Mar 21
22
The Omnipresence of God
John MacDuff,
“Where shall I go from Your Spirit? Where shall I flee from Your presence?” Psalm 139:7
The omnipresence of God! How baffling to any finite comprehension! To think that above us, and around us, and within us—there is Deity—the invisible footprints of an Omniscient, Omnipresent One!
“His Eyes are in every place!” On rolling planets—and tiny atoms; on the bright seraph—and the lowly worm; roaming in searching scrutiny through the tracks of immensity—and reading the dark and hidden page of my heart! “All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do!”
O God! shall this Your Omnipresence appall me? No! In my seasons of sadness and sorrow and loneliness—when other comforts and comforters have failed—when, it may be, in the darkness and silence of some midnight hour, in vain I have sought repose—how sweet to think, “My God is here! I am not alone. The Omniscient One, to whom the darkness and the light are both alike—is hovering over my sleepless pillow!” O my Unsetting Sun, it cannot be darkness or loneliness or sadness—where You are. There can be no night to the soul which has been cheered with Your glorious radiance!
“Surely, I am with you always!” How precious, blessed Jesus, is this, Your legacy of parting love! Present with each of Your people until the end of time—ever present, omnipresent. The true “Pillar of cloud” by day—and “Pillar of fire” by night, preceding and encamping by us in every step of our wilderness journey. My soul! think of Him at this moment—as present with every member of the family that He has redeemed with His blood! Yes, and as much present with every individual soul, as if He had none other to care for—but as if that one engrossed all His affection and love!
The Great Builder—surveying every stone and pillar of His spiritual temple;
the Great Shepherd—with His eye on every sheep of His fold;
the Great High Priest—marking every tear-drop; noting every sorrow; listening to every prayer; knowing the peculiarities of every case: no number perplexing Him—no variety bewildering Him; able to attend to all, and satisfy all, and answer all—myriads drawing hourly from His Treasury—and yet no diminution of that Treasury—ever emptying, and yet ever filling, and always full!
Jesus! Your perpetual and all-pervading presence turns darkness into day! I am not left un-befriended to weather the storms of life—Your hand is from hour to hour piloting my frail vessel.
The omnipresence of God—gracious antidote to every earthly sorrow!
“I have set the Lord always before me!” Even now, as night is drawing its curtains around me, be this my closing prayer: “Blessed Savior! abide with me, for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent! Under the shadowing wings of Your presence and love, I will both lie down and sleep in peace, for You alone, O Lord, make me live in safety!” Psalm 4:8
Blundering & stumbling on in darkness
J.C.Philpot
After the Lord has quickened our souls, for a time we often go blundering on, not knowing there is a Jesus. We think that the way of life is to keep God’s commandments—obey the law—cleanse ourselves from sin—reform our lives—cultivate universal holiness in thought, word, and action—and so we go—blundering and stumbling on in darkness—and all the while never get a single step forward.
But when the Lord has allowed us to weary ourselves to find the door, and let us sink lower and lower into the pit of guilt and ruin, from feeling that all our attempts to extricate ourselves have only plunged us deeper and deeper—and when the Spirit of God opens up to the understanding and brings into the soul some spiritual discovery of Jesus, and thus makes known that there is a Savior, a Mediator, and a way of escape—this is the grand turning point in our lives, the first opening in the valley of Achor (trouble), of the door of hope.
“In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the Seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips; and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” Isaiah 6:1-5
Octavius Winslow
What an august revelation of the glory of Christ’s Godhead was this which broke upon the view of the lowly prophet! How instructive is each particular of His beatific vision! Mark the profound humility of the seraphim—they veiled with their wings their faces and their feet. They were in the presence of Jesus. They saw the King in His beauty, and covered themselves.
But the effect of this view of our Lord’s divine glory upon the mind of the prophet is still more impressive: “Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips…for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” What prostrated his soul thus low in the dust? What filled him with this self-abasement? What overwhelmed him with this keen sense of his vileness? Oh, it was the unclouded view he had of the essential glory of the Son of God! And thus will it ever be. The beaming forth of Christ’s glory in the soul reveals its hidden evil; the knowledge of this evil lays the believer low before God with the confession, “I abhor myself. Woe is me! for I am undone.” Beloved, let this truth be ever present to your mind, that as we increasingly see glory in Christ, we shall increasingly see that there is no glory in ourselves. Jesus is the Sun which reveals the pollutions and defilements which are within. The chambers of abomination are all closed until Christ shines in upon the soul. Oh, then it is these deep-seated and long-veiled deformities are revealed; and we, no longer gazing with a complacent eye upon self, sink in the dust before God, overwhelmed with shame, and covered with confusion of face. Holy posture! Blessed spectacle!—a soul prostrate before the glory of the incarnate God! All high and lofty views of its own false glory annihilated by clear and close views of the true glory of Jesus. As when the sun appears, all the lesser lights vanish into darkness, so when Jesus rises in noontide glory upon the soul, all other glory retires, and He alone fixes the eye and fills the mind. “With twain they covered their faces, and with twain they covered their feet.” Their own perfections and beauty were not to be seen in the presence of the glory of the Lord. How much more profound should be the humility and self-abasement of man! Have we covered ourselves—not with the pure wings of the holy cherubim, but with sackcloth and ashes before the Lord? Have we sought to veil—not our beauties, for beauty we have none—but our innumerable and flagrant deformities, even the “spots upon our feasts of charity,” the sins of our best and holiest things; and, renouncing all self-glory, have we sunk, as into nothing before God? Oh, we are yet strangers to the vision of Christ’s glory, if we have not. If the constellation of human gifts and attainments, distinctions and usefulness, on which unsanctified and unmortified self so delights to gaze, have not retired into oblivion, the Sun of Righteousness has yet to rise upon our souls with healing in His wings.
“I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight.” Isaiah 42:16
J.C.Philpot
What is the mind of man–of any man–of your mind, my mind, under affliction? Let him be tried with pain of body, poverty of circumstances, sickness in his family, guilt of conscience, hard bondage in his own soul, without any beam of divine light upon his path, and what is he? A murmuring, rebellious wretch, without a grain of resignation, without a particle of contentment or submission to the will of God.
But let the glory of the Lord be revealed; let him have a view by faith of a suffering Jesus; let some ray of light shine upon his path; let there be some breaking in of the exceeding weight of glory that is to be manifested at Christ’s appearing; where are all his crooked things now? All made straight. But how? By his crooked will–crooked because it did not lie level with the Lord’s–being made to harmonize with the promise and precept, the footsteps and example of the blessed Jesus. The crook is not taken out of the lot, but straightened in the lot; the cross is not removed from the shoulder, but strength–that strength which is “made perfect in weakness”–is given to bear it. So it was with Christ himself in the garden and on the cross; so it is with the believing followers of the crucified One.
“Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.” Psalm 107:10
J.C.OPhilpot
God’s people are here represented not as sitting in death; were they sitting there, they would be dead altogether; but they are sitting in the shadow of death. Observe, death has lost its reality to them; it now can only cast a shadow, often a gloomy shadow, over their souls; but there is no substance in it. The quickening of the Spirit of God in them has destroyed the substance of death spiritually; and the death and resurrection of Jesus have destroyed the substance of death physically.
Yet, though the gloomy monster–deadness of soul; and that ghastly king of terrors–the death of the body; have been disarmed and destroyed by “Immanuel, God with us;” yet each of them casts at times a gloomy, darkling shadow over the souls of those who fear God. Is not your soul, poor child of God, exercised from time to time with this inward death? Deadness in prayer, deadness in reading the word, deadness in hearing the truth, deadness in desires after the Lord, deadness to everything holy, spiritual, heavenly, and divine? How it benumbs and paralyzes every breathing of our soul Godwards! Yet it is but a shadow. Write not bitter things against yourself, poor, tempted, exercised child of God, because you feel such deathliness and coldness from time to time in your heart. It will not destroy you; no, it is life in your soul that makes it felt; and the more the life of God has been felt in your conscience, the more painfully the deathliness of your carnal mind is experienced.
Do you expect that your ‘carnal mind’ will ever be lively in the things of God? What is it but a lump of death, a huge mass of ungodliness, which, like some Behemoth, upheaves its broad flanks continually in the heart? Yet the people of God are very often troubled in their minds by the gloomy shadow that this death casts over their souls. But this trouble is a mark of life. If I were dead, could I feel it? The worst symptom of those dead in sin is, that they do not feel it. But, while we feel it, while we sigh on account of it, while we hate it, and hate ourselves on account of it, though it may pain and grieve, it never can destroy. It has lost its substance, though it casts its gloomy shadow.