God: Everywhere and Nowhere (at once)

It is a wonder of God’s ways that he can be both present and utterly distant simultaneously.

I don’t mean that “God seems near” or “God seems far” - I mean literally.

God is utterly near:

Where shall I go from your Spirit?

Or where shall I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there!

If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!

Psalm 139:7

and far:

“Am I only a God nearby,” declares the LORD, “and not a God far away?”

Jeremiah 23:23

God’s omnipresence IS.

(Meaning he is everywhere, there is no escaping that fact or reality of it.)

And, yet, the “clothing of darkness” that God wears, hides him from even the most faithful saints at times:

If one wished to contend with him,

one could not answer him once in a thousand times.

…

Behold, he passes by me, and I see him not;

he moves on, but I do not perceive him.

Behold, he snatches away; who can turn him back?

Who will say to him, ‘What are you doing?’

Job 9:3, 11-12

His “all-present-ness” allows us to live and exist as human beings.

His hidden-ness makes us, even us who serve him, feel alone, lonely and “without God” in a world that is happy without the thought or reality of him in their lives.

It is a famous word of the Psalmist: “the fool says in his heart there is no God.”

The fool lives in the world without a moral principle to care for, or at least, without God’s moral principle, and feels safe and secure in his belief and his living.

The irony of God’s hidden-ness permits for a time this kind of belief to prosper and exist IN his world, which literally exists because of him and by his power.

God even gives to such a rebellious person a great life at times, making men like Caesar and Alexander, Napoleon and others who live contrary to his ways so they seem like gods.

Yet it is the fool who says in his heart there is no God.

So also the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” And the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way.

Mt 27:41-44

Here we see the righteous one, being mocked by the people of God because his God was not strong enough to “save” him.

So you see the fool who lives contrary to God, will usually defy God to his face (literally in this passage, to God-Incarnate’s face). These teachers are actually teachers of the Law of God, sitting in the highest human position as leaders of the people of God.

This is the utter strangeness of God hiding himself.

The faithful appear un-vindicated, “not having received the promise”…..

Yet there God is, both hanging on the tree, and being held atoms and all, by the invisible one from the beginning.

What is the divergence? If I was a really scummy bible teacher I would try to market “the divergence” to sell books.

The divergence is the sort of thing that happens every now and then.

Elijah throws fire from heaven and people then say “YHWH he is God, YHWH he is God.”

Or the Red Sea splits, Israel is saved and Egypt is destroyed.

The usual rule where the fool feels vindicated, and the righteous seeming to be the fool is broken.

And it is coming sooner than you expect.

Expect it.