Omnipresent: God is Everywhere
From the Series—Omni
June 6, 2002Genesis 1:2 says, “The earth was formless and void. Darkness covered the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering.” One of the first things we discover about God is the simple yet amazing fact that God is always near. Genesis 1:2 uses the word “hovering” which comes from the Hebrew word paniym.
In regard to time, paniym refers to the split second right before and right after something happens. It’s almost as if God forms a parenthesis in time. I love the way Thomas Merton captures that concept, “The Lord travels in all directions at once. The Lord arrives from all directions at once. Wherever we are, we find that He has just departed. Wherever we go, we find that He has just arrived before us.”
In regard to space, paniym refers to the place right in front and right in back of someone. It’s almost as if God forms a parenthesis in space. David paints a picture of paniym in Psalm 139:5. He says, “You hem me in behind and before.” A.W. Tozer said, “God is above, but He’s not pushed up. He’s beneath, but He’s not pressed down. He’s outside, but He’s not excluded. He’s inside, but He’s not confined. God is above all things presiding, beneath all things sustaining, outside all things embracing and inside all things filling. That is the immanence of God.”
GPS
Psalm 139:7 says, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” The answer is nowhere because God is everywhere!
A few years ago I heard author and evangelist, Ken Gaub, share one of the most amazing true stories I’ve ever heard. He and his family were driving on I-75 near Dayton, Ohio when they decided to make a restaurant stop. His wife and children went right into the restaurant but Ken decided to stretch his legs. As he walked by a nearby gas station he heard a pay phone ringing. The phone kept ringing and he thought it might be an emergency of some sort so he picked up the phone. When he did, the operator said, “Long distance for Ken Gaub.” Ken almost passed out. He said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I was just walking in the middle of nowhere and heard this phone ringing.” The operator said, “Is Ken Gaub there?” After Ken made sure there was no candid camera, he said, “This is Ken Gaub.”
A voice on the other side of the line said, “Mr. Gaub, my name is Millie. I’m from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. You don’t know me, but I need your help.” She went on to explain that she had just written a suicide note, but decided to give prayer one more shot. She said, “God I don’t really want to do this.” As she prayed she remembered seeing Ken Gaub on TV and she thought to herself, “If I could only talk with him he could help me.” She had no idea how to get in touch with him, but as she prayed some numbers came to mind and she scribbled them down on a piece of paper. She thought, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if God has given me Ken’s phone number?” She said, “I decided to try calling it, and I couldn’t believe it when the operator said it was you.
Then Millie said, “Are you in your office?” Ken Gaub said “no,” and Millie sounded surprised. She said, “Then where are you?” Ken Gaub said, “You made the call. Don’t you know?” She said, “I don’t even know what area I’m calling. I just dialed the number on this piece of paper.” Ken Gaub said, “You won’t believe this. I’m in a phone booth in Dayton, Ohio.” She said, “What are you doing there?” He said, “Answering a pay phone.”
Ken Gaub said, “I walked away from that phone booth with an electrifying sense of our heavenly Father’s concern for each of His children. What were the astronomical odds of this happening? With all the millions of phones and innumerable combinations of numbers, only an all-knowing God could have caused that woman to dial that number in that phone booth at that moment in time.”
God is in the business of positioning us in the right place at the right time. It’s God’s Positioning System (GPS). Ken Gaub walked over to the restaurant where his family was waiting. He sat down and said, “You won’t believe this. God knows where I am!”
What an awesome thought: God knows where I am! Psalm 139 says, “If I go up to the heavens you are there; if I make my bed in the depths you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me; your right hand will hold me fast.”
Jewish scholars used to debate why God appeared to Moses in a burning bush. A thunderclap or lightning bolt would have been more impressive. They concluded that God appeared to Moses in a burning bush to show that no place is void of God’s presence--not even a bush on the backside of the desert. One name for God in rabbinic literature is The Place. It doesn’t matter where you are--you can be stuck in rush hour traffic, working at your desk, or sitting on a sofa at home--God can show up anytime, anyplace! God is everywhere you want to be.
Over the door to his office, Carl Jung had a saying engraved in Latin. It said, “Bidden or not, God is present.” Richard Rohr says, “We’re already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.”
Knocked Conscious
One dimension of spiritual maturity is spiritual awareness--sensing the presence of God. Thomas Moore says, “The holy person is the one whose senses are at their peak and whose imagination is ever ready to notice the slightest sign of the divine presence revealed momentarily in the most mundane of sensations.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it in poetic terms.
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries
I Peter 2:19 says, “Your life is a journey. You must travel with a deep consciousness of God.” Spiritual maturity is about a heightened awareness and deepened consciousness of His presence. Philip Yancey says, “I envision the Spirit not so much touching our mundane lives with a supernatural wand as bringing the recognition of God’s presence into places we may have overlooked. The Spirit may bring that jolt of recognition to the most ordinary things; a baby’s grin, snow falling on a frozen lake, a field of lavender in morning dew, a worship ritual that unexpectedly becomes more than a ritual.”
That’s what happened to Jacob in Genesis 28, “When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.’ He was afraid and said, ‘How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God: this is the gate of heaven’.”
Jacob didn’t just “wake up” physically. He “woke up” spiritually. Richard Rohr says, “Most lives are a collective sleepwalking. Epiphanies, thank God, wake us up so we can in fact experience our experiences.” God wants us to be fully alive, fully aware, fully awake. In too many cases, spirituality is subconscious. God is repressed--He lurks somewhere beneath the level of consciousness. We need a jolt of recognition, a removal of the veil, an opening of our spiritual eyes.
How do we heighten awareness and deepen consciousness of God?
One key is contemplation. David says in Psalm 119:99, “I have more insight than all my teachers.” Why? “For I meditate on your statues.” There is a difference between a cursory reading and contemplation. According to Webster, contemplation means “to look at with continued attention.” Etymologically, it comes from the root word templum which means “temple.” To contemplate originally meant “to mark out a temple.”
We need to create sacred spaces--places where we practice the presence of God, places where we are unhurried and unharried. According to Blaise Pascal, 17th century French philosopher, “All of man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.” Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still and know that I am God.” We try to do more and more in less and less time, and as Leonard Sweet says, “Warp speed can warp the soul.”
Monastics practice a discipline they call statio, which simply means stopping one thing before doing another. We’re the generation that added “multitask” to the dictionary. We are experts at doing lots of things at the same time. Monastics recognize the time between the times. We need to learn to hit the pause button.
Before dialing the phone, pause and think about the person you’re calling. After reading a book, pause and reflect on what you’ve read. Before a meeting, pause and collect your thoughts.
A second key to spiritual awareness is purity. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” If you want to see God, you need to purify your heart. II Corinthians 7:1 says, “Let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit.” How do we do that?
Proverbs 4:23 is preventative. It says, “Guard your heart for it is the wellspring of life.” We need to filter what we see and hear. I John 1:10 is prescriptive. It says, “If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
In the NIV, the word “conscious” only appears twice. Once in the passage in I Peter 2:19 where it says “conscious of God,” and in Romans 3:20 where it says, “conscious of sin.” Those two things are not mutually exclusive. It is consciousness of sin that leads to confession. Sin dulls our spiritual senses, but confession sharpens them. Confession purifies us so that we can enter the presence of God.
The Experiment
On January 30, 1930, a man named Frank Laubach began a spiritual experiment. He was forty-five years old and dissatisfied with his spiritual life. He decided to try to think about God one second out of every minute. His goal was constant consciousness of God. Here is how he framed his spiritual experiment. “Can we have contact with God all the time? Can we do His will all the time? Can we think his thoughts all the time? I choose to make the rest of my life an experiment in answering this question.” Here are a few of his journal entries.
I feel simply carried along each hour, doing my part in a plan which is far beyond myself. This sense of cooperation with God in little things is what so astonishes me, for I never have felt it this way before. I need something, and turn round to find it waiting for me. I must work, to be sure, but there is God working along with me.
His journal entry from March 1, 1930 reads,
This sense of being led by the unseen hand which takes mine while another hand reaches ahead and prepares the way, grows upon me daily.
Everyplace Frank Laubach went, he shot people with prayer. Some people had no reaction, but others were obviously impacted. Some people would do an about-face and smile at him. Other people’s entire demeanor changed.
On May 24, 1930, he wrote,
This concentration upon God is strenuous, but everything else has ceased to be so. I think more clearly, I forget less frequently. I worry about nothing, and lose no sleep. I walk on air a good part of the time. Even the mirror reveals a new light in my eyes. I no longer feel in a hurry about anything. Everything goes right. Each minute I meet calmly as though it were not important. Nothing can go wrong excepting one thing. That is that God may slip from mind.
On June 1, 1930, just six months into his experiment, Laubach journaled these words,
Last Monday was the most completely successful day of my life to date, so far as giving my day in complete and continuous surrender to God is concerned. I remember how as I looked at people with a love God gave, they looked back and acted as though they wanted to go with me. I felt then for a day I saw a little of that marvelous pull that Jesus had as He walked along the road day after day ‘God-intoxicated’ and radiant with the endless communion of His soul with God.
What if you tried to do what Laubach did for one week? What if you got up a half-hour earlier or stayed up a half-hour later? What if you used a lunch hour or commute hour to heighten awareness and deepen consciousness of God? You’ll never know the answer to those questions if you don’t try.
Here’s a final thought.
The French writer, Jacque Reda, used to walk the streets of Paris with the intention of seeing one new thing each day, knowing that the practice renewed his love for the city. What if we tried to discover one new thing about God each day?
Learning about God renews our love for God. A.W. Tozer said, “Eternity won’t be long enough to learn all that God is.” That’s true. But we must keep seeking and learning and discovering. Plato said, “Great love is born of great knowledge of the thing loved.” If you don’t love God, you don’t know God because to know God is to love God.