“And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord in this place; and I knew it not.”—Genesis 28:16.
Through his own foolish wisdom Jacob had been compelled to leave his father’s house. Perhaps we are scarcely able to judge of the sorrowful feelings which this banishment would beget in his soul. Here we go from one Christian home to another. If we leave the parental roof we may hope still to sojourn where there is an altar to the Most High God, and where we can still unite with worshippers who fear his name. Not so in Jacob’s case. The family of which he was a member, was the only household in the land that worshipped God; or if there were some few others, probably they were unknown to one another, and as far as Jacob’s knowledge would go, he was fully assured that all the way from the place where he left his father until he arrived at Padan-Aram, he would not meet with a single person who feared the God of heaven. He was passing from one oasis to another across a burning sand. We may compare him to a swallow, which for the first time leaves our shore to find no rest until it has passed with weary wing the long leagues of purple sea. You must know too that the prevalent notion of the heathens among whom Jacob dwelt was that their gods had only local authority; that for instance, the god of Gaza was not the god of Askelon; the god of Beersheba would not be the God of Bethel. Their deities were gods of the hills and not of the valleys, and it may be but just possible that from great connection with the heathen, Jacob may have failed clearly to recognize the fact that his father’s God was not like their gods; so in leaving his father’s house there may have been this troublous thought rising in his mind, that he was also leaving his father’s God; that now his prayers would scarcely be heard; that he should be an alien from Jehovah’s land, and cut off from the congregation of the blessed. Jacob was not at this time a full-grown believer, he was but a babe in grace; his ready yielding to his mother’s craft proves his want of advanced piety; and it is no trifling thing for a weakling to be taken from the nurture of home and cast alone upon a world unfriendly and ungenial. Happy was it for the fugitive that his Lord’s compassion tracked his way even when he knew not that God was there. Blessed was the dream which assured him that Jehovah’s wing had covered his stony bed as really as it guarded his softer couch in Isaac’s tent. The truth seemed to surprise him, but O how sweetly it must have yielded consolation! “Surely,” said he, and he opened his eyes to new light as though he knew that the night of distress had passed, and that a day of confidence had begun—”Surely God is in this place, and I knew it not.”
I would address you this morning upon a topic which may perhaps be as useful to us as to Jacob, if God the Holy Ghost shall but enable me to preach, and you to hear. Oh thou that art everywhere, be speedily now; be thou in this place, and may we know it, and tremble in thy presence. I shall speak on three points; first, the omnipresence of God—the doctrine of it; secondly, a recognition of that omnipresence, or the spirit which is necessary in order to discover the presence of God; and thirdly, the results of a recognition of this omnipresence, or the practice which is sure to spring out of the conviction that God is everywhere.
I. First, then, THE DOCTRINE OF GOD’S OMNIPRESENCE. He is everywhere.
In the early Christian Church, there was a wicked heresy, which for a long while caused great disturbance, and exceeding much controversy. There were some who taught that Satan, the representative of evil, was of co-equal power with God, the representative of good. These men found it necessary to impugn the doctrine of God’s universal power. Their doctrine denied the all-pervading presence of God in the present world, and they seemed to imagine that we should of necessity have to get out of the world of nature altogether, before we could be in the presence of God. Their preachers seemed to teach that there was a great distance between God and his great universe; they always preached of him as the King who dwelt in the land that was very far off; nay, they almost seemed to go as far as though they had said, “Between us and him there is a great gulf fixed, so that neither can our prayers reach him, nor can the thoughts of his mercy come down to us.” Blessed be God that error has long ago been exploded, and we as Christian men, without exception, believe that God is as much in the lowest hell as in the highest heaven, and as truly among the sinful hosts of mortals, as among the blissful choir of immaculate immortals, who day without night praise his name. We believe that he filleth heaven and earth, and hell; that he is in the very space which his creation seems to claim, for creatures do not displease God; and even the space which is occupied by his handiworks is still filled with himself. The rocky bowels of the unsearched-out depths are full of God; where the sea roars, or where the solid granite leaves no interstice or vacuum, even there is God; not only in the open place, and in the chasm, but penetrating all matter, and abounding everywhere in all, and filling all things with himself. “In him we live and move, and have our being, and in him are all things, and by him all things consist.” Yet, while we receive the doctrine, it is well sometimes to enlarge upon it, not so much for sake of argument, as to make the truth stand out the more clearly to our minds’ eye. Let us remember, then, that in the three kingdoms God is everywhere; in the kingdoms of nature, of providence, and of grace, we may say of each spot, “Surely God is in this place.”
He is everywhere in the fields of nature. Go if you please to secluded parts; walk through the forest-glades where the virgin moss presents a delicate carpet for human foot; where the deer starts up affrighted by the intrusion of an unexpected visitor; where the wild bird scarcely flies from you because as yet it is not familiar with the cruel face of man. As you walk among the intertwisted boughs, the natural arches of God’s own temple which He Himself hath builded, without toil of hewer of stone or dauber of clay, if you be a true Christian you will be compelled to say—
“The calm retreat, the silent shade,
With prayer and praise agree;
And seem by thy sweet bounty made
For those who follow thee.”
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
