The Omnipresence of God

Christ Sanctuary - 23 July 2023

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Psalm 139 expresses a number of the attributes of God but one of the most prominent ones / is the omnipresence of God

        the teaching that God is everywhere present

David / the writer of this psalm / has had numerous first-hand experiences
of the presence of God in his life 

in his many close encounters with danger and possible death

So he’s able to talk about it in a way you and I are not able to naturally

So let’s learn from him

Let’s begin by picking up the two opening verses 

“O LORD, you have searched me and known me!

“You know when I sit down and when I rise up”
“You know when I sit down” / that’s your passive life
“You know when I rise” / that’s your active life

God knows your passive life

your inner thoughts / unspoken attitudes / hidden motives

That’s the meaning of the line “you discern my thoughts from afar” v.2

        But He knows too / your active life             – things your hands have touched / stuff your mind harbors             – places your feet navigate to

v.3 says “You are acquainted with all my ways”

* what you will turn out to be
* what your life will add up to /  and * how you’ll live it 

We’re talking about the entire span of your life and its destiny

Now all that / God has you contained / encompassed
He’s got you hedged in / by His love and care

And God knows each word you will speak even before you speak it

  v.4 / “Even before a word is on my tongue / You know it altogether”

        meaning you know it minutely / down to the ground!

        v 5 can be kind of scary 

“You hem me in / behind and before and lay your hand upon me”

That word “hem” has a reference to a garrison laying siege of a city
pressing in / besieging it

David sees God pressing in on him on every side

He sees all of his life / past present and future all wrapped up with God

  

Now / Do we understand all this / “No / we don’t”
  But neither did David / Look at verse 6 / “Such knowledge 

is too wonderful for me / it is high / I cannot attain it”

There is nowhere that God is not

God is a simple pure spirit / without material parts
In theological language / we say “God is incorporeal”

meaning “not composed of matter” “having no material existence”
So He can be everywhere in all places

We are now gathered here / but in five hours time
this place will be totally emptied of human people / But God
because He is incorporeal / was here / is here / and will be here

David tells us that there is no place God is not

and that ultimately / no one can succeed in running from Him

v. 7. Where shall I go from your Spirit? 

Or where shall I flee from your presence?

And he spells out / the omnipresence of God in clear geographical terms 

He understands God being present UP there / DOWN here / EAST & WEST         Victor Shepherd calls this “the geometry of grace”

David first sees God UP there / v.8 “If I ascend to heaven / you are there!” 

Of course God is not confined to any one single geographical location

But generally / we think of God us being UP in heaven

     We refer to this as the transcendence of God / God up and beyond us!
Psalm 97:9 “You are the Lord most high / over all the earth
towering over the earth”

So that’s the first location / UP 

Secondly / David sees God “DOWN” below
v. 8 “If I make my bed in Sheol / You are there!   

Sheol is the grave / the place everyone went to at death
David understands that / if he should die
God will be present there with him / in the grave 

God is present / even in the abode of the dead
This is great comfort for those of us have lost our loved ones
to know that even death could not tear them from God’s presence

Didn’t Paul say:“For I am convinced that neither height nor “depth”
not anything else in all creation will be able to separate us
from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus / Rom 8:39

Thirdly / David sees God in the EAST

v.9 / “If I take the wings of the morning 

and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea” 

“the wings of the morning” is a common Hebrew expression 

meaning the EAST / The sun rises in the EAST

There was a time when I daydreamed of owning a fishing boat

And if I did own one / I would have / painted on it’s brow / these words

Wings of the Morning / from v.9

“If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts
of the sea / even there your hand shall lead me,

  and your right hand shall hold me”
It will remind me that no matter how far / I venture out to sea 

to the vast unknown / God will be there with me

It is surprising that Jonah didn’t consider how impossible it was to 

run from God / He lived after the Psalms have been written

And surely he would’ve have been well-versed with v.9 

Someone has said that if the ship Jonah caught / had the words
Wings of the Morning / painted on its brow he chose not to see it
He was hell-bent on running from God

But don’t you love the fact that you can’t run away from God?

Alex Motyer calls this “the delightful impossibility” 

      It’s delightful because the day you succeed in running from God
  that’s the day of your unraveling / that’s the day you perish! 

Paul reminds is that it is “in Him” that we “have our being”

Fourthly / David sees God in the WEST

v. 9 / “If I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea”

“the uttermost parts of the sea” symbolizes the WEST for Israel

since the Mediterranean Sea was always west of Palestine

So David is here saying even if you could traverse that great arc 

from east to west / even if you could burst through the horizon

you can’t outpace God / You can’t run away from God

Look at vv 10-12 / “even there your hand shall lead me

and your right hand shall hold me / If I say "Surely the darkness
shall cover me and the light about me / be night"                             even the darkness is not dark to you 

The night is bright as the day / for darkness is as light with you”

Derek Kidner tells us that the reference to “darkness” here

  refers to a desire in our hearts that’s as old as the garden of Eden 

He calls it our “Eden-old desire to hide from God” 

Something inside us / wants for us to stay “hidden”
In John 3 Jesus said “light has come into the world
but people loved the darkness rather than the light
because their works were evil
For everyone who does evil hates the light”

But no one stays hidden / ”for darkness is as light to God”

Now / God is not only present in every place
He permeates and infuses the universe and beyond it
without in any way becoming diffused or distorted
God is present in every place / in the fullness of His being

But it is precise here that we need to be careful that we don’t 

     confuse God’s identity with nature’s identity
  God is never identical to nature

        If you think He is / you’re sliding into pantheism

Both Hinduism and Buddhism are pantheistic in their belief
   

* They hold that God is “in” everything / in the trees / rocks / sea etc

That’s the reason why they bow before such objects in worship

* They reduce God’s being to the substance of things

  * They believe that the being of God 

    is one and the same / with the being of all reality

    and without this world / God does not exist

For theists like us / God / without the world / remains God

God created the universe / But it remains distinct from His being

No part of God’s essence in found in the trees or rocks  

Although God is present in all things / He is distinct from all things

Ontologically / creation is not an extension of God’s divine being

Creation is distinct from God’s essence

God may be immanant / but supremely He is transcendent

There’s no way a finite creation could ever contain an infinite God

Perhaps the last word on the matter / comes from Solomon
Remember soon as he built the temple / he confessed
“But will God indeed dwell on the earth?
Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you
how much less this house that I have built!” / 1 Kg 8:27

Solomon is not denying that God dwells on earth
But he insists that God is not bound to any one place

Then / the psalmist says something most comforting in v. 10 / we mustn’t miss

    “Even there Your hand will guide me Your right hand will hold me fast”

     Hebrew people understand that God’s left hand symbolizes His judgment

But the right hand symbolizes His strength / mercy and protection

Isn’t that so reassuring

What a place to be / to be held securely by God’s right hand

Imagine if your eternal security depended / on your grip on God
which one of us / could hold fast to the end / like Job did

But our eternal security 

is not depended on our grip on God / but on His grip on us

We need to wake up to what this verse is saying / It’s saying to us
that God Who’s transcendent / Whose abode is in the heavenlies
is at the same time
wholly immanent / holding us fast with His right hand

Isaiah 57:15 / “For thus says the One who is high and lifted up
who inhabits eternity / whose name is Holy:
"I dwell in the high and holy place / and also with him
who is of a contrite and lowly spirit / to revive the spirit
of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite”

If you take comfort in nowhere else / take comfort here in v10

    “Even there Your hand will guide me / Your right hand will hold me fast”

For it will mean that whatever grief / danger or misery 

you may go through / God is ever present with you

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

I will fear no evil / for you are with me

Your rod and your staff they comfort me" / Ps. 23:4

Alright / Let me pose a provocative question here:

If God is everywhere present / will God be present in hell?

I used to think not / I used to think
that hell is only one place / where God is not present
until one day an American lady heard my view on that in a sermon
She was a gracious person and didn’t want to embarrass me
She simply quietly handed me a book on that subject
It was Heaven and Hell: Jonathan Edwards on the Afterlife
by John Gerstner
Now let me say / It is not everyday that I have a personal paradigm-shift
      But at some point / between the covers of that book
  my entire eschatology
        was turned up-side down / or shall I say right-side up

I had then never really noticed Revelation 14:10 before
“In hell the unbeliever will drink of the wine of the wrath of God
he will be tormented with fire and brimstone
in the presence of the holy angels” / Now listen to this
“and in the presence of the Lamb”

You can’t be any more explicit than that: It tells us that “the wicked 

will suffer eternally in hell in the holy presence of Christ

I came to see that in hell / it will be God himself / Who will be there 

* inflicting his own wrath on sinners
* carrying out his own vengeance upon the unrepentant sinner

        Unrepentant sinners who rejected Christ 

* must have the anguish / of seeing Whom they have rejected

* must be able to see him triumphant

The holy angels / and the Lamb / will be present in hell
not just so they might gloat / but so they will be vindicated

Hell is appalling and gruesome / not because of the absence of God
but because of the presence of God

The ungodly want nothing more than to be separated from God
But their anguish in hell will not be separation from God
It will be the presence of God that will torment them

For God will be present in hell 

not in grace and blessing but in holiness and wrath
They will know Him as an all-consuming fire
In the end / even hell is God’s hell

Now / where does all this lead us? Now let me build on this thought

Some of you may have read William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies
It is about a plane full of young English school pupils
that crashed on an isolated island in the Pacific Ocean
The only survivors are boys in their middle childhood
And in no time / any semblance of order rapidly deescalates

They started suspecting one another ended up killing one another
The novel depicts the intrinsic evil nature / in human people
and how that in the absence of any social order  
human people will only reveal their depravity

The point I want to make: human civility / lies only thinly under the skin
Most of you are too young to have heard of the Watts Riot in the
August of 1965 For six days in LA there was this racial riot / civil unrest
And right through the six days of civil unrest / the TV cameras
    were picking up prominent people in society / looting the stores 

Now / you might be thinking     if humans capable of such unspeakable evil         how is it that the world is still spinning and we’re all still alive?

It is this: God / in His grace / has placed in human societies
      no matter how tribal / such institutions as head-ship / government
      law and order / marriage / school / police / military
      These are gifts of common grace / God gives to the world
to curb / to constrain / the wickedness of the human heart

Remember James says : “Every good gift and every perfect gift
is from above / coming down / from the Father of lights” /1:17

Thomas Hobb who died in 1679 wrote his famous satire / Leviathan
in which / he expounded his influential social contract theory
where free people voluntarily consent / to Government control
for the sake of securing  / safety / peace and order
His basic thesis is
* that the human tendency is one that slides towards anarchy
with the strong dominating the weak
* that given total freedom
humans will plunder, rape and murder
* that without political law and order / human life would be
in Hobb’s words / "nasty, brutish and short"

We take it for granted / but had it not been for the grace of God
restraining human people / from what was in their heart to do
this earth / would long have been uninhabitable
we would long / have eaten up each other
Paul has a verse that seems to contracted John
Remember John says the wicked will suffer
“in the presence of the Lamb”
        Paul tells us / that the wicked will suffer
“away from the presence of the Lord” / 2 Thes 1:9

      There is no contradiction there:
      The Greek word Paul uses for "presence" is προσώπου (prosōpon)
means "face” / “countenance” / “look"
Paul is saying in hell / what will be dreadfully lacking
is the “face” / the “countenance” of God

That / is the core of divine judgment:
      the exclusion from God’s presence as the source of all blessedness

Sometimes you tell people / that the biblical imageries of hell
as undying fires and devouring worms are precisely just that             they’re just imageries

And when they hear you say that / they would breath a sigh of relief 

But that just goes to show that they don’t understand
that though those imageries are merely imageries
      they are imageries of something / far more terrifying

The horror of hell is not the unending burning fire / or the voracious worms
It is a zillion-quadrillion times / far more ghastly than that

Can you imagine a community / where there’s not a shred of kindness
not a grain of compassion / not an ounce of love
not a trace of honesty / not a smidgen of mercy / a morsel of justice

Such a place would be gruesome and hideous / It’ll be a nightmare

Now hell / is precisely such a place!

The horror of hell is this:
It will be the absence
of any trace of the benevolence / the countenance of God
It will be the absence of His grace / His favor / kindness
mercies / sustenance / benefits / privileges / protection / pity
affection / faithfulness / devotedness / compassion / empathy

Now / here’s where everything finally lands

Our Lord Jesus / plunged into this very place!

On the cross / at the third hour / the place was darkened
And Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?             that is / My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Martin Luther once sat motionless for hours / as if in a trance

He denied himself food and drink

he remained absorbed in deep contemplation

Finally / he stood up and exclaimed:

"God forsaken by God! Who can understand that!"

Now / there are some bible passages / that are difficult to decipher


but perhaps nowhere in the Bible do we have such a mystery


that staggers the mind / and shocks the consciousness


as this tortured cry from the lips of our dying Savior

These words are so shocking


* some people have denied that they ever came from the lips of Jesus


* others say that it was a despairing cry of a disappointed patriot


whose political plans have failed


* others like Schleiermacher / say that He was simply reciting 


the opening sentence of the Psalm 22 / the psalm of lamentation


* the Moslems say his cry was due / to his fear of death


his lack of the moral courage / to face death


* still others say He became so overwhelmed by the excruciating pain


so drained of his strength from his lacerated back 

so tortured by the crown of thorns jabbing his head

so crushed by the weight of human sin


which is so repulsive to his sinless soul


that He “felt” forsaken by God / God had not truly forsaken him


that it only seemed to Him / that God had abandoned him


but God would never have forsaken Him at all

Nothing could be further from the truth

This is the cry of Psalm 22 / which is prophetic of Calvary

“I am poured out like water / All my bones are out of joint
My heart is like wax / It is melted within my breast

My strength is dried up like a potsherd,

    My tongue sticks to my jaws / You lay me in the dust of death”

This is called the Cry of Dereliction 

Theologically it’s called the harrowing of hell  

Descensus Christi ad Inferos / "the descent of Christ into Hell" 

      We recite that line regularly in our creed: “He descended into hell”

Richard Bodey my lecturer at Trinity 

refers to this cry as the “crucifixion within the crucifixion”

  John Calvin says that these words / are the best commentary 

to the words of the Apostles Creed 

which says "He descended into hell"

Jesus plummeted into that perverted and depraved place 

All the hell that all sinners deserve for all eternity were laid on Him

He absorbed the undiluted wrath of God

And the Father forsook Him
He became a castaway / a derelict / a cosmic fugitive 

He felt repulsed / ostracized / scorned

  He hears no voice saying 

"This is my beloved Son in Whom  am well-pleased”

John Duncan / divinity professor in Edinburgh / Scotland once asked: 

“Do you know what it means to be forsaken by the Father? 

It is damnation”

I’ve reminded you a number of times now
of what it cost Jesus / for us to receive the Aaronic benediction:

“The Lord bless you and keep you
The Lord make His face to shine upon you / and be gracious to you
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace”

Those words bless you / at a great cost to Jesus / because
for the Father to bless you this way
He had to turn / and say to the Son

“The Lord curse You / and cast You away
The Lord make His face to scowl upon You
and be ungracious to you
The Lord hide His countenance from  You
and give You torment”

But this is the very core of the gospel
"Christ saved us from the curse of the law
by Himself becoming a curse for us” / Gal 3:13

If we are blessed with omnipresence of God
      it’s because He was cursed with omni-absence of God 

But Jesus plunged into that God-forsaken place
so that we will never have to be found there

Had it not been for Christ
that place would’ve been our destiny

He suffered our hell / that we might reap His heaven

Because He was abandoned / we will never be abandoned

What a Saviour!

If there is one verse that ought to be tattooed in our daily consciousness

it’s got to be 2 Corinthians 5:21

“For our sake / God made him to be sin / who knew no sin
        so that in him we might become

                    the righteousness of God”                                 

 

All praise be to our God  

the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ

for His great love for us in giving His Son

 

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