God is Immanent
Immanence: literal meaning - “to
be within” or “near” in relation to God’s creation. Immanence is closely
related to God’s omnipresence, in that God is always present within the
universe, though distinct from it. God is ‘within’ the universe in that God is
its sustaining cause.
Yesterday we dealt with transcendence: God is sovereign, supreme, all powerful,
completely outside of us. Today we deal
with what would appear to be the opposite: God is immanent: close to us; knows all about us—about our
heart and our mind; He is present, gracious, sustaining.
C.S. Lewis said, “God is both further from us, and
nearer to us, than any other being.”
How can God be both not known by us – far beyond us
and also immanent?
Here is what the Bible says:
For
this is what the high and lofty One says—
he who lives forever, whose name is holy:
“I live in a high and holy place,
but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit,
to revive the spirit of the lowly
and to revive the heart of the contrite.. (Isaiah 57:15)
he who lives forever, whose name is holy:
“I live in a high and holy place,
but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit,
to revive the spirit of the lowly
and to revive the heart of the contrite.. (Isaiah 57:15)
The prophet Jeremiah declared the Word of
the Lord “‘Am I only a God nearby,’ declares the LORD, ‘and not a God far away?
Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him?’ declares the LORD.
‘Do I not fill heaven and earth?’ declares the LORD” (Jer. 23:23-24)
God did this so that men would
seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from
each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’
As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ (Acts
17:27-28)
“When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
30 When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth. (Psalm 104:29-30)
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
30 When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth. (Psalm 104:29-30)
Extreme
immanence is pantheism, the belief that God is everywhere.
Extreme
transcendence is deism, the belief that God is impersonal.
The incarnation is the most dramatic example of God’s
immanence.
Transcendence and immanence meet.in the person of Jesus Christ.
Colossians 2:9 " For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority." God’s fullness (transcendence) dwells in Christ, nevertheless I find myself “complete” in Him (immanence).
Isaiah
7:14 gives us the name “Immanuel.” Which
means “God with us.” Matthew 1:23 ““The
virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”
—which means, “God with us.” As one
person said: “So the greatest declaration of God’s transcendence and immanence is the Incarnation;
the Most High, became the Most Nigh.”
6 Who, being in very natureGod,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7 but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:5-8)
"He (Jesus) is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:17)
John
1:14 “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his
glory, the glory of the One and Only,
who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
I
like the rendition from The Message
of the same passage:
“The
Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.” (John 1:14) (emphasis added)
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.” (John 1:14) (emphasis added)
Here is an excellent portion from The Pursuit of
God by A. W. Tozer:
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or
whither shall I flee from thy presence?-Psa. 139:7
In all Christian teaching certain basic truths are
found, hidden at times, and rather assumed than asserted, but necessary to all
truth as the primary colors are found in and necessary to the finished
painting. Such a truth is the divine immanence.
God dwells in His creation and is everywhere
indivisibly present in all His works. This is boldly taught by prophet and
apostle and is accepted by Christian theology generally. That is, it appears in
the books, but for some reason it has not sunk into the average Christian's
heart so as to become a part of his believing self. Christian teachers shy away
from its full implications, and, if they mention it at all, mute it down till
it has little meaning. I would guess the reason for this to be the fear of being
charged with pantheism; but the doctrine of the divine Presence is definitely
not pantheism.
Pantheism's error is too palpable to deceive anyone.
It is that God is the sum of all created things. Nature and God are one, so
that whoever touches a leaf or a stone touches God. That is of course to
degrade the glory of the incorruptible Deity and, in an effort to make all
things divine, banish all divinity from the world entirely.
The truth is that while God dwells in His world He
is separated from it by a gulf forever impassable. However closely He may be
identified with the work of His hands they are and must eternally be other than
He, and He is and must be antecedent to and independent of them. He is
transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.
What now does the divine immanence mean in direct
Christian experience? It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is
here. There is no place, there can be no place, where He is not. Ten million
intelligences standing at as many points in space and separated by
incomprehensible distances can each one say with equal truth, God is here. No
point is nearer to God than any other point. It is exactly as near to God from
any, place as it is from any other place. No one is in mere distance any
further from or any nearer to God than any other person is.
These are truths believed by every instructed
Christian. It remains for us to think on them and pray over them until they
begin to glow within us.
"In the beginning God." Not matter, for matter
is not self-causing. It requires an antecedent cause, and God is that Cause.
Not law, for law is but a name for the course which all creation follows. That
course had to be planned, and the Planner is God. Not mind, for mind also is a
created thing and must have a Creator back of it. In the beginning God, the
uncaused Cause of matter, mind and law. There we must begin.
Adam sinned and, in his panic, frantically tried to
do the impossible: he tried to hide from the Presence of God. David also must
have had wild thoughts of trying to escape from the Presence, for he wrote,
"Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy
presence?" Then he proceeded through one of his most beautiful psalms to
celebrate the glory of the divine immanence. "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." And he knew
that God's being and God's seeing are the same, that the seeing Presence had
been with him even before he was born, watching the mystery of unfolding life.
Solomon exclaimed, "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold the
heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee: how much less this house
which I have builded." Paul assured the Athenians that "God is not
far from any one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being."
If God is present at every point in space, if we
cannot go where He is not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why
then has not that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the
world? The patriarch Jacob, "in the waste howling wilderness," gave
the answer to that question. He saw a vision of God and cried out in wonder,
"Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not." Jacob had
never been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that
all-pervading Presence. But he knew it not. That was his trouble, and it is
ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they
knew.
The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence
are not the same. There can be the one without the other. God is here when we
are wholly unaware of it. He is manifest only when and as we are aware of His
Presence. On our part there must be surrender to the Spirit of God, for His
work it is to show us the Father and the Son. If we co-operate with Him in
loving obedience God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will
be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the
light of His face.
Always, everywhere God is,present, and always He
seeks to discover Himself. To each one he would reveal not only that He is, but
what He is as well. He did not have to be persuaded to discover Himself to
Moses. "And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and
proclaimed the name of the Lord." He not only made a verbal proclamation
of His nature but He revealed His very Self to Moses so that the skin of Moses'
face shone with the supernatural light. It will be a great moment for some of
us when we begin to believe that God's promise of self-revelation is literally
true: that He promised much, but promised no more than He intends to fulfill.
Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is
forever seeking to manifest Himself to us. The revelation of God to any man is
not God coming from a distance upon a time to pay a brief and momentous visit
to the man's soul. Thus to think of it is to misunderstand it all. The approach
of God to the soul or of the soul to God is not to be thought of in spatial
terms at all. There is no idea of physical distance involved in the concept. It
is not a matter of miles but of experience.
To speak of being near to or far from God is to use
language in a sense always understood when applied to our ordinary human
relationships. A man may say, "I feel that my son is coming nearer to me
as he gets older," and yet that son has lived by his father's side since
he was born and has never been away from home more than a day or so in his
entire life. What then can the father mean? Obviously he is speaking of
experience. He means that the boy is coming to know him more intimately and
with deeper understanding, that the barriers of thought and feeling between the
two are disappearing, that father and son are becoming more closely united in
mind and heart.
So when we sing, "Draw me nearer, nearer,
blessed Lord," we are not thinking of the nearness of place, but of the
nearness of relationship. It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we
pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence. We need never
shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul,
closer than our most secret thoughts.”
God is Near
by The Rend Collective Experiment
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