comfort, and assurance, I more vocally cried out, “Do you even hear me, God?!”
Suddenly, a strong gust of wind blew through the neighborhood from behind the house across the street forcing the tall evergreen trees next to the house to sway, triggering the motion sensor on the porch light of the house right across the street in front of me where I was facing, thus causing the light to turn on. I then heard the Father’s quiet reassurance, “I am with you. I hear your cries.”
In the dark of night, God is not only omnipresent, He is near, and He hears our cries. Sometimes He will even give us a sign that He does.
Personally, I don’t need signs so much anymore.
GOD IS MERCIFUL! GOD IS LOVE! GOD IS GOOD! GOD IS ALWAYS NEAR…..AND HE IS ALWAYS FAITHFUL TO THOSE WHO LOVE HIM AND PUT THEIR TRUST IN HIM!
TRUST IN GOD…..NO MATTER WHAT!
SHALOM!
Excellent, excellent, excellent!
In the trauma years of my life, where things went from bad to worse; where every choice of OTHERS around me seemed to culminate in poorer and ever poorer outcomes for me, and there was no path for my feet no matter how hard I struggled, I cried again and again to God and religiously, assiduously, tried to ‘do right’. Nothing ‘worked’: the skies were brass and I was effectively fractured from God, myself and all around me. Trust had been broken from every direction, it seemed, and I was the unwilling recipient of all those broken ends; the custodian of disfunction. After a full decade of attempting to reach out to God and be a ‘good girl’, I fatigued; I realized that I had to quit all that wasn’t getting ‘results’ or I was not going to survive.
I humbled up and, after searching the Bible from end to end, turned away with only one verse resonating for me: only one verse I found in the whole Book that applied to me, and that one was about the Laodicean condition: “lukewarm”, and about YHVH’s response: projectile vomiting of deadly poison. I felt lukewarm: I had no emotions left. I didn’t want to be vomited (rejected) by Him, but I realized that I did not know what the warmth (“hot”) of love was. (That was an extremely humbling revelation!) So I decided the only other option for me was “cold”. I knew that I didn’t know what “hot” was, so I decided (to avoid God’s rejection) that I had to go “cold”. I walked out of the church and away from the Bible and I quit trying to talk to God (pray). I started looking for love instead of going through the motions of pretending I already ‘had’ it, religiously speaking. Looking back, that was the first truly honest, responsible move of my life. I have already told the story about being baptized late (age 17) into the church, and IMMEDIATELY being told to “get out” of it. Frightened for my life, I did, and that move (of obedience) I believe saved my life from suicide shortly thereafter. It was because I was taking personal responsibility for my life; learning ‘my’ part of the dance. But, y’all, it was really cold out there! I learned what cold was: what a life without God was.
It was only when I started taking the responsibility for making HONEST moves back toward Him, however, that I started to realize how my end was ‘creating’ all the distance: all the “cold”. I could not see my part in the drama and the trauma of my life. The distance was all on my end, but I had been handed a ‘system’ (religion) as a mask for that distance, and the utter lack of effectiveness of love in my life was, because of BROKEN TRUST (created by the choices of others), the source of that experience of “lukewarm”. Walking away from the pain of love not working saved my life because it forced me to be honest to the bottom of my soul; a place simply not accessible (again, because of a break of trust with MYSELF that occurred in conjunction with the traumatic break of trust I was simultaneously experiencing on all the other levels of my life); in the flesh, anyway. What I was learning was that the house of my life – my body, mind and soul – had been ‘built’ by the choices of those who had gone before me on sand: on the fractured ‘rocks’ of unresolved disconnection. My inheritance was not good, y’all! I had to start over. The picture of God that I had been handed was not Himself; not a good image; not the actual Rock. No wonder I could not ‘find’ Him!
The only cries that count are the ones from the bottom of our wells; the bottom of our fractures. Cries from any other place are cries for a fictional god of our ‘need’ to continue to justify the paradigm we already find ourselves in. He cannot respond to those ‘needs’ because they are not what is really wrong with us. I think it is shameful for the yetzer hara to admit “trust issues” – breaks in reality – for all sin creates these breaks that result in INSANITY. The human brain does not wish to admit insanity to itself because if it did, the programming is set to precipitate apoptosis: cellular death. The brain does not want to die! So insanity pretends it is sane to avoid a reboot. That pretense, however, is what creates all the distance between ourselves and a holy God who can only connect with those who are not erecting barriers: altars to false gods in the name of God: fictions of a god who ‘fits’ our disfunctional paradigms.
I think we can cognitively admit a picture of God that aligns with the words about Him all day long, but the only thing He can respond to is where we are really at, which is a place the yetzer hara avoids at all costs because it knows that, by design, the admittance of the insanity; the trust breaks; the disconnection of sin; will result in death: death of the false identity we got handed the first time around. To avoid that death, we ‘create’ that distance from Him. It is not because His ears don’t work or because His “hand is shortened that (He) cannot save”, but because our sins have “separated between (us) and (our) God” Is. 59:2. The breaks are all on our (false identity) end. (However, I will have to say, crying is a good way to start to shorten that distance of our own making!) May we sigh and cry about those breaks today, and tear down the wall between us with the tears of repentance for believing all the lies that accuse Him of not hearing what we are refusing to admit.
Laurita. Had it not been for these experiences in your life, you would not be here today to relate them to us and give us hope when we wonder WHY. Why Lord am I here and for what purpose? It is almost impossible to understand why when you are in the midst of everyday living. My only plan is to go out every day and ask God that I may be a blessing to someone this day.
Wow, thank you so much Laurita for sharing all of that. I feel like I’m way down the road from you, from where you’re at in the distance that you’ve come, but at least I am on the road.
Accepting God’s love in my brokenness and despite my inability to perform up to the standard I believe God required of me, is having an amazing impact in my life. It’s the love that heals and restores us to himself, actually to sanity. Both yesterday and today of Skip’s writing has greatly moved me, givien me more understanding of what’s going on inside of me. And God is showing up in such an amazing way. To realize that God Is with me, the same, whether I feel his presence or not. God has been so gracious to me by allowing me to feel his presence and reassurance so much because he knew I needed it. But now, he is telling me, let us go on, walking by faith in his promise to never leave me or forsake me. I believe he is healing me from a life of drama, the beginning of which I had no control but later I seemed to create my own traumas. Basically I was reacting every time I felt he left the room and left me alone. But that was a lie. Perfect love casts out fear because fear has torment.
Building each other up in the most holy faith.
How can we be close to, or experience His presence,
if we are not keenly aware of and a part of His nature?
Isn’t it our imprisoned human nature that steadfastly separates
us from His divine nature?
He offers us a gap solution: Come to Him in complete faith
and trust. Repent deeply and shake everything off. Give yourself up,
surrender all that clings to your old self-centered nature and, in faith,
receive His promised divine nature. Obedience opens the door and
obedience keeps it open. When we cease being a foreigner to Him,
we begin the process of operating in His nature and realm and knowing
Him in His nature and realm. The slow steep change is overwhelming.
Peter knew this full well when he wrote 2 PET 1:1-10.
Our mind says it’s impossible. His mind, which we receive, says otherwise!
Good morning. I just have to say how incredible the writings from the last two days have been, to me! I feel like I’m in conversation with a number of different resources and God is speaking through all of them. God has no trouble communicating! Especially when your heart is open and hungry. I think he spikes the water of life with some salt because the more you drink of him, the thirstier you become! He is Genius!
Thank you, thank you Skip and everyone who has been sharing their experiences and thoughts. Providing the material for continued possibility of transformation! God will never be our debtor! The more we see Him , the more we find Him!
Maybe I will write more later but I have to get to work. Shalom to all.