The Omnipresent God

There is a folk tale about a group of blind men who encountered an elephant. Because each of them touched a different part of the enormous beast, each came to a different conclusion as to the animal’s nature. The one who felt the elephant’s tail decided that an elephant was something like a rope. The one who touched the elephant’s leg envisioned the beast as somewhat like the trunk of a tree. And the one who felt the elephant’s trunk came away convinced that pachyderms are like snakes. Each one of them made a conclusion about the whole elephant based on an encounter with only a portion of it.

As we have considered aspects of God’s nature, we have seen that He is Spirit, not a material being, which means that He is present everywhere. His being fills all reality. But God’s infinity does not flow out of simple bigness. In other words, as fanciful as it might sound, it is not that God is so gigantic that He is everywhere in part, that His toes sit at one end of the universe while His head rests at the other. This is thinking in physical terms, making God—like us—a composite being made up of legs, arms, a head, and so forth. The truth, according to Scripture, is that God is simple in His being and is therefore everywhere present in all His fullness. This is why we refer to God as “omnipresent.” The prefix omni means “all,” indicating that God is present always, everywhere. Another word that conveys this idea is ubiquity. The prefix ubi is Latin for “where,” while the root word means “equal.” Ubiquity, therefore, means “equal whereness.” The fullness of God’s presence is equal everywhere.

This truth has very practical implications. It means that wherever we may be, God is present there in all His majesty and glory. Wherever and whenever we gather to worship Him, God comes in all His totality. We need never worry that God will be distracted from our worship as He focuses on one of the myriad other gatherings of believers that occur around the world each Lord’s Day. He is present in full in each of those congregations. When we (and all our brothers and sisters from every nation, tribe, and tongue) commune with the presence of God, we are communing with the totality of God, not just a part of Him. He is everywhere in all His infinite perfection. And that means He is there, where you are, right now, in all His fullness.