The Nature Of God’s Presence Among Men

We have such a high priest… a minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man.

Hebrews 8:1-2

The Word of God interlocks so completely that if you destroy any one part of it, you destroy the rest.

That is why I have no place in my heart or my head for a liberal, because a liberal insists on believing what he wants to believe, even rejecting what does not suit him.

The result is that he has destroyed everything because each tiling depends upon everything else.

Read and Learn More Bible Verses about the Presence of God

God’s Transcendence

The very nature of God’s presence transcends human nature and is therefore beyond the grasp of mere human thought. When we come to the Scriptures, we must remember that through the Bible.

We are taught what sometimes has come to be called the “transcendental view of the world.” The word “transcendental” means a dozen things in philosophy.

But what I mean by it is that somewhere there is an absolute. Somewhere there is that which is not relative; it is fixed and final and can have no beginning and no ending.

It transcends fate, time, space, matter, motion, law, and all these things, and we call that one, God. When Christians talk about Him, we call Him “our Father, which art in heaven.”

That is one of the great truths of the New Testament, which if removed, you have done to the Scripture what you do to a sweater when it unravels.

If you take a thread and just pull it along enough until you have pulled it out into one long thread, you have destroyed the sweater.

Likewise, if you attempt to pull out this great, simple truth that God is God that He had no beginning, and that He created all things “that are in heaven.

And that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him” (Col. 1:16).

You unravel the sleeve of Christianity until you have nothing left but a memory. It is essential to accept this truth.

I know that many people do not accept it. Liberals deny it and materialists and certain scientists, but we do not care what people deny. Our job in life is not to deny, but to affirm.

And regardless of how it sounds to some, we affirm that there is another world above this world, of which this world is but the shadow; and in that world there is a throne, and on that throne, a God is ruling His universe.

The Mystical Element

Recognizing this transcendence is a mystical thing. By the word “mystical,” I mean nothing of the esoteric religion of the East. I mean that there is such a thing as a Christian knowing God and meeting God for himself.

That we can press our way into the sanctuary of the holy of holies, and with our hearts, we can meet, know, and feel.

Sense and experience God in a manner more wonderful than any man or woman can experience any human thing or any human being. This is what is taught here, and this is basic to Christianity.

To deny the presence and existence of a transcendental world of which God is the head and the creator and the Lord, and to deny the mystical element of Christianity.

You might as well close your Bible and go for a walk because you will never understand it.

If Christianity is reduced to a doctrine that can be explained with no intuitive knowledge, no direct knowledge of the heart of God, then where is the wonder of it?

I would not give a dime to support a teaching that denied the presence of God in His universe and the fact that the human heart can know God through Jesus Christ.

A Shadow Of Heaven

Earth is a shadow of heaven—sin excepted, of course. Heaven shines downward and throws its shadows; and those shadows we call the earth and the things therein.

Wherever sin is found, however, it is a shadow of hell and never can be of heaven. Sin is a disease, a deformity, a plague, a”blight, a treason, a rebellion, an error, a sacrilege, and a perversion.

It is all of those things and so it can be no part of heaven, for there is nothing of heaven in it and nothing in heaven like it.

Sin is a sinister presence in the universe, which God has permitted to be here for a little while. Its days are limited and numbered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.

When His good pleasure comes, He is going to destroy sin from the universe beat it, and chase it out of His universe until there is no sin left. So earth is the shadow of heaven.

Oneness Between Heaven And Earth

Genesis 1:1 tells us, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” The universe is one Creator, one universe.

God made the universe, and He did not make it in everlasting contradiction to itself. He made it as one. He did not make several parts of the universe opposed to each other but working harmoniously together.

Christ, when He was on earth, taught the unity of heaven and earth and held that everything had its spiritual counterpart. For that reason, He was as much at home on earth as He had been in heaven.

There is a great deal of unnecessary mourning about our Lord coming down to the earth. A great many unnecessary and lugubrious tears are shed over our Lord’s incarnation.

Our Lord could become incarnated in the form of a man without embarrassment and difficulty because when God made man in the first place, He made Him in His image.

It was a simple matter for the God who made the image to move into the image so that the incarnation of Christ is not a great difficulty to believe at all.

It is a mystery of godliness, but it is not hard to believe, though it is certainly impossible to understand. Christ could be incarnated in the form of a man, but not in the form of an angel.

No matter how high in the order of beings the angels may be, they were never said to be created in the image of God. Man is created in the image of God, and therefore, when God came down to be incarnated.

He fits into the nature of man as nearly as a man’s hand fits into a glove. And Jesus our Lord walked among men—among flowers and trees and babies and women.

And men and horses and all these things—just as naturally as He walked in heaven before He was incarnated, because heaven and earth, in the sight of God, are one.

The only thing that separates us for the moment is that sinister presence we call sin—just as a healthy man may be suddenly very ill.

All that prevents him from being a healthy man is the presence of certain microbes or bacteria or viruses in his veins. So in the universe, heaven and earth are one.

But what is present in the world now is that virus we call sin. And by the blood of Jesus Christ and die the power of His Spirit, when that is purged away from the world.

It will be seen that heaven can shine down on the earth because God made both. Jesus walked among men and talked about the birds and showed how the very birds could preach a sermon that we all ought to listen to.

He talked about the flowers and pointed to the lily that grew around there, and said, “That lily can teach you a lesson, for that lily grows in its beauty and there isn’t a man in all Palestine.

Not even Solomon when he was arrayed in all of his splendor, could be as good-looking as this flower. God made this flower and the flower had nothing to do with it.

Therefore, we give God the glory, and you stop worrying about yourself. Because God made the flowers, the Lord will take care of you.”

And the wind, the water, the light, life, growth, reward, punishment, and all these things He talked about on earth, showing that they were projections downward of Law that was as old as God and had their origin at the throne of God.

I pray and hope that Christians might get away from the notion that earth is under a shadow far away in some deep, subterranean cave of God’s universe.

And somewhere far away, shining in celestial splendor, there is a city, but there is no connection between the two. The devil would like us to believe that, but I do not believe it for a minute.

I believe that the Christian whose heart is alive, alert, and sensitive to the light of God can see the city that “hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”

Moreover, he does not have to go to heaven to see it. I do not mean he sees visions in the night, wakes his wife, and says, “I just saw a vision.”

I have never gone much for that kind of thing. I never had a vision in my life. I never had a dream I could not explain by something I ate or something I had seen or did not do.

I am trying to say that the Christian, who is inwardly alive and has the life of God in him, will find himself at home among men and at home in heaven because he belongs in both, just as Jesus did.

When Jesus Christ walked on the earth, He was in the bosom of the Father, and there was no contradiction between those two statements. When a Christian walks upon the earth and tells his unbelieving friend.

“I live in the bosom of God,” the unbelieving friend raises his eyebrow shakes his head, and makes a little signal as though there’s something wrong with the Christian.

But there is nothing wrong with the Christian at all. The Christian is simply telling the truth: He is walking the earth, but he is in the bosom of God nevertheless.

He is in the kingdom of God. “Ye are in God and God is in you,” said Paul. The Bible and nature bear the same signature upon them so that we can conclude that whoever made one, made the other.

Look again briefly at how nature is. We look up above us on a clear night and we see the stars. When I was young, I tried counting them but soon gave up.

It was a good thing because scientists say they are innumerable. That is, there are too many to count.

You look up and see a little white spot, you call it a star, but the scientists say it is not a star at all, but a galaxy—a collection of stars.

How many stars? Nobody knows. We have to have telescopic instruments to know that there must be billions upon multiplied billions of them.

When David looked up at the stars, it struck him how little he was in comparison with the size of the world.

David knelt before God and with his harp in his hand, sang himself a song to God: “When I consider thy heavens, die work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:3-4).

Unredeemed Man’s Response To The Wonder Of Creation

There is the wonder of God’s creation, but along comes man and begins to study it and log it and weigh it and measure it.

And create sophisticated instruments to see it so that he can weigh it and measure it better. This is unredeemed man’s response to the wonder of God’s creation.

Astronomy

Nobody was ever blessed by astronomy, but how many millions of farmers at night have walked across the meadow on their way home from the store in the little town away?

And looked up at the stars, and in their heart, thanked God that they were”alive and that He was alive and up there. Astronomy is what man has made out of the stars.

Botany

It is the same with flowers. God put flowers everywhere. I believe that everything is here for a purpose and that God, being a God of reason, has a reasonable purpose for everything.

I believe He made flowers because He had some creatures down here made in His image, and He knew those creatures had an aesthetic sense. They could appreciate beauty.

So instead of God putting flowers down here and making them ordinary, He made them so beautiful that they bring a gasp of delight when you see the first flowers in the spring.

You look at a flower and you say, “That flower grew there without any help at all. It couldn’t even help itself.” And then, “Thank God, He that made the flowers will keep me.”

A botanist comes along and breaks that thing down into petals, stamens, and all the rest. Soon you have a big book that nobody likes.

We call that botany, which is what you inflict upon young people in high school and college, making them swear quietly that they will never look at a flower again.

Instead of having God’s beautiful world studied with God’s beautiful flowers, you have a big book with fine print in it.

And some fellow boring into it at night, trying to catch up so he can pass his test. That is what we have done to God’s flowers. We have turned it into botany.

Geology

Then there are the rocks and the hills and the entire beautiful world God made under His heavens. And we like to look at them. I grew up in the state of Pennsylvania, that cherry land that I know now that it is.

I did not know it then; I was too close to it to appreciate When you grow up with something, you are not as likely to appreciate it as much as something you see later in life.

And I saw all those hills and little streams running among those hills and pine-clad mountains pushing up against the sky. I saw all that.

Those are rocks and hills, and they are beautiful. And along comes some fellow with a microscope and a little hammer.

And he is a geologist. And he teaches geology. Therefore, instead of being amazed at the rocks and hills, we have geology.

Zoology

Then there are the birds. You used to see the birds that came early in the springtime, laid their eggs, hatched, sang among the branches, and went back south again when the bitter autumn winds began to blow.

And the brown discouraged leaves were flying all about. I enjoyed seeing the birds. I used to like to see the pigeons come, reel, and light on the peak of the barn and coo and puff out their necks at each other.

I enjoyed the birds. But you give a bird and a rabbit to a professor, and he turns it into zoology.

Nature is reduced to a system instead of enjoying itself. God gave Adam the Garden of Eden, the trees, and the beauty, and said, “Here, it’s yours.

Help yourself, but just take care of it. It’s yours.” Then man sinned, and when Adam, if he ever got back to see it, came back, he had a book under his arm. All that beauty is reduced to systematic science.

Man’s Study Of God

The same thing is done with the Scriptures. God gave us the Word of the Lord, a letter from home.

We used to sing a little song by an unknown composer back in camp meeting days that went like this:

I have letters from my father In my hand.

Written by my elder brother, They are grand, they are grand.

It was not a good hymnology, but it was a wonderful truth— that we have a letter from God in our hands. Put that in the hands of a professor with thick glasses, and in a very short time he would produce theology that nobody would read.

A student in a Christian college wrote to me once and said, “Will you please help me? Am I backsliding, or what is going wrong? I suppose theoretically that the study of theology would be the most thrilling.

The most delightful, the most enjoyable thing in the world, because theology is the study of God and the ways of God.

And I would assume that it ought to be a delight, but this professor makes it impossible. I wrote back and explained it the best I could, because I had been up against that, too, in my life.

So we have the Bible —the letters from God to His people. Then we take it, reduce it, and systematize it, and soon you need a good education to understand it at all. The Lord never meant that. His Word is meant for all of His children.

This continent was conquered and settled by people who had never been through more than grade school. A Guffey Reader was about all the education they had.

But they could read, and they did have Bible translations given to them by men who were scholars, and so they lived on those good translations and never even knew there was anything else.

Simplicity and childlikeness. God hid these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them unto babes (see Matt. 11:25). I have met many an old woman dressed in her old-fashioned black.

Who had not had a dress that was up to date or the latest fad for 40 years? I have seen these little old women and they have quit living in the earth at all.

Oh, they cooked, sewed, cleaned house, and went to the store and all that, but they were not living here. They were walking far off the sidewalk, living with God all the time.

They were not brilliant people, not educated people, but they looked out for God’s truth and saw it as a child sees flowers.

They looked at God’s truth and saw it as David saw stars, and as Isaiah saw the mountains: direct, unmediated, unsophisticated, unspoiled.

A Picture Of The Mystical That We Can Understand

We have a pattern for this way of seeing in the Old Testament tabernacle, which illustrated the presence of God among men. God’s presence descended from above to lift humanity above the elements of the earth.

The Lord said there was a pattern given to Moses on the mount. But now there is in heaven a sanctuary—a true tabernacle. There is an altar, a mercy seat, and a high priest, And He said if Jesus were on earth, He would not be a priest.

He could not be a priest, because there were priests already here on the earth after the order of Levi.

But He said, according to the Old Testament Scriptures themselves, there has come a priest who is above the Levitical priesthood, after the order of Melchizedek, and this Jesus is the one.

And He said this Jesus has a more excellent ministry than Levi, who had the Tabernacle. If you will read the books of Leviticus and Exodus.

And become acquainted with them and see what they say, you will see how beautiful the Tabernacle and the priesthood were. There is something utterly beautiful about that Old Testament tabernacle and Levitical order.

It was spoiled and stained by blood everywhere, for sin had spoiled and stained the world, and it took blood to wash the world. So all through the Old Testament order.

There was blood: blood of lambs and pigeons and goats. But it was all pointing to the Lamb of God who would come to take away the sin of the world.

This whole tabernacle has been lifted and is now in heaven, and we have a priest there forever who offered Himself as the Lamb to end the sacrifice of all lambs. We have an altar there— not the altar in Jerusalem, but the altar in heaven.

We have the Lamb there to take the place of all the beasts that were slain on Jewish altars. And we have an altar of incense there where our Lord pleads, to take the place of that transient altar of incense in the old tabernacle in Judea.

Jesus Christ is the true priest, and strictly, He is the only priest. In a secondary sense, all of His people are priests. But in a primary sense, there is only one priest, and that is Jesus Christ the Lord, the High Priest.

No Longer Anything Between Man And God

What does all this mean to us? It means that this glorious remedy remains now. In Old Testament days, once a year the high priest came dressed in his resplendent robes.

And with blood not his own he went in through a veil so sacred that it was only to move once a year, and he sprinkled blood on the mercy seat between the wings of the cherubim where glowed the fiery Shekinah.

All that yearly blood sacrifice for sin was fulfilled when our Lord gave up the ghost and said, “It is finished,” and died on the cross. And what is taught here is that Jesus Christ washed the heavens so there is nothing between man and God now.

If man will believe it. By the blood of the Lamb, God washed the heavens so that there is a friendly heaven arching over us now.

Jesus said, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).

“And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Rev. 22:17), says the last book of the Bible.

The ‘blood of the Lamb has washed away the evil that kept us away from God. Now, whoever will come may come, regardless of how dark his stain or how far off he may be from God. Any prodigal is the same distance from God as any other prodigal.

We hear of rapists, murderers, and all the rest. Yet that rapist who rapes and kills in the park in the dark of the night is no further off from God than that proud businessman surrounded by his adoring family, who reads Shakespeare and listens to Beethoven.

All are sinners, and all have come short of the glory of God (see Rom. 3:23). We are all without hope and God in the world. Yet there is hope in God, if we will believe.

The Scriptures tell us there is a way opened through a fountain in the House of David, a way open through the rending of His flesh. So the rapist in the park, though we shudder at the terrible act he has committed, can come home if he will come.

And the man who is up and out, he can come too. The cultured sinner can come and the uncultured, base sinner can come.

All can come because heaven and earth are united. Jesus Christ has washed away the division, die difference.

Now we can come to God. Sin is still loose in the universe like a virus in the body, and the world is sick, desperately sick. But Jesus is the physician of souls and He can cure us and bring us to Himself by His blood.

Our hope for this world and for the world to come is a High Priest, an altar, a temple, a tabernacle, a shrine, and a Savior by the throne above. This we Christians have.

What bothers me is how we can keep so quiet about it and why it is that we can take it so soberly, almost sadly. It would seem to me that we Christians ought to be the happiest people in the whole world.

Plow Let Our Cheerful Eyes by Philip Doddridge (1702-1751)

Now let our cheerful eyes
Our great High Priest above,
And celebrate his constant care
And sympathizing with love.

Though raised to heaven’s exalted throne,
Where angels bow around,
And high o’er all the hosts of light,
With matchless honors crowned.

The names of all his saints he bears,
Deep graven on his heart;
Nor shall the meanest Christian say
That he hath lost his part.

So, gracious Saviour, on our breasts
May thy dear name be worn,
A sacred ornament and guard,
To endless ages borne.

Man’s Revolt Against God’s Presence

Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such a high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens.

Hebrews 8:1

Certain things are fundamental to human morality. That is, wherever you find man you will find a basic agreement on certain aspects we call morality—honesty, courtesy, neighborliness.

Although humanity is sliding down a slippery slope, there are still things, from the human standpoint, that are considered moral—not necessarily things that God can approve as moral, but things that are common among humanity.

Perhaps the most basic agreement that can unite us is the idea that God exists and that He is the sovereign Majesty in the heavens.

Read and Learn More Bible Verses about the Presence of God

Along with that basic belief is the belief that we must go back again to God for the final judgment of the deeds done in the body. An old hymn by Charles Wesley, “A Charge to Keep1 Have,” reminds us of this:

A charge to keep I have, a God to glorify, a never-dying soul to save, and fit it for the sky.

In Ecclesiastes, we read, “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.

For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil” (Eccles. 12:13-14).

For if we believe that we must fear God, that this is our whole duty, and that God shall bring every work into judgment, whether it is good or evil, there is going to be a difference in the way we view God’s moral law.

Majesty In The Heavens

Human morality rests upon this belief: There is a Majesty in the heavens. I believe also that human decency is fundamental.

And human decency depends upon an adequate conception of God and of human nature. Accordingly, the atheist could not possibly have an adequate view of human nature.

Any view that excludes the possibility that we come from God and that we shall return to God will have a detrimental effect on human morality.

So we have faith in God, and we build on this rock. Saint Patrick himself prayed that prayer every day:

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness
Of the Creator of Creation.

I believe that when we arise in the morning, it ought to be in a mighty strength, believing in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

Throne And A Kingdom

The Bible teaches that creation is a universe. That is, all that we see about us, from the farthest star that can be picked out by the most powerful telescope down to the tiniest cell seen through a microscope.

And all things living and inorganic makeup what we call the world, this is a universe.

It is one vast, single system embracing matter in spirit and life and mind and time and space, and all beings that are in it.

The Bible teaches that these are not separated—they are not independent of each other —but are united and working harmoniously.

According to medical research, cancer is simply a condition in which cells no longer take orders from the rest of the body.

Cancer is composed of free cells, and anarchic cells; they are not subject to the balance and order of the rest of the cells of the body. They go wild, and soon they have brought the victim to death.

If everything in the world were independent of everything else, you would have a universal cancer throughout the vast universe. So God brings everything together, interlocks them, and makes them interdependent.

A stone could not be moved on the seashore but it would change in some manner the balance of the world. A leaf could not fall from a tree but it changes the order of nature a little bit… just that much.

There is not a baby born into the world but makes the world a little different. The man or woman who dies and goes out of the world changes the world just a little bit, for all things interlock and depend upon each other.

The Bible further teaches that this universe, this “uni” (meaning “one”), this one great interlocking system has a central control. And that control is called the throne of God.

The universe is controlled from that center. This seems logical to me. Do you know what would happen to the human body if it had no central control?

There have been many fables and stories made up and told about the body that would not obey the head.

And you can imagine what it would be like. There must be a head on every organism or else there could be no harmony, no coordination, no cooperation, no life.

Every organization has to have a head. If you organize anything, even a simple literary guild consisting of half a dozen women, they will always have a president. And the president must preside.

It goes right on up to the largest empire that ever touched the world. Right on up to the great nations of the world. Every organization must have a head. That is logical.

So, if any organism has to have a head, if a machine has to have a head, or an organization has to have a head, is it not logical to believe that somewhere in this vast universe, there is a throne where somebody runs it? I believe that is true.

And I believe that the one on the throne is God, the Majesty in the heavens. The Bible refers to this center of control as the throne of God.

And from that throne, God governs His universe according to an eternal purpose. That eternal purpose embraces’ all things.

“All things” are two little words used often in the Scriptures, yet they are bigger than the sky above. They are bigger than the entire world. They are big because they take in all things.

So, we have the Majesty in the heavens, sitting upon Elis’s throne. Then someone is sitting on the right hand of that throne.

Why? And who is He? He is Jesus Christ, the minister of the sanctuary, which God made, not man.

The reason for His being there, in brief, is this: A province revolted in what we call the universe. In all this interrelated, interdependent, interlocking universe, one province revolted and said, ‘We don’t want to be ruled by the head.

We will not be ruled from the throne. We will rule ourselves. We will build this great Babylon up to heaven. We will not have God rule over us.

” That province we call “mankind.” And mankind inhabits the little rolling sphere we call “the earth.”

Some inquire if man exists anywhere else in the universe, and astronauts go up to find out. I do not think he exists elsewhere, because the Scripture says the earth has been given to the sons of men.

I think the earth belongs to man. They have not done much with it, and they have not done a very good job, but it belongs to the sons of men.

That province is now in revolt against the Majesty of the heavens. What is God going to do? God could, with a wave of His hand, sweep that province out of existence.

But what did He do? God sent His only begotten Son that He might redeem that province and bring it back into the sphere of the throne again, back into the sphere of the Kingdom. And that Kingdom is called “the kingdom of God.”

When a man is converted, he is born again into the kingdom of God. What does that mean? It means that he is born out of the old rebellious province into a new Kingdom, and admits that there is a throne, which he did not admit before.

No sinner admits to the throne of God as being valid and the right of God to rule over him. He can talk about God, and he will appeal to God, and he will use the name of God, but he will not obey God.

That is why he is what he is. That is why he is a sinner and why he is called a sinner. That is why it is said that he will perish unless he repents and is born again.

When he repents and is born again, he leaves the old world, the old province that revolted, and moves into the kingdom of God and comes under the rulership of the triune God again. That is how simple it all is.

You cannot get there by being baptized, though we all ought to be baptized, according to the teaching of Jesus. We do not get there by joining a church, although we all ought to join a church.

You do not get there by praying; you can pray to the end of your life, 24 hours a day, and not get there. It is coming into the Kingdom by an act of the will, through Jesus Christ the Lord, that gets me out of the old, revolted province and into the Kingdom of God and under the rule of the throne of God again.

The One Who Returns Us To The Kingdom

God became man to rescue the sinful man. This He did by forfeiting His own life so that He might bring back to God again those who had revolted.

This, Jesus Christ our Lord did, and now we have Him sitting on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens.

We have Christianity now intermixing everywhere, and everybody trying to do a little bit of good. But the essence of Christianity is this:

Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you.

As ye yourselves also know: Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: Whom God hath raised.

Having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be held of it (Acts 2:22-24).

And, of course, “This Jesus hath God raised, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted.

And having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear” (Acts 2:32-33).

There is a throne. And the one who sits on the throne is one of us—Jesus Christ—and the world has revolted against that throne. Christianity says to the world that they can come back to the throne through Jesus Christ the Lord.

This is what excited and thrilled the Early Church. They were not excited about the politico-industrial questions that excite so many religious leaders today.

Everybody seems to jump on the political bandwagon, believing that the church should control the government.

But in the Early Church, those men and women baptized with the Holy Ghost, as recorded in the second chapter of Acts, were excited about other things.

They were excited about God on the throne. They were thrilled about Christ on the right hand of God the Father and His coming again in clouds of glory.

They talked about the consummation of all things, the downfall of iniquity, the purgation of the world, and the cleansing of the starry heavens above.

They were intoxicated with thoughts about the glorified Christ who would soon return. Above all things, they talked about that man who sat on the throne.

“This man whom you crucified,” they said, “He is at God’s hand, alive forevermore and He is one of us.” And they went out ablaze with that.

These converted people, this discipleÿ said, “Did you know that one of us is in a position equal to God, next to God in power and authority with all power given unto Him in heaven and earth?” (see Acts 4:10- 12).

They went everywhere saying that this God was the man Jesus and that one of our numbers had been exalted to deity.

The God-Man Question

I read once of a man explaining that Christ was a man but not a man. I wonder how that could be. How could a thing be a “horse” but not a “horse”?

Do you ever see “horse nature” floating around somewhere like a glutinous, ill-formed mass of clouds? Human nature can only be where a human being is.

So instead of saying Christ is man but not a man, we must say that Christ is a man. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). Jesus is a man, He is at God’s right hand and He sits on the throne.

Therefore, we worship this man as God. We worship no other man, but we worship this man as God. And this man was believed to be God by the Early Church, and they worshiped Him as God.

They said, “Now this man here, Jesus, is God.” Then, of course, as they began to refine it metaphysically, people said, “But He’s a human being, and how can you get on your knees to a human being? That would be idolatry.”

The NewTestament Christians said, “This human being is different. He has union with the eternal Godhead so that when you’re worshiping Him, you’re not worshiping idolatrously; you’re worshiping God.”

After they had gone on joyously worshiping for a century or two, the old theologians thought out a name for it. They called it the “hypostatic union.” And because they had found a name, they thought they had explained it.

Hypostatic Union

If you saw a strange-looking creature with feathers in front and hair behind and two tails and three horns it was an odd-looking thing that was part duck, and somewhat like a cat.

And it was waddling about, you would have all the scientists confess that they never saw anything like it. And then some scientist comes along with a name for it.

And so he names it, and everybody says, “Now we know what it is.” No, you do not. You just named it; that is all.

So it is with the hypostatic union. The question was, “How can God and man be one?” Nobody knew how, so they called it the hypostatic union, which means that the substance of God and the substance of man are united in one.

So that when you are worshiping that man, Jesus, you are worshiping God. That has satisfied everybody ever since, except the liberals, and you cannot satisfy them anyway.

I heard another name for it that I also like. I think this is a good one, maybe better than the “hypostatic union.” They call it a “Theanthropic Conjoinment.”

“Theanthropic” is such a beautiful little word. “Theo” is God, and “thrope” is man. Therefore, you have a man and God in conjoined.

God and man united. Although I still do not understand it, I can kneel before Him and cry, “My Lord and my God,” for there is a man at the right hand of God.

If we could look into heaven now, we would be introduced to creatures that would exhaust all human explanations. There would be six-winged creatures when two wings were all we were used to.

And we would see creatures with wheels in the middle of wheels, coming out of the fire. We would see broad-winged angels and seraphim that burn.

We would see strange creatures! and we would not understand them. All of these things would defy everything that man knows about this side of glory.

Then somebody would say, “Now, wait! Look there. I see something that looks like the form of a man.” Sure enough, you would recognize Him. It would be Jesus. He would be one of us.

Moreover, we would step up to Him and say, “We’re brothers. I know you. You’re of my race. You belong to me.” Don’t you feel good, for example, when you’re traveling in South America or Germany or Asia?

And a fellow walks up to you, and you look at each other and he speaks, and you say, “You’re an American.” He replies, ‘Yeah. I’m an American. I live in Chicago.”

You smile. In the little traveling, I have done around the world, I cannot get over wanting to turn a flip-flop handspring backward when I see the American flag or when I see somebody that I know is an old Yankee.

I like them not because they are any better, but because there is something in you that knows your people.

Suppose that I were wandering through heaven and saw an archangel but could not speak his language. Suppose that I saw a cherubim and could not speak his language, or a seraphim.

I would be bashful around him. I would say he burns… I cannot go near him. Then, suddenly, I see a man. I would say, “Wait! Don’t I know you?”

“Yes, I’m Jesus, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. And I am here for you, pleading your cause before the Father’s throne.”

There before the throne is the man, Jesus Christ the Lord. Not the victorious God, which would have been no news to herald to the world. The good news is not that God is victorious.

How could the sovereign Lord God be anything else but victorious? But what the Early Church said was there is a man victorious, a man who is joined to God.

And that man is victorious, and we are blessed in Him. And so if we are in Him, we can be victorious too.

Reunited With God In Christ Jesus

I think that we are living on the very outskirts, the far margin of the kingdom of God. We are in it, but we are just barely inside the door.

Christians ought to recognize that our nature has been joined to God’s nature in the mystery of the Incarnation. And when Christ died on the cross and rose again.

And began to join individual Christians to His body, He meant that we were to have the same victory He had. He meant that we were to have the same high privilege He had at God’s right hand.

He said, “I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me” (John 17:23).

One of the primary missions of our Lord was to convey to unbelieving people that they occupy the same place as He does in the heart of God. We are there because of the absolute worthiness of the Lord Jesus Christ who is our head.

He is the representative of us before God. And as the sample man, He is showing what kind of man He can make. He is the model man after whom you and I are patterned. That is why the Lord will not- let you alone.

We get used to a little viewpoint. We look at the world and God and the kingdom of heaven from one tiny, dim crack. It is a crevice that we are peeking through, forgetting that if we would only dare to rise and have faith.

That man at the right hand of God, sitting at the right hand of the throne, belongs to us and we belong to Him, and whatever He is, we can be in Him. I tell you, it might change our whole lives. But here we are, the same as before.

I do not believe in change for change’s sake. I recommend that we raise our eyes to God.

The Majesty in the heavens, and that we look long and hard and reverently at Him in faith, and see at His right hand one of us, and say.

“If he can be there, I can be there. If He is accepted by God, I am accepted in Him, in the Beloved.

If God loves Him, He loves me. If He is safe, I am safe. And if He has conquered, I can conquer. And if He’s victorious, I can be victorious.”

Some morning, get up and allow the power of God to come on you, and allow Him to bless you. It would be quite a different change from what you used to be.

Nevertheless, it would be wonderful. Why not let us seek the faith of God in Jesus Christ? Never go to God as some poet of paganism might go: from the outside.

Always remember, “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Any man can come unto the Father by Him.

So let us come. Let us practice it. Begin now. Let us move into the heart of God and live in that heart of God victoriously.

Of all the things I have been saying, this is the sum: We have a great high priest who has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty of the throne, of the Majesty in the heaven, being a minister of the sanctuary, which God built, and not man.

From our human point of view, man has always revolted against the presence of God, starting in the Garden of Eden.

The first Adam took us away from the presence of God, while the second Adam, Christ, led us straight into God’s presence.

The revolt of man is overturned by the redemptive action from the throne on high. God has paved the way into His presence and never winces in the face of man’s revolt.

Now To The Lord A Noble Song By Isaac Watts (1674-1748)

Now to the Lord a noble song!
Awake, my soul, awake, my tongue,
Hosanna to the eternal name,
And all his boundless love proclaims.

See where it shines in Jesus’ face,—
The brightest image of his grace;
God, in the person of his Son,
Has all his mightiest works outdone. Grace!
’Tis a sweet, a charming theme;
My thoughts rejoice at Jesus’ name;
Ye angels, dwell upon the sound;
Ye heavens, reflect it to the ground.

Oh, may I reach the happy place,
Where he unveils his lovely face,
His beauties there may I behold,
And sing his name to harps of gold.

From The Lorica (The Deer’s Cry), Breastplate of St. Patrick, A.D. 433.

Our Personal Guide Into God’s Presence

So also Christ glorified not himself to be made a high priest; but he that said unto him, Thou art my Son, to day have I begotten thee. As he saith also in another place, Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchisedec.

Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death.

And was heard in that he feared; though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect.

He became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him; and called of God a high priest after the order of Melchisedec.

Hebrews 5:5-10

Read and Learn More Bible Verses about the Presence of God

Delighting in God’s presence is not a do-it-yourself project. The very delicate nature of it requires an experienced guide, someone who can maneuver us around obstacles and bring us into the sunlight of God’s wonderful presence.

This ‘brings us to the idea of the priesthood, which is ordained by God and fulfills an important spiritual function.

One of the major doctrines outlined in the book of Hebrews is the high priesthood of the eternal Son.

Introduced in Hebrews 2:17, and Hebrews 3:1, we are told to “consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession.” Again, it is mentioned in Hebrews 4:14 and chapters 5, 6 and 7.

The meaning is the high priesthood as God ordained it, and the fulfillment of that priesthood is by our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Idea Of Priesthood

Few things in religious circles are the source of more abuse than the priesthood. Every base, unworthy religion found throughout the world has the idea of a priesthood attached to it.

The priestly rites throughout the various religions of the world have offended and shocked humanity, and the priests themselves have often been corrupt, cruel, and hypocritical.

If you want to get the shock of your life, read the story of the religions of Mexico practiced by the Aztecs and the Toltecs.

Twenty thousand human beings, for instance, were offered in sacrifice at the dedication of one temple.

Twenty thousand human beings were stretched out on a slab alive and their hearts were cut out with stone axes as sacrifices to the deaf and dumb god of the Toltecs and the Aztecs in the olden days in Mexico. The evil they did is unspeakable.

You do not have to go back far to find priests habitually lying around drunk. Numerous abuses have attached themselves to the idea of the priesthood.

Some have been self-righteous and arrogant and many intimidate and exploit their poor people. And yet the idea of a priesthood was not thought of first by man, but by God.

It is dimly seen in the praying father who assumes responsibility for his family, who teaches them by example and precept, and who prays for them.

Job, in the Old Testament, was a good example of this. After his children had enjoyed a night of celebration, Job went before God and offered a sacrifice.

He prayed and asked God to forgive them and cleanse them because he feared they might have sinned. He was a priest to his family.

But it is more clearly outlined in the Levitical priesthood as shown in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers in the Old Testament, and is outlined in perfection in Jesus Christ, our Lord.

The Need for a Priesthood Because of Maris’s Alienation from God.

God ordains the idea of the priesthood, and therefore, it must be a need. The need for priesthood arises from man’s alienation from God.

This is an integral part of biblical truth, just as hydrogen is a part of water, and you cannot have water without hydrogen.

Therefore, you cannot have Bible truth without the doctrine that man has broken with God in what the Bible calls “alienation” in the great Fall that took place in the Garden of Eden.

Any religion that ignores the truth that man has fallen and separated from God is a sham religion.

Fallen man has morally pulled away from God and separated himself from God’s fellowship so that he is said to be without hope and God in the world.

This being the condition of man, somebody has to make a reconciliation between God and man to bring them back together again. This is where the idea of the priesthood lies.

Granted that man desired to return to God, he could not return because sin was in the way. A moral breach has occurred a violation of the laws of God. Man is a moral criminal before the bar of God.

Until satisfaction is made, until this breach is healed, until justice is satisfied, man cannot return to God even if he wants to. This is what the Bible teaches, and anything else is less than Bible doctrine.

If I did not believe this, I would close my Bible and lecture on Wordsworth or Shakespeare I have noticed that in recent years a serious error has developed among religious people in general.

I fear that its focus is on what I will call a Christ-less nature mysticism. This is even invading what is termed as the evangelical church.

When the fall of the year comes around, these nature mystics imagine a little man with a paintbrush painting the leaves, and some get very watery-eyed about this.

Again, in the spring, when the frogs begin to make their music in the little ponds, man’s thoughts turn to love and the kind of things the poets write about.

That is very dangerous, because if it is cross-less —without redemption, without Christ, and a proper reconciliation—it can be deadly.

Yet, there are churches spending millions of dollars on fabulous buildings, but the congregation never hears a thing, year in and year out, about reconciliation.

Today’s church faces the danger of a cross-less Christianity. A preacher will get up in front of the congregation and talk so piously about the “Great All-Father.”

Or he might say, “This we ask in the spirit of Jesus.” He did not ask it in the name of Jesus but in the spirit of Jesus. He was a nice fellow, not wanting to offend anybody, and surely too nice to embrace the cross.

This does not represent the biblical focus of Christianity. We must get back to the idea of priesthood.

We must get back to the idea of God on one side and man on the other, and the two of them alienated from each other. This alienation is not by the fault of God but by the fault of man.

We must get back to a sacrifice and a priest who can come between God, who is holy, and man, who is unholy, and bring the two of them together. That is priesthood.

Priestly Qualifications

The Scripture tells us that a priest had to have several qualifications. First, the priest had to be ordained of God. “And no man taketh this honor unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron” (Heb. 5:4).

Nobody could come out of the bush and say, “I’m a priest.” God had to ordain the man or else he was a false priest. All the false priests around the world are self-ordained men. But there had to be a priest in Old Testament times that God ordained.

Then he had to be ordained “for men.” God appointed the priest to help men. God needs no help, and no priest can give God any help. It is man that needs help, and the work of the priest was to atone for man’s sins.

The formula was given in the book of Leviticus, the fifth chapter, where it says: “And he shall sprinkle of the blood of the sin offering upon the side of the altar, and the rest of the blood shah be wrung out at the bottom of the altar.

It is a sin offering. And he shall offer the second for a burnt offering, according to the manner: and the priest shall make an atonement for him for his sin which he hath sinned, and it shall be forgiven him” (Lev. 5:9-10).

There is the idea of the priesthood. It was an offering made for man to God by the priest. The priest was to represent God to man and man to God.

Before God, he pleads for the man he represents. He instructs. He exhorts. With complete sympathy and understanding, he goes to God for man. This he can do because he is a man.

But the breakdown in the Old Testament was that the priest, when he went before God, to stand between a holy God and a fallen man, was embarrassed because he had to atone not only for the sins of the people he was reconciling.

But he had to atone for his sins as well. This was where the breakdown was. This was why Isaac Watts could write in his hymn “Not All the Blood of Beasts”:

Not all the blood of beasts
On Jewish altars slain
Could give the guilty conscience peace
Or wash away the stain.
But Christ, the heavenly Lamb,
Takes all our sins away;
A sacrifice of a nobler name
And richer blood than they.

The priest could not, by the blood of the sacrifice he made, take sin away completely, but only partly. God forgave sin and covered it until the time when Christ, the Great High Priest, came.

When Christ came, He qualified completely as the one who could reconcile God and man. He was ordained of God. That was qualification number one. “Thou art my son.

Thou art a priest forever.” He wanted reconciliation for the people. He had compassion. Christ qualified as the priest, and He became the author, the source, and the giver of eternal salvation.

Trust And Obey

There is a simple song in our hymnal called “Trust and Obey,” by John Henry Sammis, that expresses something very fundamental:

Trust and obey, for there’s no other way To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey. I believe that “trust” and “obey” are two wings of a bird. A wise old writer once wrote, “Two wings of a dove don’t weigh her down.”

She rises using them. “Trust” and “obey” are the two wings of the Christian. We trust and we obey. We obey because we trust.

We trust so that we might obey. If we try to obey without faith, we get nowhere. If we try to have faith without obedience, it ends in nothing.

Christ has given eternal salvation to those who obey Him and to those who believe Him, for obviously, the two are synonymous, if not identical.

They are like two sides of a coin. I cannot split that coin edgewise with a fine saw and then try to buy anything with it.

The salesperson would see one side of it and think it was all right, but when he took it in his hand, he would say, “What did you do? What’s the matter here? That’s only half a coin.”

And he would toss it back to me. You cannot pass one side of a coin. It takes two sides. Trust is on one side of the coin, and obey is on the other.

But the Church has taken a fine saw and split them, saying, ‘You don’t have to obey. Just believe.” Everything is “believe.”

You cannot divide that coin. You cannot separate it; if you do, it is no good. It is not just trust; it is not just obey. It is trust and obedience.

Believe God and then go get obedience. You will find that it will become in your heart eternal salvation. Jesus Christ will become your all in all.

Some try to find their way or perhaps a shortcut. But there are no shortcuts on the pathway to God’s presence. Moses spent 40 years on the backside of the desert before he came to the burning bush.

I am quite sure that for Moses, who had grown up in Pharaoh’s court, those 40 years were anything but convenient.

God’s timing, however, is always perfect; therefore, only He can be our guide. Only He can direct us on this path into the presence of God. The pathway into God’s presence has nothing to do with convenience or shortcuts.

We have a Great High Priest who did not take a shortcut but rather went all the way to the cross, and now He is seated on the right hand of God the Father. He went the full distance to become our Mediator and High Priest.

What if Christ would have taken a shortcut to the cross? Remember that night, that very dark night in Gethsemane, when Jesus prayed.

“O my Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39). Jesus took no road of convenience, nor did He seek a shortcut.

He is our guide because He prayed, “Not as I will, but as thou wilt.” He earned our trust and our obedience because He did not take the path of convenience but went the way of the cross and died for us and became Our Great High Priest.

Jesus Christ, the great High Priest ordained of God and ordained for man, is the only guide to usher us into the presence of God. This may be the reason the enemy of man’s soul strives to come between God and us.

But those who have found Christ have found the perfect Guide, and in following Him have found that rest and peace are in God’s presence.

That I might Know Him by max I. Reich (1863-1945)

That I might know Him!
Let this be life’s aim,
Still to explore the wealth stored in His Name.

With heaven-bought intelligence to trace
The glories that light up His sinless face:
That I might know His power day by day,
Protecting, guiding in the upward way:
That I might know His Presence, calm and pure,
Changeless midst changes, and midst losses sure:
To dwell with Him, in spirit, day and night;
To walk with Him by faith, if not by sight;
To work with Him, as He shall plan, not I:
To cleave to Him, and let the world go by:
To live on earth a life of selfless love;
To set the mind and heart on things above:
Till I shall see Him without vision dim,
And know Him as I know I’m known of Him.

Man Is Naturally Drawn Toward God’s Presence

But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.

For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.

Hebrews 2:9-10

No mistake about it, something within the creature lifts itself in response to something within the Creator. That “something” is the great mystery of the human heart created in the image of God.

Read and Learn More Bible Verses about the Presence of God

If a culture does not know the true Jesus Christ, it will invent its own God and worship that. The history of the world is filled with religions conquering countries.

It would be impossible to find any culture in any generation in any part of the world that does not have some kind of religious tendencies and rituals.

Where did that come from? Why is it that man is always looking upwards or at least outward from himself to something greater and more magnificent than himself?

These spiritual stirrings within the natural heart fall on deaf ears and go unanswered for one simple reason. From a mere intellectual and rational viewpoint, they are incomprehensible.

Man feels drawn toward something but does not know what it is or how to define it. It is something above and beyond human rationalizing.

Down through history, man has taken many paths in his quest for God’s presence, all to no avail. Only one path is correct, and that path is revealed in the Word of God.

Only in the Bible do we begin to understand what these inward stirrings are and how to find entrance into the presence of God. A right understanding of the Bible opens to us the only path into the presence of God.

The Bible Way Into God’s Presence

Two aspects of the Bible that are critical to coming into God’s presence are revelation and inspiration.

In the volumes of Christian testimony that have come down through the centuries, two words occur frequently: one is “inspiration,” and the other is “revelation.”

When we say “inspiration,” meaning that the Scripture is inspired or given by inspiration, we mean that in its original signature, that is, as originally given, the Holy Spirit inspired the Bible, to be written.

What we have was put down at the order of the Holy Spirit. That is what we mean by inspiration. God wrote the Bible as originally given, and it is a trustworthy sourcebook of authentic truth.

What we have in the Bible is true, but not everything true is in the Bible. You can learn everything from the Bible that the Bible teaches, but you cannot learn everything from the Bible.

For the reason that the Bible does not teach everything. It does not pretend to. We must distinguish between revealed truth and truth.

Revealed Truth

The Bible has to do with that which deals with redemption. It is a book interested in our rescue from sin, our moral rehabilitation, and our spiritual regeneration.

It is interested in keeping us right making us useful and causing us to grow up into the maturity of a Christian. Then, at last, it is interested in preparing us for the journey from this temporal life to eternity.

It is interested in all that, but it is not interested in geometry. You cannot go to the Bible and learn geometry, but you can go to the Bible and learn that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16).

You cannot learn from the Bible how to bake a pie or send up a rocket. But you can learn from the Bible that “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).

The Bible reveals _the truth we need to know to save us from sin, to regenerate us, to rehabilitate us morally and spiritually, and to prepare us for the day of the Lord.

It is all in the Word, and that is what we mean when we say the Bible is the only sourcebook for our rule and practice. The Bible is the only final, authentic sourcebook of information concerning those things that have to do with our salvation.

The Scriptures tell us that God created the heavens and the earth. In addition, we are told many other things that do not seem to bear directly upon our salvation, but that do, nevertheless, bear upon it.

Revelation is the uncovering of truths that have not been known before and are undiscoverable.

Discoverable Truth

Some things you can discover on your own. For example, someone discovered the atom. Roman philosopher Tims.

Lucretius Cams (ca. 99 BC-ca. 55 BC) wrote a book before Christ’s time, On the Nature of Things, and in it.

He explained about atoms. He thought atoms were tiny, hard bits of matter out of which everything was made, just as a concrete building is made out of tiny bits of matter: sand and concrete.

You can break it down and find its tiny particles. He came wonderfully close to it, even though he did not have the benefit of modern scientific techniques and information.

Those things are discoverable. You can discover them. This is a distinction between “revealed truth” and “truth.” Some truths can never be discovered on their own or by man’s initiative.

God inspired the Bible to be written, and inspires man to say things; often those things could be discovered. For example, look at Psalm 8:3-8:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

For thou, hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.

All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea.

Tho’s words were an inspired utterance. The Spirit of God moved David to write this psalm, and it has a spiritual benefit for us.

But this is not revelation, because it is a reaction anybody could have, even if he were an atheist.

He could still look up into the heavens and say, “When I look at all of that space, what is man?”

Notice that Psalm 8 is a night scene, while Psalm 19 is a day scene:

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge (Ps. 19:1-2).

And then in verse 5, the psalmist talks about the sun and says, “Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race” (Ps. 19:5).

Seen from the earth up, that is exactly what the sun looks like—a great, shining bridegroom of the world, shining in his splendor. Both psalms are inspired, but there is no particular revelation because anybody could say the same thing.

Anybody could say that the “heavens declared God’s glory and the firmament showed His handiwork.” That is a discoverable truth.

The Main Difference Between Man and Every Other Creature

Everything in the natural world falls short of man’s supreme aspiration for God and His presence. You do not have to like it, but we might as well face up to it: We are the glory and the rubbish of the universe.

But we never would have been the rubbish of the universe if we had not chosen the gutter. If sin had not entered the world, and we had not fallen, we would never have been the rubbish of the universe.

We would have been the glory of the universe. When our Lord is finished with His redemptive work, He will have made His people.

Once again, the glory of the universe when He comes to be admired in His saints and glorified in all them that see Him.

Man is the weakest creature there is, but he is the only creature that knows how weak he is. That is where his glory lies: in his weakness. He knows how weak he is, and no other creature knows this.

I do not suppose that if you were to ask a mosquito, “Are you weak?” he would say yes. He does not know he is weak. He could not answer you. He would not know what you said.

If mosquitoes could talk, they would call us the animal that swats, because that is the only thing they know about us.

Man is the unknown—pitiful, wonderful, weak, mysterious —and yet he is the only creature that knows he is this. Man is the only creature that sins, and yet he is the only creature that could know that he sins.

And man is the only creature that knows how foolish and inconsistent he is, and he laughs at himself.

He is the only creature that aspires because there is no other creature dissatisfied with himself. Man alone is dissatisfied with himself.

In John Keats’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale,” he made this point, among other very wonderful things: You were here. You were here way back long ago when the Grecians heard thee sing among the isles of Greece.

Yes, the nightingale was there then, but the nightingale was there before there was any Greece, and before there was any Egypt. Why has the nightingale remained the nightingale from the time God created her and said.

“Let the birds inhabit the air”? Because the nightingale, although she is a beautiful singer, does not aspire.

But the man who used to come out of his cave and listen to a nightingale is now dressed in a Hart, Schaffner, and Marx suit and watches television. Why? He has aspired, you see.

He has come up. Only man aspires. All other creatures are exactly what they were; the only creature that ever improves is the one that man gets hold of and crossbreeds.

Those Guernsey, Jersey, Holstein, and Hereford cattle you see standing around in little clusters under the trees on hot days are crossbreeds.

They have been bred up to that. Someone got a hold of a poor swayback heifer and bred her to something better.

Then he bred that to something better, and on until he has these fine cattle. If man can get hold of a thing, he will breed it up, because man alone aspires.

Nothing else aspires. The lowly cow does not aspire to be anything more or else than she is.

What does this indicate? It indicates that God made man in His image, and in the image and likeness of God made He him and of nothing else can this be said.

Therefore, man aspires and is the only creature that prays and worships. God made man to worship, and he is the only creature that God made to worship, at least the only creature down here.

The lion roars for his prey and the bird builds its nest in the thickets. The stormy wind fulfills God’s will, and He gives hail and snow like wool.

Snow does not pray, and neither does the bird pray; neither does the lion pray, and neither does the stormy wind pray.

We can read prayer into it, but it is not there until we read it in. We, who can pray, read into nature prayers, and we say the wind is moaning her prayers to heaven, but she is only moaning in our imagination.

The wind is just blowing. You and I are doing the moaning. So we read those thoughts into nature. We say the little bird dips his bill in the water.

Then looks up and thanks God for it, but the bird is merely putting his chin up so the water will run down. That is all, purely a mechanical thing. No bird prays.

I think it is perfectly terrible to get a dog down beside the bed and have him pray, as some people do.

If God made a dog to pray, he would be praying without you getting him down alongside your bed, so stop it if you have been doing it. No dog ever prayed. No bird ever prayed. It is man alone that prays.

“What Is Man That Thou Art Mindful of Him?”

In the vastness of the universe, man is very small indeed. But seen as a spiritual creature in the bosom of God.

He is greater than all the winds that blow all the mountains that rise all the seas that flow and all the rivers that run down to the sea.

He is greater because God made him in His image. That is why the Son came. Why did the eternal Son become the Son of Man? He was the Son of God.

So why did He become the Son of Man? He came for the singular reason that man had sinned and had become the glory and the rubbish of the universe.

He came down in human flesh to get down as far as we were. If He had come into the world as a child of 10, there would have been 10 years unaccounted.

If He had come as a child of five, there would have been five years unaccounted. If He had started at a year old, there would have been a year unaccounted for.

If He had been born by some miracle apart from childbirth, there would have been nine months unaccounted. Scripture says, “Therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).

Jesus went back not only to the original embryo but back to the original germ so that He might know everything that man knows and develop the way of man’s development right up to full, blooming manhood.

Jesus came down to where we are. If He had been born in a palace, there might have been those who were born in huts and grass cottages that He would not have understood; but He was born in a stable that He might know the poorest there are.

Revealed Truth Allows Us To Live By Faith

Revealed truth leads to a restoration of God’s sovereignty in the redeemed. Christ is now the corporeal head of the human race, and under Him, the human race is going to regain sovereignty.

Christ came down so that He might taste death for every man. The word “taste” does not mean taste as a child might taste food and then reject it. It means “experience.”

He experienced death for every man. “Now we see not yet all things put under him” (Heb. 2:8), but we see only that which has been done. We see that He was born. We see that He grew to manhood.

We see that He died. We see that He rose again from the dead. We see that He is saving His Church and that there is a Church within the church; there are redeemed people.

Regenerated people, bloodwashed people, forgiven people—people who compose the true Church. That is the Church inside the false church —the Church that God acknowledges and approves within the vast Christendom, which God rejects.

We do not yet see all things put under His feet, but we do see what was done. ByTaith, we see all things put under Him. Faith is a kind of sight because faith sees what has not yet happened.

And if we have actual faith, we act as if we see what we believe. And if we claim we believe and do not have faith, we act as if we believe it but do not believe it at all.

We say we believe in revelation. We believe in inspiration. We believe that man is made in the image of God. We believe that God was made in the image of man by the incarnation of the holy Son.

We say we believe He tasted death for every man so that we might cease to be the disgrace of the universe and become the glory of the universe again.

And if we truly believe this, we begin to act as if we believe it, and it changes our inner perception.

Remember: You do not believe a thing rightly until you act by it. When you bring your life, into line with your faith, you are a believer.

But when your life is not in line with your faith, you are no true believer at all. We believe He tasted death for every man.

We believe that He will soon triumph over all things, and God will put all things under His feet. I believe that, and I believe there will be a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwells righteousness.

We see not all things under Him, but we see Jesus. God has put all things in subjection under His feet. For in that He put all in subjection under Him, He left nothing that is not put under Him.

We do not see it all done yet, but we have faith, and we see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than angels so that He might suffer death.

We see Him crowned with glory and honor at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. And when He comes back again, He will put all things under His feet.

For myself, with God’s help, I want to live for that time. I want my money to live for that time. I want my talents, whatever they may be, to live for that time.

I want my time to be given for that hour when He comes back again. I do not want to divide my life and live for the earth while this is approaching.

I believe with all my heart that God has put all things under His feet, and one of these days, He is coming back to take His power and reign. May God grant that you and I be ready.

Man’s highest aspirations are fulfilled through the revealed truth of God’s Word. This truth obeyed will prepare the heart to come into the presence of God in worship and fellowship.

Come Hither, All ye Weary Souls by Isaac Watts (1674-1748)

Come hither, all ye weary souls,
Ye heavy-laden sinners, come;
I’ll give you rest from all your toils,
And raise you to my heavenly home.

They shall find rest who learn of me:
I’m of a meek and lowly mind;
But passion rages like the sea,
And pride is restless as the wind.

Blest is the man whose shoulders take
My yoke, and bear it with delight:
My yoke is easy on the neck;
My grace shall make the burden light.
Jesus, we come at thy command;
With faith and hope and humble zeal,
Resign our spirits to thy hand,
To mold and guide us at thy will.

Hindronces On The Pathway To God’s Presence

Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip. For if the word spoken by angels was steadfast.

And every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord.

And was confirmed unto us by them that heard him; God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will?

Read and Learn More Bible Verses about the Presence of God

Hebrews 2:1-4

We have already established that deep within the soul of humanity is a latent desire to come into God’s presence. But that desire, put there by God, is not enough to overcome the hindrances that block the pathway.

Although the hindrances are many, the main obstruction to God’s presence is the unredeemed nature of man.

To worship God from the depths of the human soul is to discover worship in its purest form, unaffected by the world around; and it is deeper than any mere human emotion. For the unbeliever, worshiping God is impossible.

The sinful nature is repelled by the purity of God’s nature and seeks other consolations. These two natures are incompatible, which is the practical outcome of alienation from God.

Even the believer experiences obstacles that challenge his pursuit of God. The greatest challenge facing every Christian is to overcome these hindrances on the path to God’s presence.

John, the Beloved, understood this and encouraged us with these words: “Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

Certainly, the opposition is there and it is real, but it is not of such a nature as to keep us from God’s presence. We can overcome all the wiles of the enemy and anything he puts in our way.

The most important thing we can devote ourselves to is giving attention to the things of God to save our souls. This must be an active, persistent, and deliberate intent on our part, regardless of the difficulties that lie in our path.

Too many people have made coming into God’s presence not only complicated but also unattainable, discouraging many from trying. It is not a journey for the indolent or those addicted to entertainment and the coarse pleasures of the flesh.

The fact that there are hindrances only emphasizes the value of coming into God’s presence. If experiencing His presence were without obstruction, it would be without enticement as well.

Someone has well said that whatever is without cost does not have value. When we think of coming into the presence of God, what could be more valuable than that? Certainly.

The importance of coming to God’s presence is worth overcoming every obstacle along the way.

Wouldn’t you think that something so attractive would be at the forefront of every inquiring human being’s desire? There are stumbling blocks along the way.

However, they are of such a nature as to keep out all but those who have an impassioned desire for the presence of God—a desire stronger than the draw of anything else in life.

Penetrating the holy presence of God is the reward of fighting the good fight and overcoming all obstructions in the way. This all-consuming desire for God’s presence goes a long way in tackling the major hindrances a seeker might find.

When the goal is in clear view, the obstacles become trivial. Let’s take a look at the main obstacles that can keep us from pursuing God and see how we can move around them.

Manmade Errors

Perhaps the greatest ‘obstacle preventing us from coming into God’s presence would be the errors propagated down the years. People have not come right out and said them in so many words, but they think about them. And what we think, so are we.

Error Fill Religions Lead To God

One manmade error is thinking that there are any number of religions that are good in varying degrees. Therefore, why should We give more earnest heed to the message of Christianity? Well, God has spoken through His Son and said, “Hear ye Him.”

And Moses said, “This is that Moses, which said unto the children of Israel, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear” (Acts 7:37).

Jesus Christ is not another teacher; He is the final teacher and the last Word of God to men. What He has said closes all other arguments.

Error Man Has No Spiritual Responsibility

Another manmade error is the belief that there is nothing to be disturbed about because Christ carries the supreme authority of God. Therefore, everything is taken care of and we don’t need to be bothered.

Christ does carry the supreme authority of God, but to ignore that authority is a grave offense. Some will say, “God will take the initiative; I do not need to do anything.

I believe that God will always be the aggressor.” By the way, I believe that, too; but remember, God has already taken the initiative when He sent His holy Son, Jesus Christ, into the world.

And when He sent the Holy Spirit down to take the things of Christ and show them unto us. So God has already taken the initiative.

If God cannot disturb us, He cannot move us. If He cannot move us, He cannot save us. If He cannot get us concerned about the things of God, He cannot do anything at all for us.

Error The Message Needs To Be Palatable

John and Charles Wesley were men with a deep concern for the seriousness of spiritual matters. We sing the Wesley hymns about being concerned and moved, but we do not half mean them.

We ought to mean them because we ought to give them the more earnest heed, which means careful attention. We ought to read. We ought to listen.

We ought to search. We ought to examine and reexamine. And it ought to be done in earnest. We ought to put away levity, flippancy, and fun.

The curse of everything today is that it has to be funny. If it is not funny, it is not popular. But there is nothing funny in God seeing His race wander away in the night.

There was nothing funny about His sending His holy Son to be born of the virgin. There was nothing funny about His persecution and crucifixion.

There was nothing funny about the coming of the Holy Ghost; nothing funny about the judgment and the resurrection of the wicked dead.

Levity, flippancy, or fun has no place when we consider the things of God. We ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that we have heard.

The great labor of the Church has always been to get people to give serious attention to spiritual matters.

A great many pastors and preachers do not worry about this at all, because they do not expect anything and, therefore, they do not get it.

But a man of God, with the burden of the Holy Spirit on him, will want to stir the people to serious attention.

Until serious attention has been given to the claims of Christ, it is for us as if the Bible had never been written.

Medicine sitting on the shelf and never taken has never cured anybody. Food left in the refrigerator and never eaten has never nourished anybody. Heat not turned on has never warmed anybody.

And the Bible itself, though it is nourishment, though it is light, though it is warmth, though it is medicine to the soul, yet it never helps anybody where there is no serious attention given to it.

And when we do not give serious attention, it is as if Christ had not come into the world and died for mankind. He might as well have not come and died as for us to neglect all that is meant by His coming and dying.

The Curse Of Our Contemporary Culture

Every Christian faces some hindrance in seeking the presence of God. Contemporary Christianity is so taken up by the world that pressing on to the deep things of God becomes rather difficult.

Our contemporary times stand in the way of anybody taking his or her spiritual life seriously. So many things are thrown at us; it takes a very resilient soul to resist the onslaught.

Perhaps the most dangerous situation confronting Christians today is what I call cauterizing the conscience. That is, making a person insensitive or callous to the world around him.

In practical terms, he experiences a deadening of feelings toward morals. Quite simply, this moral insensibility is a lack of feeling. You cannot feel the whole moral question.

The strange paradox is that a person may be troubled by his inability to feel, yet he cannot feel. Even among those who consider themselves Christians, there is very little outrage at the immorality of our times.

The source of this dangerous condition is the semi-anesthetization caused by the act of sinning. When a person sins, he anesthetizes his conscience, to a certain extent. I call this the cauterizing of the conscience.

If you cauterize a thing, it will hurt at first, but after it heals over, you have no feeling there. Where the cauterization takes place, there will develop a hard shell, a thick skin. Sin does that.

It cauterizes the conscience, and soon it does not bother us that we are sinning. This is the work of the blinding agent of the unholy one we call the devil.

I do believe in the devil and that he blinds the minds of those who believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ might shine onto them (see 2 Cor. 4:4).

Then there is spiritual lethargy, an unnatural inward drowsiness when faced with the claims of God. Yet, we hear a speech on the dangers of our times and we immediately want to know how we can get to a fallout shelter.

We hear a program on cancer, and we examine ourselves and wonder if that last pain was cancer. We are always concerned about superficial things but rarely concerned about spiritual things.

Thomas a Kemp wisely observed, “We give all our attention to things that do us little good, or none at all; vitally necessary things we don’t bother about them, just give them the go-by.

Yes, all that goes to make man drives him to meddle with outward things, and if he doesn’t soon recover his senses, is only too glad to wallow in material interests and pleasures.”

Moral insensitivity and spiritual lethargy are two great curses because they keep us from taking earnest heed to our spiritual health.

Unless we are serious about our approach to God, we will be hindered every step of the way. These two things can only be corrected by a sound conversion to Jesus Christ.

Giving God Leftovers

Then there is the preoccupation with making a living. Jesus called it the “cares of this life” (see Matt. 13:22).

If everyone would put as much earnest time and give as much serious attention to seeking God as they put into making a living, they would become much finer Christians, and soon people would wonder what happened.

If women would give as much earnest heed to the claims of Christ and the needs of their soul as they give to their house, their cooking, and their family.

At the end of the week, they would have made such spiritual advances that they would be ashamed of the way they had been living before.

The simple fact is that God gets the leftovers, never the main meal. God never gets anything new. He gets the handme-downs. We give to God that which we do not need instead of giving to Him that which we need.

And thus earning a crown for ourselves. If we were as concerned with our spiritual condition as we are with our homes our businesses and our income, we would go forward spiritually at a great rate.

The beautiful thing about it is that we would not neglect our homes to do it, and we would not neglect our businesses to do it. You do not have to choose between making a living and going forward with God.

You can do both. There is time to do both. You do not have to choose between keeping your house decent cooking your meals for your husband and going on with God. You can do both.

An excellent example was a woman by the name of Susannah Wesley, who had 19 children. John Wesley was the eighteenth child. She kept that house spic and span and was known as one of the greatest women of faith of her time.

She decided she could look after her family and still make spiritual progress. Her domestic duties did not distract her in the least from her spiritual pursuits.

The same goes for students. If they would seek the face of God as earnestly as they seek books, they would find themselves growing grace like grass by the watercourses.

Constantly Seeking After Pleasure

Another hindrance is the constant seeking after pleasure. There are the physical pleasures: comforts, various vices, food, and the rest.

And there are mental pleasures, such as social pleasures, gambling, amusements, and the reading of fiction. There are aesthetic pleasures: art, music, higher learning, and sophisticated culture.

All these put together simply give pleasant sensations, the same sensation a baby gets by sucking his thumb. The whole human race has simply grown up seeking pleasure so we are a race of grownup thumb-suckers.

We give over our time to acquire a pleasant sensation when we ought to give over our time to the advancing of our souls.

Peter says, “Save yourselves from this untoward generation” (Acts 2:40). We may not be in earnest, but God is in dead earnest. God, the Father, was in earnest when He planned and finally accomplished the work of redemption.

God, the Son, was in earnest when fie sweat great drops of blood in the garden of Gethsemane. And God, the Holy Ghost, is always in earnest when He comes to dwell like men.

We ought to give the more earnest heed lest we drift away from it; lest we should let it slip. If you notice in the margin of some Bibles, it says, “Lest that anytime we should let them slip” and “run out as a leaking vessel.”

Other versions have “we should drift away from it.” A great many people have leaking hearts and spirits.

Letting Truth Leak From Our Heart

We neglect “so great salvation” by drifting from it. And how do we neglect it? We get the truth in our hearts, but we let it leak away. It is a heartbreaking truth that some hearts are leaky, and their good resolutions all trickle away.

People remain sober until New Year’s and then on New Year’s Eve, they lose their sobriety and start making resolutions. “I resolve that I will be kinder to my wife this year.”

“I resolve that I will give regularly to the church.” “I resolve that I will pray regularly every day.” “I resolve that I will not let a day go by that I do not read the Holy Scriptures.”I resolve that I will seek to know God better.” “I resolve…”

But the heart is a leaky thing, and before the first of February, the average person’s resolutions have all evaporated.

The good intentions, the strong wine of spiritual desire when you heard a man preach whose words touched you particularly; suddenly you can see the strong desire for God.

And you long after the strong wine of spiritual desire, but your heart is like a sieve, and pretty soon it all leaks away. Soon there is no desire left at all.

The difference between spiritual things and earthly things is that the things of the spirit are so modest.

The things of the spirit are not pushing in on you; they are not singing commercials to you; they are not knocking on your door and urging you to buy; they are simply waiting for you to notice.

Jesus did not lift His voice nor make Himself heard in the street. He did not cry aloud but was calm and quiet. People came to Him for the truth. But the things of the flesh are so insistent, so clamorous.

Before you are up in the morning, they are clamoring at you, trying to get you interested in buying what they are selling or doing what they have decided you should do.

Everybody is singing to you, urging you, pushing you—by example, by precept, by instruction, by advertising, and urging—trying to get you to go certain ways and do certain things.

Our Lord is never intrusive, but the things of the world are intrusive. Here is the point I am trying to make: If you are going to give attention to the things of God and save your soul.

You are going to have to have a good intention, a good resolution, and then see to it that you do it. Do not let the devil prevent you.

You are going to have to take yourself by the scruff of the neck, shake yourself, and say, “Now, I don’t know what others are going to do, but as for me, I’m going to seek the face of God.

I’m going to see if I can be a better man next week than I was last week, and a better man next month than I was last month.”

God meant it when He gave us the Law. Christ meant it when He died and rose on the third day. The Holy Ghost means it when He quietly speaks to your heart.

How much more will we be judged if we heed not the truth that they were judged that heeded not the Law? “For if the word spoken by angels was steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward.

How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him.

God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will?” (Heb. 2:2-4).

Some confess, “I intended to … later.” However, there was no later time.

“I didn’t understand,” they say. But they understood enough at the time.

“I was too busy.” But at last, they found Rime to die.

Somebody else says, “Nobody in my crowd paid any attention to these things,” but it is always so.

The saving voice of God speaks to a crowd of men, but only one here and there hears it. When the voice of God spoke to the antediluvian world, only Noah and his family heard it. The rest of them perished in the flood.

Somebody else says, “If I pay attention to this, I’ll lose my job’.”. Chances are, you will not, but if you do, any job you lose saving your soul certainly will be a wonderful bargain.

Somebody else says, “I want to have some fun yet. And then I’ll become a Christian.”I will not answer that. It is too meaningless, too lacking in significance to warrant any serious answer.

Another says, “I was afraid of what people would say” Afraid of what people would say? What about what God says?

Society is an elaborate conspiracy to make us alike. Society is in a conspiracy to make us all bad; not too bad, because if we get too bad, we become a problem to the police.

But not too good, for if we get too good, we are fanatical, so they say. So society wants to keep us nice, trimmed down, going to church, supporting boys’ clubs and girls’ clubs and hospitals.

Certainly, those things are all right. The general society wants to keep us just good enough not to be a problem to the police but bad enough not to bother their conscience.

I hear the voice of God calling us to a higher kind of life. The book of Hebrews is an urgent, vibrant, living book that speaks to those who are on the border and says, “Go on over. You can dare to do it.

Go on over.” And it speaks to those who could not quite make up their minds whether they wanted to obey and believe God, and says, ‘You dare obey. You dare believe.”

Whatever causes us to overcome all hindrances is handsomely rewarded when we break through to the glorious sunshine of His blessed presence.

Love Divine, nil Love Excelling by Charles Wesley (1707-1788)

Love divine, all love excelling,
The joy of heaven, to earth, come down;
Fix in us thy humble dwelling;
All thy faithful mercies crown.

Jesus, thou art all compassion,
Pure, unbounded love thou art;
Visit us with thy salvation,
Enter every trembling heart.

Breathe, oh, breathe thy Holy
SpiritInto every troubled breast;
Let us all thy grace inherit;
Let us find thy promised rest;
Take away the love of sinning;
Take our load of guilt away;
End the work of thy beginning;
Bring us to eternal day.

Carry on thy new creation;
Pure and holy may we be;
Let us see our whole salvation
Perfectly secured by thee;
Change from glory into glory,
Till in heaven, we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated by Ronald Knox and Michael Oakley (New York: Sheed and Ward, Inc., 1959).

Striving Towards God’s Presence

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things.

By whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.

Hebrews 1:1-3

In the deep recesses of man’s soul lies an overwhelming yearning toward the Creator. This is a common thread through all humanity, created in the image of God.

Read and Learn More Bible Verses about the Presence of God

Unless and until that desire is fully met, the human soul remains restless, constantly striving for what is ultimately unattainable.

To any discerning Christian, it is easy to see that men and women are in an awful spiritual and moral mess today. A person must know where he is before comprehending where he needs to be.

The solution, however, is not within the scope of human endeavor. The highest ideal or accomplishment of man is to break from spiritual bondage and enter into the presence of God, knowing that you have entered welcomed territory.

Within every human breast rages this desire, driving him forward. Many people confuse the object of that desire and spend his or her entire lives striving for the unobtainable.

The highest accomplishment of humanity is entering the overwhelming presence of God. Nothing else can satiate this burning thirst.

The average person, unable to understand this passion for intimacy with God, fills his life with things, hoping somehow to satisfy his inward longing. He chases that which is exterior, hoping to satisfy that inner thirst, but to no avail.

St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, captured the essence of this desire in his Confessions: “Thou hast created us for Thyself and we are restless until we rest fully in Thee.”

This explains, to a great degree, the spirit of restlessness pervading every generation and every culture—always striving but never coming to the knowledge of the truth of God’s presence.

John the Revelator voices something quite similar: “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Rev. 4:11).

It is God’s great pleasure for us to fully rest in His presence, moment by moment. God created man expressly for the use of His pleasure and fellowship. Nothing in or of this world measures up to the simple pleasure of experiencing the presence of God.

The spirit of restlessness breaking across the sea of humanity testifies to this truth. Our whole purpose as created beings is to utilize our time delighting in the manifest presence of our Creator.

This presence is both intangible and indescribable. Some try explaining it, but only those with a personal, intimate knowledge of God’s presence can truly understand. Some things rise above explanation and human understanding, and diet is one.

Many Christians are filled with good information, but only a few mercy drops fall into their languid soul to satisfy the thirst for God’s presence.

Too many have never burst into the dazzling sunlight of God’s conscious, manifest presence. Or if they perchance have, it is a rare experience and not a continuous delight.

Man’s Striving For Altitude

Intimacy with the Creator separates man from all others of God’s creation. The great passion buried in the breast of every human being created in the image of God is to experience this awesome majesty of His presence.

However, several things stand in the way of man’s striving toward the presence of God in personal, intimate familiarity. The experience of too many people trying to probe the presence of God ends in complete and utter frustration.

Longing to be in His presence and coming into His presence are two entirely different things. As created beings, man longs for the presence of the Creator, but in himself cannot find it.

Consider the eagle, born to fly. A natural yearning within the breast of the young eagle leads sit to mount up on its wings and ascend into the sky with a thousand feet of clean air beneath its wings.

The eagle may, on occasion, walk on the ground or perch in a tree, but everything about him is designed to fly in the air. If our eagle had its wings clipped, preventing him from flying.

He still would have the burning desire to mount up on wings and ascend into the sky. His ability, however, would be so impaired that he could never lift off the ground. He could not be true to his nature.

Such is the plight of humanity. We are born to ascend into the very environment of God’s presence where we belong; but something has clipped our wings, disabling us from responding to the cry from within.

“Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me” (Ps. 42:7). Because man is shut out of the presence of God, he suffers many maladies.

Hindrances To God’s Presence

The greatest hindrance, of course, is the fact that God is unapproachable. Sin has created an unmanageable debt for all humanity.

The good news, however, is that Christ has paid the debt and bridged that gap to God for all. But there are still at least three challenges that stand in man’s way as he strives after God’s presence.

The Moral Bankruptcy Of The Human Soul

The first obstruction is the moral bankruptcy of the human soul. Man’s inevitable striking against the kingdom of God and the moral order of the universe puts him in debt to that moral order and becomes a debt to the great God who created the heavens and earth. This debt must be paid.

What the moral conscience of all men requires and cries out for is a fund of merit sufficient to pay that debt. That’s why every religion tries to establish this fund of merit but without success.

Religion does it through what is referred to as “good works,” resulting in emptiness and a deep-seated sense of guilt that nothing can wash away. But even if such a fund of merit could be achieved, it would not be enough. Pardon must be secured.

What if some lowlife criminal desired to have an audience with the queen of England? Someone with a long-time record of criminal activity desired to stand before the gracious queen and be admitted into her presence.

Such a matter could be arranged because many have so desired and been welcomed there. But something would have to be done before that criminal could be admitted into the presence of the queen.

Nobody could arbitrarily admit a criminal into the queen’s presence—could admit someone who by his previous acts jeopardized the safety of her gracious majesty and all that she symbolizes.

Through the years, many have gone through the legal protocol to prepare them for an audience with the queen. The primary ingredient for entering the queen’s presence would rest on a legal pardon.

Somebody would have to straighten out all the legal issues necessary to grant a full pardon. The debt would have to be paid.

A pardon is a legal act beyond the capabilities of the person being pardoned; it is an outside force putting” to rest the criminal’s past. That would be the first step.

No criminal could capriciously come into the presence of the queen simply because he desired to do so. It would have to be someone who was yielding allegiance, but that would not be enough either.

Even though the government could pardon this: it could strike from the record all criminal counts against him so that there was nothing on the books-—-and restore his citizenship as though he were a freeborn citizen once more, even that would not go far enough.

Now take this example of a criminal standing in the presence of the queen of England and think about our desire to enter the presence of holy God.

The human heart knows that it cannot enter into the presence of God because it has rebelled against God. There must be something done to make it possible for that rebellion to end and be forgiven.

The act of rebellion must be pardoned completely, and the rebel restored to full citizenship in the kingdom of God, to be made a child of the Father.

All of that was done in Christ. But that is still not enough. There is another hindrance.

The Foul Scent Of Sin Upon Us

Let’s return to the example of a criminal wanting an audience with the queen. Although the man has been fully pardoned of his crimes, and his past has been expunged, that is not enough.

Not only must the past be dealt with, but also the present must be attended to. He could not just walk off Skid Row, unshaven and dirty, into the presence of the queen. He would also have to be washed and made fit to stand in the queen’s presence.

This pardoned man is dirty, smelly, and unshaven. Before going to the presence of the queen, he would have to be groomed cleansed, and properly dressed.

If he is to stand in the queen’s presence, his present condition and attire must be in complete conformity to her wishes and demands. She sets the standard, and all who come into her presence must conform to it. She never conforms to their standard.

In like fashion, man cannot enter the presence of God with the foul scent of sin upon him. Although the past has been dealt with, the present condition also must be addressed.

The very presence of sinful thoughts, for example, inhibits our approach to the presence of God. The filth clinging to our robe of self-righteousness repulses the pure, undefiled presence of God.

Not only do we need a change of heart, but we also need a change of garment. Therefore, we must exchange our filthy garments for the pure robe of righteousness. To come into the presence of God, we must conform in every way to His standard.

In light of this standard, some provisions must be made available. Some fountain must be opened in the House of David for sin and uncleanness so that we may not only be forgiven but also cleansed.

The blood of Jesus Christ accomplished this stupendous act! This is what Christianity teaches. This is the witness the Church gives to the world.

Man’s moral conscience, crying for pardon and cleansing before the presence of the great God, has now found it by an event, an act of the eternal Son, who is the image of the invisible God and the firstborn of every creature.

Upholding all things by the Word of His power (see Col. 1:15-17). He turned aside to do this awful act—this awesome, amazing, stupendous act—by Himself. He single-handedly purged our sins. He alone could do it, so He did it alone.

In other things, Jesus Christ willingly accepted help. When He was to be born into the world, He accepted the help of the Virgin Mary, who gave her pure body to God and brought Him into the world—a man born a babe in Bethlehem’s manger.

He wept in her arms, nursed at her breast, was taken care of and fed and loved. He accepted the help of His mother.

He willingly’ accepted help from Joseph, His supposed father, a simple carpenter who worked from sunup to sundown to provide clothing and shelter for his wife and the boy, Jesus.

But in this one area—-the purging of man’s sin—the Son operated alone and single-handedly fulfilled all the requirements for man’s redemption.

Therefore, the foul scent of sin upon man can be washed and cleansed by the blood Jesus Christ shed on the cross. This standard allows us to come boldly into the presence of God.

The Lost Concept Of Majesty

Even those in Christendom have been challenged in their striving after God. Not only our garments but also our attitudes and intentions need divine purification. We must come into His presence in a way that is worthy of Him.

The present generation of Christians has suffered what I call the lost concept of majesty. This has come about by a slow decline, manifesting itself in our depreciation of ourselves.

Those who hold a low value of man have a corresponding low value of God. After all, God created man in His image. When we cease to understand the majestic nature of man, we cease to appreciate the majesty of God. How did we get to this place?

At one time, many believed the earth was the center of the universe and all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. It was a simple earth and easy to explain, because we go by our sight, and by our sight the earth is still, and everything is traveling around it.

Most people believed this until the time of Copernicus and Galileo, who came along in the sixteenth century and taught that the earth is not fixed at all, but in motion around an orbit.

For the most part, people complied with those findings and said, “Then, we’re all wrong about anything being fixed.

We don’t believe in it anymore.” So they stopped believing there was anything fixed in the heavens, or at least that the earth was fixed.

The common thought at the time was, “We’re riding around on Earth’s diurnal course. If the earth is not the center of the world, man is the center of God’s creation.

Surely not only the center but the top of God’s creation.” The accepted belief at the time was that man is at the top of the world; God made him and made him in His image.

In time, Charles Darwin came along and taught that man is not the center, the head, the top, and the final, finished product of the creation. Furthermore, the earth and all that is in it and on it is not a creation at all; it just happens to be here.

It is simply a moving purpose. Man is simply partway up from where he used to be and where he is going to be. A man once moved about in colloidal ooze and crept and sloshed about in the depths of the sea.

Then the sun struck him and he took on an eye and became a mudpuppy. He moved some more, and after the passing of a few more million years, he became a bird. Then after that, he became a monkey, and we are on our way, and here we are now.

However, we are not where we are going and we are not where we have been. We are not the center of anything. We are simply taking off. We are in motion.

About the turn of the twentieth century, or a little before, the world suddenly drew a deep breath and said, “Can it possibly be that we are struggling upward and what used to be called sin is not sin at all? It is something else.

It is simply the residual twitching of the old mudpuppy. The lingering remnants of that which used to be in the man, and little by little, we are purging him out. Look at that baboon, and look at that college professor.

What an amazing difference! Look at him sitting there with a dreamy look on his face while he listens to a Beethoven symphony. See how far he’s come?”

Yes, he certainly has come a long way. See him two nights later when his wife bawls him out and he turns on her, shoots her, stabs her, or walks out on her. He is a human being, too, and not all of his degrees have changed him on any level.

But I believe the Majesty is still in the heavens. This Majesty still sits on His throne before which angels, archangels, seraphim, and cherubim continue to cry, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabbath.”

When Jesus, who was God by Himself, alone purged our sins, He went back and sat down where He had been through the long, long ages—at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens. After He sat down on that right hand, the eternal Son turned to man.

Reclaiming Our Sense Of The Majesty On High

Christian leadership today has done so much to hinder the majestic elements of Christianity. Everything must have some kind of logical, rational explanation.

I readily admit that it verges on the impossible to describe in any degree of adequacy the conscious, manifest presence of God. Any lame attempt on my part will crumble in frustrated disappointment.

The best I possibly can hope is to put forth my personal experience backed up by scriptural exhortation. My part is only to whet the appetite and then trust the Holy Spirit to take it from there.

Many people like their religion in a nice neat formula— something they can do without much effort or thought.

These days everybody has some shortcut to the blessings of God’s presence: “Five easy steps to happiness” or “Ten easy steps to get everything you want from God.”

However, there is no nice neat formula for this. Rather, we need to whet the spiritual appetite for that which it truly craves: the presence of God. I know well that if you can explain it, it certainly is not the majestic presence of God.

Most people, unfortunately, would pursue these pages with a sense of curiosity and soon grow bored and turn aside for the titillation of some new thing.

Becoming fascinated with some exterior trinkets, they soon lose interest in pursuing the presence of God. For those, someone always comes along boasting of some new religious gadget to play with.

The poor, undernourished, immature Christian goes from one religious gadget to another, ending up with an emptiness inside that they cannot comprehend.

This book is a small attempt to fan the flame of holy desire toward God. I hope you will catch the passion and press forward to delight in the conscious, manifest presence of God.

Thomas a Kempis understood this and wrote, “If you are to live an interior life you must learn to enjoy Flis intimacy, unhampered by any interruption from the world outside.”

He expands this thought in his book The Imitation of Christ: “For a man to make real spiritual progress, he must deny himself; a man who has made this renunciation enjoys great freedom and security.”

Unfortunately, the world is too much with us, and it has successfully become entrenched in our inner soul, making it unable to court His presence.

The good news is that the heart of man truly hungers for God’s presence and that all of the great barriers prohibiting that striving after God have been overcome in Jesus Christ.

God Is Present Everywhere by Oliver Holden (1765-1844)

They who seek the throne of grace
Find that throne in every place;

If we live a life of prayer,
God is present everywhere
In our sickness and our health,
In our want, or our wealth,
If we look to God in prayer,
God is present everywhere.

When our earthly comforts fail,
When the woes of life prevail,
’Tis the time for earnest prayer;
God is present everywhere.

Then, my soul, in every strait,
To thy Father come, and wait;
He will answer every prayer:
God is present everywhere.

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated by Ronald Knox and Michael Oakley (New York: Sheed & Ward, Inc., 1959).