The Presence Of God Series

A four year old attended a prayer meeting with his parents, and that night when he knelt to say his

prayers before going to bed he prayed, "Dear Lord, we had a good time at church tonight. I wish

you could have been there." The child was not critical of the church as being godless, he was merely

expressing a childlike literalism concerning the presence of God. To be present to a child is to be

seen, touched, and heard. To be present to a child is to be available to the senses. Even an amateur

theologian could quickly set the child straight and point out the reality of the presence of things

unseen and unheard. Numerous verses of Scripture could be quoted to assure him that God is

always present. He has promised to be with us always, and to never forsake us. Where two or three

are gathered in His name Christ said He would be present in their midst. The historian could point

to the experience of the saints down through the centuries who were aware of the presence of God at

all times, even when they were not gathered with two or three.

Madam Guyon could set in prison and write:

My Lord, how full of sweet content,

I pass my years of banishment.

Where'er I dwell, I dwell with Thee,

In heaven, in earth, or on the sea.

David said that God is so persistently present with the believer that there is nowhere to go

escape His presence. In Psa. 139:7-10 he writes, "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither

shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell,

behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me."

What a contrast this is with the testimony of the first Russian cosmonot who ascended into the

heaven's and said he saw no God. What a contrast to the dark conclusion arrived at by Jean Paul

Richter the German skeptic of the last century. He wrote, "There is no God. I have traversed the

worlds. I have risen to the suns, I have passed athwort the great waste places of the sky. There is no

God. I have descended to the place where the very shadow casts by Being dies out and ends. I have

gazed into the gulf beyond and cried "Where art thou, Father?" But no answer came, save the sound

of the storm which rages uncontrolled. We are orphans, you and I-Every soul in this great

corpse-trench of the universe is utterly alone."

Here was a man who experienced the real absence of God as deeply as believers experience the

real presence of God. To some God is nowhere present; to others God is everywhere present. Ralph

Cushman could write:

I met God in the morning

When my day was at its best,

And His presence came like sunrise,

Like a glory in my breast.

All day long the Presence lingered,

All day long He stayed with me,

And we sailed in perfect calmness

O'er a very troubled sea.

There is an obvious conflict of experience. The child and the skeptic experience the absence of

God, whereas the saint and poet experience the presence of God. The believer recognizes that the

child and the skeptic are victims of the same misconception. They are both looking for a physical

and visible presence rather than a spiritual presence. They want an objective presence rather than a

subjective presence. We know that as the child matures and develops a spiritual maturity he will

become aware of unseen values. He will learn to appreciate the reality of God's presence in spirit.

We know that if the skeptic would open his heart to Christ, the eyes of his soul would lose their

scales, and he too would be enlightened as to the reality of things unseen.

What we seldom or never stop to realize is that it is the child's and the skeptic's longing for the

visible presence of God that is the ideal. The experience of the mystic who is caught up into a trace

and senses his oneness with God is not the ideal experience of the presence of God. The ideal is not

that of being aware of the peace and power of God within your life giving you strength and

guidance. As precious as these experiences are, they are temporal and fall short of the eternal

experience John describes here where we will dwell with God and He with us, and we shall

fellowship with Jesus in physical form.

Faith is essential but not eternal. Faith is not the ideal. We walk by faith now, but the ideal and