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Psalm 139:7–12
“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!” (vv. 7–8).
Because God is simple, not made up of parts, all His attributes are ultimately one. His holiness is His love is His power and so on. Consequently, when we are making distinctions between the divine attributes, we can sometimes think of one attribute as an application of another attribute to a particular concept or reality. For example, that God is infinite means that He has no limitations. Thus, His sovereignty is really His infinity applied to authority—His sovereign control and right to rule have no external limits; His sovereignty is infinite, extending in its fullness over all that He has created.
Today we are thinking about divine omnipresence, which is God’s infinity applied to location. Our Creator’s omnipresence means that there is no place where He is not present. Today’s passage describes the Lord’s omnipresence in poetic terms. There is no place where the psalmist can flee from God; wherever he goes, the Lord is there. From the highest heaven to the depths of the earth (Sheol), God is present. Our Creator inhabits both east (“the wings of the morning”) and west (“the uttermost parts of the sea”). The darkness cannot hide the psalmist from the Lord, for our Maker is present even there (Ps. 139:7–12).
Importantly, when we say that the Lord is omnipresent, we do not mean that a portion of His essence is in France, a portion is in Nigeria, a portion is in the Andromeda Galaxy, and so on. Instead, wherever the Lord is present, He is present in His fullness. He cannot be divided up into parts, after all. The seventeenth-century Reformed theologian Francis Turretin writes in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, “Wherever [God] is, he is wholly; wholly in all things, yet wholly beyond all; included in no place and excluded from none; and not so much in a place (because finite cannot comprehend infinite) as in himself.”
God’s omnipresence has significant consequences. First, it means that we cannot hide from God, so we should not even try. When we sin, the Lord has seen it, so we should be quick to repent. His omnipresence means that wherever we are, we can reach out to the Lord in prayer, confident that He will hear us because He is present. Because the Lord is everywhere, we can also be confident that He sees every good that we do and every harm inflicted on us, and He will not fail to bring His just recompense in His own time, whether now or on the day of final judgment.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
Even after we have been converted, we sometimes act as if the Lord cannot see our sin, that somehow we can transgress His law and He will not see it. Remembering that the Lord really is everywhere and thus can see everything that we do can help us resist sin and say no to temptation.
For further study
- Jeremiah 23:24
- Hebrews 4:13
- Joshua 21–22
- Luke 6:1–26
The bible in a year
- Joshua 23–Judges 3
- Luke 6:27–7:35