Attributes of God (Series 1): God's Omnipresence — A.W. Tozer

God's Omnipresence in Scripture

Let me read some passages from various parts of the Bible. I will speak tonight on God's omnipresence, but with a particular reason for it which I will explain as I go along. King 1 Kings, but will God indeed dwell on the earth?

Behold, the heaven of heavens cannot contain how much less this house that I have built. I have God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off, that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he be not far from any one of us.

For in him we live and move and have our being. I have set the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me.

Those are a few texts. It certainly doesn't exhaust the great wealth of texts dealing with this same topic. Those of you who have been listening to these sermons will know, because you will have noticed, that my method of treating scriptural doctrines is a little bit different from the average man inasmuch as I go back of everything to God himself and show that the teachings of the holy scriptures have their origin in the nature of God.

They are what they are because God is what he is, that these teachings rest upon the character of God and are guaranteed by the changeless attributes of the Lord God Almighty, the Ancient of Days. I have before, some years ago, preached on the omnipresence of God, and I shall only sketch it here to get started.

The Meaning of God's Omnipresence

And I want to explain briefly what omnipresence is and then show what it means in the human experience. And to say that God is omnipresent, and this, of course, is believed by all churches. I am not introducing anything.

This is believed by every church that believes the Bible. It means that God is all-present, that God is close to, for that's what the word means, close to, near to, here. Means that he is close to everywhere.

Means that he is near to everything and everyone. It means that he is here, that is, that he is next to you wherever you may be. And if you send up the querulous question, O God, where art thou? The answer comes back, I am where you are.

I am here, I am next to you, I am close to everywhere. That's what the Bible says. Now there's a reason on the side of this, as well as scripture. If we had only reason and not scripture, it would be dubious.

If we had scripture and no reason, we'd still believe it. But since we have scripture to declare it and reason to shout, it's true, I know it's true, then we may be sure that God is omnipresent, that is, that he is everywhere.

You see, if there were any borders to God, if there was any place where God is not, then that place would mark the confines, the limits of God. And if God had limits, God could not be the infinite God.

Some theologians call the infinitude of God his immensity. But immensity is not quite a big enough word. Immensity simply means that whatever you're talking about is hugely, vastly large. But infinitude means not only that it's hugely, vastly large, in fact, it doesn't mean that at all.

It means that there isn't any way to say that God is large. It means that there is no limits to God anywhere, and that if there were limits to God, and God were very hugely, vastly large, then we could say that he was immense.

But since he is infinite, then we can only say that God has not size at all, and you can't measure God any direction, that God is infinite and perfect. If there was any place that God was not in any line, we could say God comes to here, but doesn't go beyond that, then of course we would have not an infinite God, but a finite God, and if whatever is finite, wherever you have finitude, you have creaturehood.

You wouldn't have God, you would have something else. Now actually, God is equally near to all parts of his universe. You see, we think rightly about God and spiritual things only when we rule out space altogether, when we rule out the space concept.

I listen every Saturday night at 9 .30 to this Professor Posen, who lectures on space, and it's been quite interesting. He was going last night to give the great theory, the latest theory by Einstein, and I eagerly turned it on, I was lying down, eagerly turned it on and woke up just when he was finished.

I fell right off to sleep. That's the first time I've done that. I must have been unusually tired. But he talks a lot about space and about all of having to do with the outworld, out yonder. But you know, when we think about God and spiritual things, we think correctly only when we rule out the space concept altogether, because God, being infinite, does not dwell in space.

He swallows up all space. Now the scripture says, Do not I fill heaven and earth, and that sounds as if God was contained in heaven and earth. But actually, God fills heaven and earth just as the ocean fills a bucket which has been submerged in it a mile down.

The bucket is full of the ocean, but the ocean surrounds the bucket in all directions. So when God says, I fill heaven and earth, he does, but he does not. The heaven and earth is submerged in God, and all space is.

And he says, The heaven of heavens cannot contain me. You see, God is not contained. God contains. And there is the difference. God is not contained, God contains. In him we live and move and have our being.

Distance, Space, and the Presence of God

Now, we talk about God being close to us or far from us, and a problem that I'll speak about tonight and tomorrow night is the problem of distance, the problem of God being far away. You see, we don't think right because we think geographically or astronomically, we think in light years or we think in meters or inches or miles or leagues or something else, when actually we are thinking about God as being spatial, that is, as dwelling in space, which he does not, but contains space, so that space is in God and we never have any problem about God being anywhere, for the fact is, as the texts say, that God is everywhere.

I believe what God says and relieve those who do not believe with the problems. It says, if I ascend up to heaven, art there, if I make my bed in hell, behold, art there. Now, don't ask me to explain it, but let's remember, John Wesley said, don't reject it because you can't understand it.

He makes, if a man made his bed in hell, the omnipresence of God requires that wherever there is anything, the presence of God must be. But why is it that the world thinks of God as being infinitely remote, far beyond the farthest star?

We used to sing a little song when I was a boy, far away beyond the starlit sky, and we have placed God somewhere far out beyond the starlit sky. Now, why? And when the world prays as a rule, they pray without any sense of God's nearness at all, always God is somewhere else, always God is far away.

Why is this? Well, this is the reason that in spiritual things, closeness and likeness are the same thing. Remoteness means dissimilarity. Now, please get that, for if you don't get that, you'll have missed most everything that I want to say tonight.

That when it comes to personality, when it comes to spirits, when it comes to that which is not material, then distance doesn't mean one lonely thing in all the wide world. That is why Jesus could go to the right hand of God the Father and still say to people on earth, I am with you always, because Jesus Christ as God, and God being spirit, can be instantaneously everywhere at the same time, and there is no problem there.

But where men are shut off from God, not because God is spatially far from them, not because he is remote like a far galaxy or star, but because there is a dissimilarity in nature. And when we see, when we think, we project our own human concepts up into spiritual things, and one of the problems of a Bible teacher is to break that down.

Now, I haven't heard very many Bible teachers try to do it. And one of the problems of the Holy Ghost, if he has any problems, is to get his people so spiritualized that they no longer think in material concepts.

We project our human concepts upward or outward. For instance, your friends are the ones who are the nearest to you, and the closer a friend it is, the nearer that person is likely to be. But your enemy wants to put as much space between you and him as possible, and so everything else being equal, that enemy gets as far away as he can.

So we tend to think of our friends as being near to us, and our enemies as being far from us. My friend comes to me and I to him, and we chat in intimate conversation, we're friends. But the enemy stays away, and stays away as far as he can.

Now that's a human concept, and it has to do with material things. Everybody's glad his enemy's a mile away, and he'd be more comfortable if he was two miles away, or three, or ten, or on some other continent.

As the world sees it, the farther away your enemy is, why he's the better off you are, because you think in spatial terms, that is, S-P-A-T-I-L terms, he's way off there, and your friend close. Now, that isn't the way we think when we think about God, it isn't the way we should think, because there isn't any place you could go and not find God.

You take that 139th Psalm, from which I read tonight, why, that psalm tells us plainly enough that there isn't any place where you can go that God isn't. He says, if I say, surely the darkness shall cover me, why, even the night shall be light about me.

Yea, darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day, and the darkness and the light are both the light to thee. There isn't anywhere that we can go, because God knoweth our down-sitting and up-rising, and understands our thoughts afar off.

We do not have the problem of distance or remoteness when we come to God, for what makes this a Christian assembly is that God is here. What makes this a Christian assembly, God is here. So two creatures may be in the same room, and yet be millions of miles apart.

For instance, an ape and an angel, if it were possible to get an angel and an ape in the same room, the same room size of this little choir room here, half of the choir assembles, if you could get an ape and an angel in there, there would be no compatibility, there would be no communion, there would be no understanding, there would be no friendship.

There would be only distance, because the shining angel and the slobbering, chippering ape would be intimately, to use the word intimately carelessly, intimately removed from each other, even though they were in the same room, they are far, far distant.

For you see, when we come to human, or when we come to spirit, when we come to anything that is intellectual or spiritual or of the soul, space and matter and weight and time have no meaning at all. That is why I can stand and smile at all the space boys and all of those who tell us that if you took a foot rule and started shooting it like an arrow and speeded it up to 186 ,000 miles a second, it would lose its length and would not have any length at all, it would be lengthless.

Do you know that? Well, he knows it now, that is what they tell us, that that's what would happen. Well, that's supposed to stun you and knock you for a loop, and you're supposed to walk around dizzy and quit praying.

I don't, brother, because I don't think in spatial terms, and I don't think in material terms, nor in speed or distance, because God being spirit is right here, and he'll never be any further away, and he can't get any nearer than he is right now.

Sin, Dissimilarity, and Alienation from God

But you see, the reason that there's that sense of far awayness, that sense that God is remote, is the dissimilarity between moral characters. God and man are dissimilar now. God made man in his image, but man sinned and so became unlike God in his moral nature.

And because he's unlike God, communion is broken. Just as two men, enemies, hate each other, they're enemies and they're separated in a part even though they're for a moment forced to be together. Two brothers who hate each other may come to the funeral of their father, and yet they will stand at that coffin and be miles apart, because there is dissimilarity within them.

There's alienation there. And that is exactly what the Bible calls it. That moral incompatibility between God and man, that remoteness, that's what gives that sense of distance. God is not far away, as I've explained, but he seems to be far away spatially, because he is far away in character.

He's unlike man, because man has sinned and God is holy. And the Bible has, for this moral incompatibility, this spiritual unlikeness between man and God, the Bible has a word. It's the word alienation.

Now, let me read to you what it is that gives to the world that sense of God being far away beyond the starlit sky. You who were dead in trespasses and sins, wherein in time past you walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience, among whom also we had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath even as others.

Then in the fourth chapter we read, I say therefore and testify that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their minds, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts, who, being past feeling, have given themselves over unto lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness.

Now let's take our Lord Jesus Christ, who is God incarnated and is in character all that God is, perfectly, altogether, exactly what God is. Does this describe Jesus walking in the vanity of his mind?

No, that describes the sinner, the alienated sinner. Having his understanding darkened, does that describe the glorious Son of God, with ignorance in him, blind in his heart, past feeling, given over to lasciviousness, walked in uncleanness, greediness, does that describe Jesus?

It describes exactly the opposite of Jesus. It shows that this sinner, wherever he is, Roman, Greek, whatever he is, this sinner is so dissimilar to God that the distance is a distance of character. It is not a spatial distance, it's not a distance of space.

God is not, say, 186 ,000 light-years away from a sinner, he is not one inch away from a sinner, he is yet far from the sinner. Am I contradicting myself? No, not at all. Since God contains all space, and being omnipresent according to all theologians of every denomination anywhere, since God is omnipresent close to, next to, here, anywhere, everywhere, here, then the distance is that of character and not that of space.

So that when the sinner prays, O God, save me and forgive me for Jesus' sake, he does not call God down from his high interior, but God is there, there, there! And he knows at that moment he can know that God is there.

But you say it's dissimilarity of character that makes the difference. Suppose there was a very, very godly man and a very licentious, abandoned, evil man, and they were forced, neither one of them would bend an inch, the holy man would not bend an inch toward sin, and the sinner would not even allow the holy man to talk to him.

But they were forced to sit together on a journey. What could they talk about? They'd have to find some common ground, and it might be the landscape or the pretty tree there or something, but they could never have fellowship.

They might, if the sinner would be listening to the urge and appeal of the good man, but as long as the sinner shut himself off and said, You can't talk to me about God, now keep still, there would be no communion.

They would be miles apart, even though they were the same nationality, approximately the same age, and traveling in the same vehicle. They would still be miles apart. So it is with God and man. God is away from man, and man is away from God, and that's why the world searches after God.

If happily they might find him, but don't find him, because God and man are dissimilar in their moral natures. God is one thing in perfect holiness, man is another in perfect iniquity, and the two can never meet, and that's why God seems so far away.

Adam, Jonah, and Peter: Human Flight from God's Presence

Look at that man, Adam. When Adam sinned, he ran and hid himself from the presence of God. I heard a Jewish rabbi talking the other night on the radio while he was introducing some Jewish hymns, which I like to hear, some of the old Jewish hymns.

He said that once a Jewish rabbi had been in jail. He was a very godly man, and he was in jail, and he said that his jailer had been interested in the old man who prayed a lot and read his Bible a lot, and he said, he went to the rabbi and said, Rabbi, I've got a question I'd like to ask you, a theological question out of your own Bible.

It's that about God knowing everything. Do you believe God knows everything? Oh, certainly, said the rabbi. Well, how is it then that God said, Adam, where art thou? If God knew where he was, why did he ask?

Well, the rabbi said, son, that's not that hard. He said, God said, Adam, where art thou? Not that he didn't know where Adam was, but Adam didn't know where he was. And he said, the question was, ask of Adam, Adam, you don't know where you are.

Adam, where are you, he said, because Adam was lost, not God. And God knew well where Adam was, but Adam didn't know where he was, yet his Adam didn't know where Adam was. Adam was alienated from God, and I think the old rabbi had the explanation all right.

God knew where he was. God said, I will go down now and see. That didn't mean that God was coming down to get information like a newspaper man. The great God knows everything, one instant, perfect act.

And yet he comes down among us and acts like us, and said, I'll go down and see. And there was Jonah. When Jonah refused to obey God and broke off and alienated his heart, he got in a ship and lit out from the presence of God.

Why? He thought he could get away from God. How foolish of a Jew. How foolish of a Jew who had been reading the Old Testament to think that he could get away from God. Then there was Peter. When Peter sinned, Peter knelt down and said, Depart from me, get away from me, I am a sinful man, O Lord.

The Difference Between God's Presence and Manifest Presence

It is the heart that puts distance between us and God. It is not stars and satellites and moons. We must not think of God as being thus far away, for the reason that God does not dwell in space, and the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, but he contains the heaven of heavens.

Therefore, God is just as near to you now, nearer than you are to yourself, nearer than your thoughts. But the sinner yet is far from God. He isn't far from God, and yet he is far from God. What do I mean?

I mean that God is not away like a Roman God up on a holy mountain, far away, two miles, ten miles, a hundred miles, a thousand miles away. No. God is not away that way, but God is far away in another way.

He is far away in his holy unlikeness to everything sinful. He is far away in the sense of alienation and enmity, and the natural man is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be, and he cannot please God.

He cannot please God, and God and man are alienated. This is the terrible world, the world, this terrible world, alienation. Not alienation or distance in space, but moral dissimilarity. And that's why there's got to be a place to put those who refuse to be like God or become like God, because God cannot in his holy heaven, for heaven is a place as well as a state, God cannot in his holy heaven have beings that are morally dissimilar to himself.

But we must be like him to enter there, and we shall see him and shall be like him, says the Holy Ghost according to 1 John 1 .3. Now the bliss of all moral creatures is the presence of God. Our fathers called it the vision beatific, the presence of God is the bliss of all moral creatures, just as the shining of the sun is the bliss of all creatures that love the sun.

All the creatures that love the sun come out and come to the surface and fly or crawl or swim when the sun returns, so the presence of that holy God is the bliss of all moral creatures, and the absence of it is the terror and the grief and the sorrow of all fallen creatures.

But you know, I am not talking about God's presence, but God's manifest presence. You see, there's a vast difference between God's presence and God's manifest presence. The presence of God is even in hell, the Holy Ghost says in the 139th Psalm, but the manifest presence of God is only in heaven and where good souls are.

So therefore a man can walk around on the earth and be so close to God that he could whisper and God will hear his whisper, and yet have such a sense of alienation and remoteness that he'll go to the river and commit suicide, thinking there's no God in the universe anywhere.

Entertainment as Escape from Alienation

This accounts for man's busy activities, you see. That accounts for practically all of the entertainment there is in the world. That accounts for it, people. People do all sorts of things because they invent every sort of instrument and every sort of entertainment because they can't live with themselves knowing they're alienated from God, knowing that there is a moral dissimilarity that shall forever and forever keep a sense of all but infinite remoteness between their soul and the God who is their life and their sunshine.

And hell, if there were no fire in hell and no worm that never dies, hell would be hell enough because moral creatures are cut off forever from the sunshine of God's face. And if there were no golden streets and no jasper walls and no angels and no harps and no living creatures and no elders and no sea of glass, heaven would be heaven enough because we shall see his face and his name shall be on our foreheads.

It is the presence of God, the manifest conscious presence of God, that makes heaven heaven. And it is the refusal of God ever to manifest his presence in hell or on earth or anywhere where men are not good men or not wanting to be good men that makes hell what it is and makes the world what it is.

If God could only manifest himself to men on the earth, all over the earth, every night club would be emptied or would turn into a happy prayer meeting. And every house of ill fame would be emptied in five minutes, and everyone with deep repentance and sorrow of heart would be down on their knees before God asking for forgiveness and weeping tears of happiness, because it is the presence of God that gives bliss to moral creatures and the absence of God that brings everlasting woe to moral creatures.

Well, you see, men want a bright day without the sun. They deny the sun and still want a bright day, so they invent every kind of light imaginable and whirl all kind of Roman candles over their heads to get a little light.

And we call that entertainment, and we call that the theater, and all the rest. Well, that helps people to forget that they are without God. But now somebody says, but Mr. Tozer, if man's nature is dissimilar to God's, and that's the remoteness, that's the gulf fixed, that's the everlasting unbridgeable gulf, and the Ethiopian cannot change his skin or the lepers his spots, and a man born in sin can't get out of it, and God will never change, and man can't change himself, how then can God and the human race ever come together?

Reconciliation Through the God-Man

Oh, the answer is, my friend, that the dissimilarities can be reconciled only by one who is both God and man. The dissimilarity can be reconciled. The man cannot educate himself into a likeness of God, and he cannot cultivate himself into a likeness of God.

He can begin to go to art galleries and read Shakespeare and visit the opening nights at the opera, and begin to drop his Rs and open his As and sound very, very, very cultured. And when it's all over, he's still inwardly what he was before, walking in the vanity of his mind, blinded by the ignorance that is within him, cut off from the life of God without hope and without God in the world, man can't right himself.

Religions have tried it, philosophies have tried it, school systems have tried it, police try it, and we try everywhere to bring a similarity that God will recognize so that instead of our having that far sense of infinite remoteness, we can say, surely God is in this place.

But we can't get it. We can't. We can't. Religions can't. How can it be done? Oh, my brother, it says in 2 Corinthians 5, God was in Christ reconciling. God was in Christ reconciling. Now, how can God reconcile the dissimilar nature of man to his own?

You see, reconciliation can be done in two ways. Reconciliation can be accomplished by the two parties who are alienated, compromising and thus getting together. If this man and I had four propositions that were keeping us apart, we might get together and pray and say, now, brother, I'd say, Brother Knighton, I don't want to be out of friendship with you, and therefore I'll make a concession on this.

And he'd say, well, all right, then I'll make a concession on this. Well, I'd say, all right, then I'll make one on this, and he'd say, I'll make one on this. And so by his moving over this way halfway and my moving this way halfway, we'd be reconciled.

But how can God? How can God say to the sinner, I'll move over halfway, you're blind, and I'll move over and be half-blind, and you move over and be half-blind, you're dead, and I'll move over and be half-dead, and you move over and be half-dead, and thus by God coming halfway and compromising himself, he and man could be reconciled.

To do that, God would have to void his Godhead and cease to be God. And I'd rather go to hell than go to a heaven presided over by a God who would compromise with sin. And I believe every true man and woman would, for we want God to be the holy God that he is and remain the holy God that he is.

And so God can never say, I'll go halfway. You come halfway over and I'll come halfway over. It didn't work that way, and it doesn't work that way. The father stayed at home and the prodigal came all the way back.

The prodigal and his father did not meet halfway to the far country. The boy came clear back where he belonged, and so the sinner in his repentance comes all the way back to God and God doesn't move from his holy position of infinite holiness, righteousness, and loveliness, world without end.

God never compromises and comes halfway down. God stays the God that he is. This is the God we adore, our faithful and changeable friend whose love is as great as his power and knows neither limit nor end.

And we don't want God to compromise. We don't want God to wink at our iniquity. We want God to do something about it. What did he do about it? He came down and became flesh and became both God and man, sin, sin accepted, in order that by his death he might remove everything out of the way so that now man can come back.

Before, he couldn't come back, or he couldn't come back if Christ had not come and died. But now because he came and died, he removed every moral obstacle out of the way so man can come home. Now Peter, approaching it from another direction, says in 2 Peter 1, 4, that God has left us the promises of the gospel, that by these we might be partaker of the divine nature.

What does that mean? It means that when the sinner comes home, repents and believes on Christ savingly, that God implants in the heart of that previous sinner some of his own nature. And then the nature of God in God and the nature of God in the sinner are no longer dissimilar, but now they are one.

And the sinner is home and the dissimilarity is gone and the unlikeness removed. And the nature of God in man makes it morally proper that man and God should have fellowship. God, without compromising himself in any way, now receives the returning sinner, puts a deposit of his own nature and life in that sinner.

My friend, don't you see that's what the new birth is? Don't you see it's not joining? Don't you see it's not being baptized? Don't you see it's not quitting this or that bad habit, though everybody will quit their bad habits, but it's an implantation of divine life.

Now let me go back to my own rather awkward illustration, grotesque illustration, I will admit. But if it gets an idea across, I don't want to apologize. Let's go back to this ape and this angel that are out in the side room there, staring at each other.

The ape and the angel, there's no getting them together, how could you do it if the great God Almighty could take from the angel that glorious celestial nature that is his and deposit it in the ape? The ape would leap to his feet and shake hands with the angel and call him by name because similarity would instantly be there.

But as long as one has the nature of an ape and the other of an angel, there can be nothing but everlasting dissimilarity. And so the world with all of its money and all of its culture and all of its education and all of its science and all of its philosophy is still a moral ape.

And the Bible has said so, and the holy God cannot compromise himself to fellowship and neither can that man understand God, for the natural man cannot understand God and there can be no fellowship. But God moved in Christ and died on a cross and so took the obstacles away, I repeat, and now by the new birth he gives some of his own delightful, divine nature to the sinner.

And the sinner looks up and says, Abba, hallelujah, for the first time in his life, now he's converted. You know that's what happened to Jacob. Everybody will admit that Jacob was converted there at the ladder and was filled with the Holy Ghost or whatever you want to call it there at Jabbok, two works of grace there for Jacob.

And you that don't believe in it will have a hard time explaining Jacob. But anyway, here was Jacob. Well, he was an old sinner, was crooked, and he had a name, Jacob, which meant it's a planter, he was crooked.

And Jacob was there, oh, how does it go, and Jacob went out from Beersheba and went toward Haran and he lighted upon a certain place and tarried there all night because the sun did set. And he took the stones of that place and put them for his pillows and lay down in that place to sleep.

And while he slept he saw a ladder set up on the earth and God was above it and the angels ascending or descending upon it. And God and Jacob met and Jacob believed in his God and he awoke. And you know what he said?

He said, this is the gate of heaven. And I didn't know it. It was the gate of heaven when he lay down and it wasn't anymore the gate of heaven when he awoke. But he said, I didn't know it. The presence of God had been there all the time, but now, by a work of God, he got the conscious presence of God.

And that's why a sinner who is soundly converted, soundly born anew, who has a conscious transplantation of the divine nature into his heart in faith in Jesus Christ, why he is likely to be explosively happy, he says with Jacob, why this is the gate of heaven.

God's in this place and I didn't know it. What's been restored to him? Not the presence of God, but the conscious presence of God. What makes heaven heaven? The unhindered, unsullied presence of God. What makes hell hell?

The absence of a consciousness of the presence of God. That's the difference between a prayer meeting and a dance hall. The omnipresent God fills heaven and earth, contains heaven and earth, and is present everywhere.

But in the prayer meeting, some little old lady kneels and says, oh, Jesus, where two or three are gathered, I am there in the midst. God is there. In the dance hall, they'd be embarrassed if the presence of God were to be manifested.

That's why conversions are such milk-and-water things these days, such poor, shoddy, ragged things these days. How we pick them out of their shell, how we try by rubbing their nose in red-letter texts to make them think they are converted.

They have not had an implantation of the divine life, there is no similarity, and therefore God and man do not meet in the bush, but wherever God and man meet, there is the joyous rebound of the human spirit, similarities restored, and instead of God being a million light years away, the man can hardly believe his own heart when he cries, oh, God's in this place, and I didn't know it.

Ah, for some of the old conversions again. I have not seen too many of that kind, but I have seen a few, conversions where a man would kneel in bursts of tears and agony, confess his sins to God, believe on Jesus Christ, and get to his feet with his light on his face, and walk around shaking hands with everybody, keeping back the tears the best he could, and smiling through the tears he couldn't keep back.