Godisnowhere - Part A

So David's question is simple. Where?

Where? And David's answer to the question is equally as simple. There. And there. And there.

And three times that's what he says. Where is God? He's there, there, and there. If I go to heaven, you're there. If I make my bed in hell, you're there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there.

Three times he says it. When one of the first people in space, a Russian cosmonaut, orbited the earth for the first time, he reported that he didn't see God. That's hardly conclusive evidence to disprove his existence. But it does beg the question, where exactly is it that we find God?

Discover the answer today on Connect with Skip Heitzig. But before we begin, we want to let you know about a resource that will help you get to know God more personally so you can experience a richer faith. Okay, I want to let you know about my latest book. It's called The Biography of God. Now, the very subject matter of God is the loftiest of all topics and the pinnacle of all human pursuits. As we discover who God is and how aware He is of the human condition, we will be inspired to know Him more each day. But we cannot stop with just gathering information about God. To truly know Him, we must believe and act in the light of that information. I'll share how you can do just that in my newest book, The Biography of God. Here's how to get your copy. The Biography of God is our way to say thank you when you give $35 or more today to help expand this Bible teaching outreach to more people.

Request your copy when you give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888. Now, we're in Psalm chapter 139 as Skip Heitzig gets into today's message. There were two brothers. One was eight years of age and one was ten years old.

They were always in trouble. In fact, in their town, if something went wrong, the town just sort of figured that those two kids were somehow involved. Well, because of their reputation, their parents decided they got to do something and they heard about a preacher who had a way with kids.

That was his reputation. So the mother asked if the pastor would come over and speak to her two boys. He agreed to and he said, I first want to meet with the eight-year-old, the youngest, in the morning first and then after that I'll meet with the ten-year-old. So the preacher came to their house and he was a big man, deep booming voice, very intimidating.

And that was the whole idea, he thought. So he got the eight-year-old in the living room and he stood over the top of him. And he kind of wanted the kids to realize that God sees everything they're doing and is everywhere when they're doing it. And so the preacher in a deep booming voice said to the eight-year-old, where's God? Well, the little boy was so intimidated by this, he dropped his jaw, eyes got as wide as saucers, didn't say a word. Followed up by a second question the preacher asked, same question, where's God?

No answer. Third time the old preacher stuck his finger in the boy's face, where's God? At that the little boy jumped up, ran out of the room, ran into his bedroom, into his closet, slammed the door. His older brother quickly followed him and said, what's up?

And the eight-year-old turned to his older brother and said, we're really in trouble this time, dude. God's missing and they think we done it. Where's God? Good question, actually a great question, a question everybody asks.

It's a question that we want to consider this morning. Now the name of my message, the title that you saw is not really a word, I just stuck all of these letters together. But this could spell one of two things depending on who you are. This could spell as in the next case God is nowhere, the atheist would be predisposed to take in those letters and spelling that. Or the same letters could be configured to spell that, God is now here. God is nowhere or God is now here.

It all depends on how you're predisposed with those letters. We want to talk about this morning God's presence. And Psalm 139 is our starting point and it's because this Psalm is so filled with great deep teaching of the characteristics of God, four to be exact, that David discovers this one as well. Now last time we were together we looked at what God knows, that's verses one through six. Verses seven through twelve talks about where God is. And you probably already discovered that this Psalm is set up with four stanzas of six verses a piece. And each one of those stanzas takes a whole new facet of God's character and explores it in poetic language. And so we want to discover the second one, where God is.

David has a very simple question that he begins with in verse seven. Where? Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? Essentially where is God? It's a great question. As I said it's a question certainly every child asks. It's funny how when we're kids we ask very honest questions and the older we get somehow we learn to put those questions at bay or it's not appropriate to ask that. We get uncomfortable.

But kids have no problem with it. A little boy looked up at the full moon and said, Mommy, is God up on the moon? And she said, well, honey, God is everywhere. And so he said, well, is God in my tummy? And she just didn't know what to do with that one. Well, sort of. You know, she's wondering where is this leading?

Well, it was leading somewhere because the next thing is, Mommy, I think God wants a happy meal. So David's question is simple. Where?

Where? And David's answer to the question is equally as simple. There. And there. And there.

And three times that's what he says. Where is God? He's there, there and there. If I go to heaven, you're there. If I make my bed in hell, you're there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there.

Three times he says it. So this second stanza of the song, so to speak, is divided up with a rhetorical question. Where is God? Followed by a conclusion of where God is. A rhetorical question followed by a rational conclusion.

So let's look at verse seven. Here's the question. Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence? Now, just something about the question itself. This is a rhetorical question. And a rhetorical question is different than a typical question. A typical question is asked to get information, not a rhetorical question. A rhetorical question is simply a statement in question form. It's to make a statement. It's to lead you to a conclusion. And there's only one answer to it. So it's a rhetorical question. It's not like David is saying, you know, I'm really trying hard to get away from God. Can anybody tell me a place where I can run away and hide?

That's not the issue. It's a rhetorical question. Where can I go? Where can I flee? Now, my question is, why would anyone want to run away from God?

Answer? Well, it depends on how you're living. If you're an obedient person, you're in conformity with God, you're doing what he wants. Like David was at this particular point in his life, he knew you can't get away from God, and why would I even want to try? But if, on the other hand, you're not obedient, you're living not right with God, you're being disobedient, then those kind of people will do everything they can to try some way to hide from the presence of God. Adam and Eve tried this. They disobeyed God, and the Bible says, Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord amongst the trees of the garden.

How stupid is that? I mean, think about it. Honey, quick, we've got to hide from God.

Get behind this bush. Here's God, the Creator, made both of them, and the bush, and the trees, and they're trying to hide from God, who is there every day. But that's how irrational people become in trying to hide from God. Jonah was the same way. Jonah was a prophet, and he must have believed that God doesn't like to hang out west because he tried to go west instead of east. God called him to Nineveh. He decides, I'm going to go the opposite direction, 2,000 miles to Tarshish. That's Gibraltar.

That's the area of Spain. Listen to what the Scripture says. Jonah went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare, and he went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

What does that mean? Because if anybody would know better, it would be, Jonah, you can't escape God, what does it mean he's fleeing from the presence of the Lord? Simply, he's quitting. He's trying to flee from standing before God as an obedient prophet. He's handing in his resignation. You might say he wants to be a nonprofit organization.

Sorry about that. Couldn't resist. He's hanging up the sign, I'd rather go fishing. In his case, whale fishing. But God called him in one direction.

He escapes, he thinks, to the other direction out west. I had a dog like this. I've told you about him in the past, a Springer Spaniel. Cute as all get-out, either dumb or stubborn. I'll take the second. Because every time I would call him and say, come, he would turn directly on his heels and go in the opposite direction.

I should have renamed him Jonah. So, let's answer the rhetorical question. Where can I go from God's presence? Where can I flee from God's Spirit? Answer, nowhere.

So put it into the positive. Where is God? God is everywhere.

That's the right answer. Like the mother said to the son, God is everywhere. We call this the omnipresence of God. And correctly stated, it is that God is everywhere present in the totality or the wholeness of his being at all times. God is everywhere present with his whole being at all times.

Now, that is either a great comfort to you or a great concern. Again, depending on how you're living. If you're not living right, then you can run, but you can't hide. You can decide I'm not going to go to church or I'm going to walk out on this sermon in the middle of it or when my friends come over and talk about God, I'll change the subject or I used to have a Bible, but now I'm going to hide it. You can do all of those things, but God is inescapable. God is omnipresent. That's the truth that emerges from this paragraph of Psalm 139. But there is a text, I'm going to call it the primary text on the presence of God found in the book of Job. In the book of Job, this is God speaking to Job and his friends.

It's chapter 23 of Job, verses 23 and 24. The Lord says, Am I a god near at hand, says the Lord, and not afar off? In other words, I'm in all places. Can anyone hide in secret places so that I shall not see him, says the Lord?

Again, both are rhetorical questions. Do I not fill the heaven and the earth, says the Lord? That's the teaching of the omnipresence of God.

But be careful. Don't confuse this biblical truth of God being everywhere with a false teaching known as pantheism. Some of you have heard of pantheism. It's different than omnipresence. The biblical teaching of the omnipresence of God says that God is present in his creation, though he's separate from it. But pantheism says God is his creation. They're one and the same.

There's no distinction between them. God isn't just active in the world. God is the world. So as an example, the Bible would affirm that right now where you're sitting with your Bible open listening, God is with you. Pantheism would say the chair you're sitting in is God. The earth that holds it up is God. And when you go outside and see the trees and the bushes and the grass, all of that is God. It's all one and the same.

There's no separation and no distinction. That's an ancient belief system known as pantheism. And I believe it's still around in a different form. I believe there's something. I'm going to call it neopantheism. And I think it shows up in earth worship, in hyperenvironmentalism, where people so focus on the environment and the earth and there's days of worship for it and it's all about the environment because that is the only thing they know and that has become essentially their God. There's slogans like love your mother or the environment is everything. There was a French teacher who even asked her nephew, well, isn't God just Mother Nature?

Answer, no. God is eternal and separate. God has no beginning and no end. This world, this universe had a beginning, all scientists will tell you that, and will have an end.

It's winding down. So God is outside of it but created it and is present in his creation but is not his creation. That's the omnipresence of God. Now, for us in the New Testament, it gets even better because it's not just like, yeah, there's kind of like God is everywhere and he's big and he's out there. For us, it's more personal because Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and Jesus came to the earth and for 33 and a half years lived here and I know some of you are thinking, yeah, but he left. But before he left, told his disciples, it's good for you that I go because if I can't go or if I don't go, I won't be able to send the counselor, the comforter, who will be with you. And then Jesus said, I will not leave you as orphans.

I will come to you. And he was referring to the presence of the Holy Spirit of God dwelling inside of the believer. So that is the rhetorical question. Where is God? Everywhere. Where can you get away from God?

Nowhere. That's followed in the next few verses by three rational conclusions. The rhetorical question is followed by the rational conclusion, and David says three things about the omnipresence of God. First, death itself can't hide a person from God. Verse 8, if I ascend into heaven, you're there.

Now, we would take that first part of the verse and go, duh. I mean, that's God's unique dwelling place. Though God is everywhere present, heaven is his unique dwelling place.

Even Jesus taught us to pray, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. We understand that that's HQ for God. That's headquarters.

That's the base of operations. But notice the next part of the verse. If I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there. You see the word hell? It's an ancient Hebrew word, sheol. 65 times it appears in the Old Testament. It is typically a word that means the grave, the place of the dead. It's where people get buried.

It's a general term to refer to the abode of those who have died. Now, in ancient thinking, a person in the grave, a person in sheol, was cut off from God. You die, you go down into the earth, and you hang up the sign, God is nowhere. That's how the ancients thought, not David.

David would say, uh-uh, God is now here. He's present on this side of the grave, on earth, and when you die, God will be present on that side of the grave. Because death is a transition, right?

It's a threshold. For the believer, well, when a Christian dies, you really can't say he died. You have to say he moved. To be absent from the body, Paul said, is to be present with the Lord. That's where a person experiences the presence of God in a very special way. Unlike here, where we apprehended by faith, it'll be face to face in glory. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.

But flip the coin, go to the other side. What about the unbeliever, who his whole life or her whole life has tried to get away from God or not believe in God or discount God? Surely death ends it all.

Nope. Even there, even in the grave, believer or unbeliever, you can't get rid of God even at death. Because the Bible puts it this way. It is appointed unto every man once to die, and after this, the judgment. Not after this, you float around.

Not after this, you're eternally unconscious. But after this comes the judgment. Imagine the fate of a man like, let's take Adolf Hitler. Hated Jews, killed millions of them, killed Christians who protected them, and he dies. And who does he see? Jesus Christ, a Jew, who is his judge for eternity. He cannot escape Christ, he cannot escape this Jewish Messiah, he cannot escape the judgment and the faith that beholds him. Death can't separate him from God. There's a verse of Scripture I was looking at early this morning.

I want to share it with you. It is a frightening verse. It goes along with this for the unbeliever. This is Revelation 14, verse 10. He himself shall also drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out full strength into the cup of his indignation, which is poured out on all the earth.

And he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. That's a frightening piece of truth. I have a book in my library.

I pull it out from time to time. It's simply called The Last Words of Saints and Sinners. And what Herbert Lockyer, the author, has done is to find people throughout history, believers and non-believers, and give us the last words before they died. It's a great book of comfort. It's a great book of terror. Here's a couple of unbelievers.

One was Altamont, who lived in the 1800s. He was an agnostic writer. He wrote a lot of words, not believing in God, discounting it, being very confident about it. But at his death, he said, As for deity, nothing less than an Almighty could inflict what I feel now.

Remorse for the past throws my thoughts onto the future. O thou blasphemed and indulgent God, hell is a refuge if it hides me from thy frown. Can you imagine breathing those words as your last words after living that way?

Tragic. Then there was Voltaire, the French atheist, who was very vocal against Christ. In fact, while he was alive, he said of Jesus Christ, Curse the wretch. But when he died, among his last words were, I'll give you half of what I'm worth for six months of life, and then I shall go to hell, and you shall go with me, O Christ, O Jesus Christ.

Tragic again and powerful. No, death can't hide any person, believer or unbeliever, from God. And David states that in this poetic language. The second conclusion David comes to is that because God is everywhere, distance can't hide us from God. Look at the next two verses, 9 and 10 of Psalm 139. If I take the wings of the morning and I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, your right hand shall hold me. Now this is Hebrew poetry. It's a description of distance, especially going west over the Mediterranean.

The sun rises in the east and instantly its rays permeate everything, even out toward the Mediterranean. Picture where David is writing this. And it travels instantly. So if I were to rephrase this, David is saying, if I could travel the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, and shoot across the universe to any place, God is there. You're there.

Even there. That's Skip Heise, with a message from his series, The Biography of God. Now, here's Skip to share how you can help keep this broadcast going strong, connecting more people like you to God's truth.

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