God is everywhere
Jer. 23: 23-24 Am I close to God alone, says Jehovah, and not God from afar?
God has a quality that no other being possesses: Omnipresence. This attribute means that God is everywhere. But how can this be? Let's deal with this topic.
It is wonderful, it is something that man can not even understand in all its magnitude, but it is a reality: no matter where in the universe we are, we will never find a place where God is not. This means that God is present everywhere at the same time! It is not that God is divided to be everywhere, but that all his person, with all his power and glory, does not even have the need to move from one place to another to dominate the stage.
- Tell me where God is? - asked an atheist to a child. He replied, "I will tell you if you first tell me where He is NOT." This truth about the Omnipresence of God should impress us and make us live in holiness, because it is clear that we can not hide from Him to sin. Let us always remember that God sees us and hears us everywhere and at all times.
The greatness of the universe and the Omnipresence of God.
The universe is vast and, according to experts, continues in permanent expansion. Our understanding is not enough to cover its limits. At most, man has managed to leave his footprints on the moon, located about 384 thousand kilometers from the earth. God was already there from the beginning.
We reached to see the sun, located about 150 million kilometers. Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, is only 58 million kilometers from the sun. Pluto, a planetoid, is six billion kilometers away and takes 247 Earth years to complete a single orbit around the sun. The sun itself is almost 150 million kilometers from the earth. God is there, for man it is impossible; God fills all those distances, all those orbits, all those kilometers, all those gaps.
According to astronomers, our galaxy - called the Milky Way - measures 100 thousand light years from one end to the other. A light year is the distance that light travels in a year at its speed of 300 thousand kilometers per second. This results in 9 trillion four hundred and sixty thousand eight hundred million kilometers in a linear fashion. It is an incalculable extension, and God is on one end, and on the other, and on the whole journey. The measurements in kilometers are insufficient to measure the immensity of the universe. God does not have that problem. He does not have to travel, He does not move: he is simply in every corner of such a vast universe.
Only God is Omnipresent.
Being everywhere is only possible for God because, in essence, "God is Spirit" (John 4.24a). He does not "decide" to go to a place, He is already there!
"Jer 23: 23-24 Am I near God alone, says Jehovah, and not God from afar, will any man hide himself, says Jehovah, in hiding places that I will not see? heaven and earth? "
"Jer 23: 23-24" The Lord says: "Am I only God of what I have near? Does not my divine power reach what is far away? Can a human being hide in a hiding place where I can not see it, do not I fill the heavens and the earth with my presence? "
We understand with this that there is no time or place that escapes His presence. In other words, God is not limited or restricted to time or space.
- Over time:
2Pe 3: 8 But, beloved, do not ignore this: that one day is one thousand days and a thousand years as one day with the Lord.
- About the space:
Ps 139: 7-10 Where will I go from your Spirit? And where will I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, there you are; and if in Sheol make my stand, behold, there you are. If I take the wings of the dawn And dwell at the end of the sea, yet there your hand will guide me and your right hand will hold me.
For our part we can not even dream of the possibility of being infinite: our life has a limit, as does our body, our presence is subject to a single time and even only place. That is, we are always "here" and "now"; we can never be here and there at once, we can never be yesterday and today and tomorrow. God is.
This reality makes abominable, for example, the so-called prayer to the saints, the invocation of men and women who lived in a time on earth but who are no longer in it. When someone makes an invocation of this type, he is attributing the omnipresence, exclusive of God, to a person: God was yesterday and is today, here and there, while the saint was yesterday but can not be now; in life he was in one place at a time, today he can not be in any here on earth. The prayers to the saints, evidently, are empty prayers, that go nowhere and that also offend God.
By describing our finiteness and limitation and contrasting it with the Omnipresence of God, we realize our smallness and His greatness.
Isa 57:15 For thus said the High and Sublime, who dwells in eternity, and whose name is the Holy One: I dwell in highness and holiness, and with the broken and humble of spirit, to live the spirit of the humble, and to quicken the hearts of the broken.
God is not limited by time because he is eternal. And neither is it limited by space because it is omnipresent. But it goes even further: not only is it at all times and in all places but it transcends those concepts. In this consists the revelation of oneself as the Great I Am: He is the one who exists in himself, the one who had no beginning or end, He is the One Who Is.
He has no "past" or "future." The "past" and the "future" are human concepts, the age is divine. I emphasize here that time and eternity are not the same thing, and that eternity is not a "long time". His eternity is forever and ever!
The Omnipresence of God and His manifestation.
- The question will arise: If God is everywhere, are you also, for example, in a brothel? The answer is yes: but it does not manifest.
The manifestation of God is perceived through what we see and what we feel. God is everywhere but not always shown, not always manifested.
God, moreover, manifests in different ways.
1Ki 19: 11-1. He said to him, Go out, and stand on the mountain before Jehovah. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and mighty wind broke the mountains, and broke the rocks before the Lord; but Jehovah was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake; but Jehovah was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire; but Jehovah was not in the fire. And after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he covered his face with his cloak.
Let's analyze The prophet Elijah was in a cave. God, obviously, was already there. This man experienced four manifestations through which, in the past, God had already shown himself:
First it was a strong wind. When God spoke on Sinai with Moses, his words were like a whirlwind of lightning and thunder. That is, God manifested as a strong wind. But in the case of Elijah, God did not come in that wind. Then there was an earthquake. When the Lord descended on Sinai, says the Bible, that mountain trembled because God is there. But in that earthquake was not God either. The third manifestation that Elijah saw was a fire. God had already manifested himself like this to Moses when he spoke to him in the burning bush. But, now, God was not in the fire.
Let us observe that, although God manifests himself in his sovereignty as He wishes, he always does so in accordance with the Scriptures. Otherwise, we run the risk of being easily deceived as, sadly, it happens with many believers today who, because they do not know the Scriptures, allow themselves to be carried away by spiritual manifestations alien to the genuine movement of God.
Finally, returning with Elijah, a whistle came, a gentle and gentle wind. In this wind, declares the Bible, God was.
Let us learn the lesson: God manifests himself in many ways, but it is not possible to pigeonhole His presence in this or that manifestation. Elijah was not a prophet who walked after the manifestations of God, so he could discern that God was not in the first three manifestations as someone else might have thought. Therefore, Elijah did not leave the cave when the strong wind came, when the earthquake came, when the fire burned, but waited for the peaceful whistle. Every true believer must tell when God is manifesting and when he is not.
Now, let us understand that the very fact that God decides to manifest himself or not is part of His sovereignty. Thus, the fact that there is no manifestation does not mean that the Lord is not in our midst.
- Mat 28:20 Teaching them to keep all the things that I have commanded you; and behold, I am with you every day, until the end of the world.
Where was God?
Eph 1: 17-23 ... may the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, enlightening the eyes of your understanding, so that you may know what hope he has called you, and what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the great greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the operation of the power of his strength, which operated in Christ, reviving him of the dead and sitting at his right hand in heavenly places, above all principality and authority and power and lordship, and over every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the age to come; and he put all things under his feet, and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.
