If God Is Everywhere, Why Is He So Hard To Find?

On the 12th of April 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to ever travel into outer space. Legend has it that as Yuri peered out the tiny window of his space capsule and looked around, he uttered the now infamous words, “I do not see God anywhere.”

Although Yuri’s search for God was far from exhaustive (I mean, he only traveled a few hundred kilometers from the earth), I think he touched on a question that bothers us all. Don’t pretend like you haven’t asked it. I know I have. It’s the question, “Where is God?” And if nobody can answer the question, then it is easy to see why many people would decide the answer to this question is “Nowhere” and choose to deny his existence altogether.

Churches teach that God is omnipresent — that means God is everywhere. The Bible says that if we were to go up to the heavens or the depths of the oceans, or even under the earth, God is there. God is the one who holds all of creation together, we are told.

Many Old Testament heroes certainly seem to physically see and hear God, walk with him and talk to him. In the New Testament, Paul says that in him, we live and move and have our being. Scripture declares that God is unmissable. He promises his presence with us wherever we go. In fact, he promises that he will never leave us or forsake us.

But that’s not my experience.

Is God Missing In Action?

If God is as the Bible describes him, he surely shouldn’t be that hard to find. But, let’s be honest. Most of the time, God seems to be missing in action, and all of us have wrestled with the idea that the God who is everywhere often seems impossibly hard to locate.

It evokes a troubling question. How can God be both everywhere-present and yet so intangible that we don’t see, hear or feel him for much of our lives? How could we follow a God that says he is here with us when it often feels like he is nowhere to be found? It’s a fair question.

Does it have an answer, though?

There is no easy answer to the question, so stick with me, and I’ll do my best. If there is one character in the Bible who can help us explain this paradox — the simultaneous presence and distance of God — it is Moses. Let me explain.

The Moses Crisis

Moses grew up living in the tension of having two identities. On the one hand, he had his unique Jewish heritage. On the other hand, he had his royal Egyptian status. One day, this tension got the better of him and, after killing an abusive Egyptian slave driver, he was forced to run away from Egypt into the wilderness where he started a new life as a shepherd — that is, until God called him to go back to Egypt to rescue the Israelites from their slavery.

This occurred on an ordinary day — where Moses is tending to his sheep — when he suddenly notices an extraordinary bush fire. This story is found in Exodus 3:1–9:

“Moses was shepherding the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. He led the flock to the west end of the wilderness and came to the mountain of God, Horeb.

The angel of GOD appeared to him in flames of fire blazing out of the middle of a bush. He looked. The bush was blazing away but it didn’t burn up. Moses said, “What’s going on here? I can’t believe this! Amazing! Why doesn’t the bush burn up?”

GOD saw that he had stopped to look. God called to him from out of the bush, “Moses! Moses!” He said, “Yes? I’m right here!” God said, “Don’t come any closer. Remove your sandals from your feet. You’re standing on holy ground.”

Then he said, “I am the God of your father: The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” Moses hid his face, afraid to look at God. GOD said, “I’ve taken a good, long look at the affliction of my people in Egypt. I’ve heard their cries for deliverance from their slave masters; I know all about their pain. And now I have come down to help them, pry them loose from the grip of Egypt, get them out of that country and bring them to a good land with wide-open spaces, a land lush with milk and honey.”

Image by Traolách Conboy on Unsplash

Come Close and Stay Back!

What I want you to notice about this section of the Bible is how it highlights the problem. First, God calls Moses over but then tells him to keep his distance. “Come close, Moses — but not too close,” God says.

We are left with a mystery. If God is everywhere, why would he appear in a bush? If God is everywhere, is everywhere holy ground, should we walk around barefoot all the time? Should we come close to God or stand back from God? There is a tension between the closeness and distance of God, and it keeps showing up in Moses’s life.

Later on, after Moses has led the people out of Egypt, Moses is called up to the mountain again to meet God, but the rest of God’s people are warned not to approach. God goes to all the effort of liberating his people from Egyptian slavery but then refuses to allow them into his presence. God calls them out of slavery and then holds them back, and Moses alone goes up to be with God.

You could understand the people saying, “Where is God now? He performed all these wonders and signs back in Egypt, and now we can’t see him. Why can’t we see him? Back then, we saw all these miracles, and now he seems to be gone!” Have you ever thought like that? Remember when God did this or that, but where is he now?

Then, later again, God wants Moses to build a Tabernacle, a special tent in which God’s presence would dwell. But, then God instructs Moses to put the tent outside of the camp away from where everyone is living. Surely, you’d think the tabernacle should sit right in the middle of town — but it’s not. It’s set apart from the people.

Not only that, this giant tent is divided up into different zones, and the presence of God dwells only in the very middle zone, separated from everyone. No one was allowed in there except one priest, once a year. I don’t get it. God calls Moses to set up a visual reminder of his presence among them but then restricts their access. It’s like God is there, but you can’t see him!

Why does he need to live in a tent? Or a bush? When he’s in the tent, does he stop being everywhere else? Or is he in the tent and everywhere else at the same time? The people feel a gap — a dissonance between the closeness and the distance of God. We still feel it today.

The Gap Between Us and God

Renowned preacher Tim Keller in his book on prayer, explains that all ancient lands and cultures had temples because human beings once knew innately that there was a gap between humans and the divine. God is great, and we are small — God is perfect, and we are flawed. Temples were places where an effort was made to bridge that gap. Sacrifices and offerings were made, and rituals were observed by professional ‘mediators’ (priests) who sought to bring the remote divinity near. All such efforts were understood to be partial and fragmented.

Aristotle, for example, said that while it might be possible to appease the gods, actual intimate friendship with a god was impossible. The philosopher reasoned that friendship requires that both parties share much in common as equals. They must be alike. Since God is infinitely greater than human beings, the possibility of friendship ceases. No religion ever claimed that the gap would be closed — that was until Christ came along.

According to the Bible, Jesus Christ is the ultimate mediator and priest to end all priests (Heb 4:14–15). He eliminates the gap so that we can know God as a friend (cf. Ex 33:11). It is because the Son of God was “made like us — fully human in every way” — we can “approach God’s throne of grace with confidence” (Heb 4:15–16).
Aristotle — indeed, most other philosophers and religious teachers of the world — would find this claim outrageous: Through Jesus, God can be our intimate friend because God became like us, equally mortal and subject to suffering and death.

Image by Shutterstock.com

Back to the Original Question

This brings us back to the original question, doesn’t it? If God was once distant, but through Jesus, he came close, and because of this, we can supposedly be intimate friends with God, why can’t we see him, come near to him, or feel him or find him most of the time? This is the tension we all feel. Moses felt it. The Israelites felt it. So how do we explain it?

There are two ancient theological terms that help us understand this dilemma. The first term is “immanence.” The second term is “transcendence.” Stick with me here, and you’ll see why these two terms are important and how they help explain this paradox.

First, what do we mean when we talk about immanence? Well, the Bible teaches us that God is present everywhere — that there is no place where God is out of reach and no time when God is off duty. This is what we mean by the immanence of God. When something is imminent, it is upon us now. When we talk about the immanence of God, we are saying that He is close by, available to each of us, around us, present in time and space, and permeating all of creation.

However, God is not to be confused with his creation. God may permeate everything, but God is not the same as everything. God is also distinct, separate, holy, or, to use the technical term: He is transcendent. Transcendent means higher, separate, and uncontainable.

God is both immanent and transcendent. He is both present with and distinct from his creation. This explains how he can be in a burning bush and still be everywhere, how he can be in a tent, and still everywhere, and how he can live inside of you and still be everywhere. He is both with us and distinct from us simultaneously; Immanent and transcendent at the same time.

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The challenge for believers is to learn to be comfortable with the tension that God is both here right now and separate from us. People misunderstand God when they cannot hold the balance and live in the tension of God being both immanent and transcendent at the same time. If you focus on one over the other, you can run into problems. In fact, if you focus on one over the other, there are at least three issues you can run into. Let’s take a look at them.

The Problem of Focusing on God’s Closeness

Let’s say you only focus on God’s immanence — the fact that God is close by — to the exclusion of God’s transcendence (his separateness). How would that lead to an unbalanced view of God? There are three ways that can happen:

Mistaking Creation for the Creator

If we over-emphasize the immanence of God — the idea that God is in all things present — we can begin to confuse creation with the Creator, we can start to look for God in nature. Famous American Writer Frank Lloyd Wright said, “I believe in God, only I spell it nature.” But God isn’t nature, Frank. It makes sense that we should feel a deep connection to nature because God created us, and God created nature. So, we should worship our creator, alongside nature.

Over-sentimentalizing God

The second problem we can run into if we overemphasize God’s immanence is that we can fall into the trap of over-sentimentalizing God or, in other words, fall into “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” theology.

Don’t get me wrong; the Bible is full of pictures of God that describe him as a faithful friend, a genuine helper, the lover of our souls. It uses heaps of affectionate and personal language to describe how God relates to us. But, the problem with only focusing on this aspect of God is that we can bring God down to our level. When we romanticize God, it won’t be long before we start expecting God to deliver.

I don’t know about you, but when I was looking for a girlfriend — before I was married, that is — I had certain expectations and conditions. There is a danger in relating to God like that. We can create a God in our own minds who is there to build up our self-esteem, meet our needs, deliver our dreams, make our lives easier, make us more secure. And when God does not seem to provide these things, we end up asking, “Where is the God that I ordered?”

Misunderstand the Will of God

This leads us to the third problem we can run into if we overemphasize the immanence of God. It can lead us to misunderstand the will of God. If God is only my personal God, we wonder what God is up to when he doesn’t comply with our demands and do things in our time. Theologian David Wells says, “A God who is merely there to satisfy our needs has no authority to compel and will soon begin to bore us.” In reality, unless we understand that God is also distinct from us, we will never understand that his will is also distinct from our will. A lot of people just assume that God wants what you want.

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The Problem of Focusing on God’s Distance

If we focus only on his closeness, we can see that we can run into some problems. Equally, there are dangers if you focus on God’s transcendence — the fact that God is higher, separate, holy, distinct.

God is Uninvolved

The first problem we can run into if you only focus on God’s transcendence is you can come to believe that God is uninvolved and not really interested in your day-to-day life. Basically, you believe that God made the world and pushed it out into the vast cosmos to fend for itself. And sure, he might look in on us from time to time and smile at us, especially if we do the right things, but for the most part, we are on our own, doing our own thing with little involvement from God.

In a recent study in the US, exploring the beliefs of thousands of 21st-century teenagers, it was found that churches are full of young people who were ‘almost Christian’ in their beliefs. The report summarized the belief system of most young people surveyed not as Christianity but something called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

The word moralistic is used because most young people believe that acceptance by God is through doing good things to earn his favor. The word Therapeutic is used because most young people believe that the primary goal of life is personal happiness. And Deism is used because, while God does not need to be particularly involved in someone’s life, he is useful to have around when there is a problem to be solved.

Herein lies the problem, if we focus on the transcendence of God, we can assume that God is some distant higher power who has little interest in the normal aspects of our lives. He’s out there somewhere, and maybe he can help me if I get stuck. He isn’t interested the rest of the time, and neither am I.

God is Like a Time-Traveler

The second problem we can run into if we focus on the transcendence of God is what Krish Kandiah, in his book, Paradoxology, describes as viewing God like a time-traveler who has been warned not to touch anything for fear of the repercussions. For example, if I pray for a nice sunny day, am I depriving some farmer of having enough rain for his crops? If I am running late for the bus and I pray and ask God to make the bus run late so that I can catch it, could this prevent some other guy from meeting their future wife, whose child was destined to be the next Prime Minister of Kenya?

We might believe that God might be close enough to actually do something, but we act as though God were prevented from doing so by the laws of physics or something. Therefore, God is a powerless force, unable to intervene, and so what’s the point of even praying? The God that many people believe exists is one that can’t actually effect any change in our world.

God Doesn’t Want to Come Close

The third problem we can run into if we focus on the transcendence of God is that we can come to believe that not only is God unable to intervene, he is simply unwilling to do so. Because we don’t see him doing things all the time, we presume that he merely doesn’t want to. He is like a neglectful parent, refusing to help. Obviously, this leads to a lack of intimacy and ultimately a lack of respect for God. Sometimes we can presume that God doesn’t step in because of our lousy and sinful nature. This line of thinking can even result in a kind of self-loathing: “If only I were more righteous, maybe God would be willing to step in!”

A Balanced Approach

We can see the danger in overemphasizing one aspect of God’s nature over the other. How do we understand God in relationship to his universe? We need to learn to have a balanced view of God’s immanence and God’s transcendence because the truth about God is actually found in the tension in the middle.

Just as software is present in every computer but distinct from the hardware, God is more than his universe. God is both physically present and morally distinct. He comes to draw alongside us, wanting to live among his people, but he also tells us to stand back from his perfect glory because he knows that it would destroy us.

Back to Moses. I think it was no accident that God appeared to Moses as a flame. The movement of the flame — the colors, the beauty — it’s captivating, and it draws us in, yet, the heat of the flame pushes us away. It is for our protection that he keeps us away, but it is for our salvation that he comes close.

For the time being, we live in the tension. There is no escaping the apparent absence of our everywhere-present God. Sometimes God feels incredibly close, and sometimes we wish he felt closer. That might not be very satisfying to you, but both stages are essential for our spiritual growth and health. At the end of the day, you will never be able to call yourself a person of faith until you can live with mystery and paradox, and become comfortable with not knowing the answer.

So, where is God? He is here right now, both transcendent and immanent, and he invites you to trust him.

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