None Greater (part 11)

All right, so this week in the book, in None Greater by Matthew Barrett, The Undomesticated Attributes of God, we are starting a study into the omnis, omnipresence. This week, next week, it'll be omnipotence, omniscience, omnisapience, which is a little bit less common, I guess.

You know, usually, I always taught my kids about the three omnis, and then thanks to Barrett, I found out that I've been wrong all these years, but what are you going to do? So we're going to start with omnipresence this week.

Obviously, this is an attribute that we've heard about before, right? This is something that it's kind of, it's more in the orthodox understanding of the attributes of God, not this aseity, aseity stuff, and all these other weird words.

So who can define omnipresence for me? Look at all those hands, Josh. God is everywhere present, okay? Anybody want to expand on that, alter that, adjust that? I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just asking.

This thing's going down. Go ahead, Corey. God is always everywhere. Okay, coming from the one who just taught on the timeless eternity of God, imagine that. So I found this definition, which I really like, for a couple reasons, and we'll kind of, we'll look back on it a few times, where it says, from Baker's Encyclopedia, that omnipresence is an aspect of God's infinity in which he transcends the limitations of space and is present in all places at all times.

An aspect of God's infinity, by the way, chapter one on your, or question one on your worksheet, an aspect of God's infinity in which he transcends the limitations of space and is present in all places at all times.

I'm not grading you, you don't have to write it exactly, so if you've, you know, missed a conjunction or something, take it up, schoolhouse rocks. So this, it goes beyond Josh's definition of God is everywhere, right?

It even, to a degree, goes beyond Corey's adjusted and still accurate definition of God is always everywhere, right? And it gets to the root of the omnipresence of God. Unsurprisingly, all of God's attributes are related, so we're going to touch on a couple of different things.

There's a whole section in this chapter about the relationship between God's omnipresence and God's omnipotence, but as I've already said, we're going to talk about omnipotence next week, so we'll touch on it a little bit, we're not really going to dig into it.

Omnipresence and Solomon’s Temple

Will someone read some scripture for me? First Kings, chapter 8, verses 12 and 13, and then someone else, verse 27. Now, this isn't like a conversation between two people where they're disagreeing on something, right?

This is Solomon dialoguing with himself, and in this span of, you know, 15 verses, he says, oh, well, you know, the Lord has said that he would dwell in Thich Nhat Hanh, I built you a house, and then he's like, wait a minute, what good is this house?

This house cannot contain you, this house cannot contain him, right? So in this passage, without saying it directly, Solomon is acknowledging some of the truths about God and about his presence. So, we know chronologically, First Kings comes 750 or so years after the book of Exodus, right?

Book of Exodus, the Levitical priesthood has been established, we have this idea of who the Levitical priests are, the idea of God's presence on earth is something that has clearly been seen, right? You know, we see God residing with the nation of Israel as a pillar of smoke, pillar of fire, we certainly see a lot of examples of God showing himself to Moses, right?

These are physical things that we have a little bit of a glimpse to, so some of these ideas we certainly see, and so it kind of makes sense that Solomon would come to this and say, oh, well, there's a, you know, we're going to build a temple for God, right?

We're going to build a temple, a place where he can be, a place where he can dwell, but Solomon does, later on in that, in this chapter, and presumably some point before that in his life, rightly recognize that although God may reside, at least in some way, in the temple, the temple cannot contain him.

Okay, Barrett writes, and this is something that we should keep in mind, especially as we talk about this stuff, that it is never safe to assume that the manifestation of his presence, of God's presence, at any one place, to any one person, is the, listen, containment of his being to that place.

Okay, that has long-reaching effects as we look at the entire corpus of scripture. So, having established that nothing on earth can contain God, let's talk about what God is and is not for a minute. So, remember our definition, our definition of omnipresence?

It says that God's omnipresence is an aspect of what? His infinity, infinity. God's omnipresence is an aspect of God's infinity in which he transcends the limitations of space and is present in all places at all times.

So, it's not like a state that you enter, that God would enter into. It's not like God was God and then God became omnipresent, right? It's tied to his nature. This thing is killing me. It's tied to his nature, right?

It is part of who he is, and when we talk about the essence of God, and, you know, we're going to get into things like the simplicity of God, which we talked about before. When we talk about all these things, God's omnipresence is necessarily tied to that.

Barrett describes this omnipresence with a word that, unless you read a lot of, like, I don't know, fantasy books or play fantasy games or something, you don't really use this word in our modern vernacular, and that's the word incorporeal.

Okay, Dave's here. Here we go. What does the word incorporeal mean? Not having a body, exactly. All right, we're quick on the uptake today. I like it. So, God, in his essence of omnipresence, is incorporeal.

I promise we'll get to Jesus. I promise. Dan's like, oh, I have so many questions. Every time he looks up with that wry grin on his face, I'm like, all right. So, let's develop this a little bit further.

Everything on earth has body, right? Physical things have a body, like people, animals, even plants. I struggle with, like, what's the word to use, like physical things? Like, gas is a physical thing, but I'm not talking about gas here.

I'm talking about, like, nouns, person, place, or thing kind of stuff, right? People have a body. Animals have a body. Plants have a body, right? But things like liquids, nonspecific liquids, gases, they have body to them, right?

I mean, you know the difference between these two things. Like, I had coffee this morning. I had 2 milk in the coffee. Yeah, I don't, I didn't put the milk in the coffee, so. But if I had skim milk in the coffee, gross, I know, I know.

Why? Why even do that? If I had skim milk in the coffee, or if I had heavy cream in the coffee, right, the body would be different. Like, the texture, the mouth feel, right, would be different. It's not, like, a taste thing, by the way.

Just don't drink heavy, like, heavy, come on. Heavy cream is, like, for baking and cooking, and that's it. Do you really put heavy cream in your coffee? That's desperate times, man. You mix that with that skim milk, I guess, but.

I guess that is what half and half is. Like, I like everything about drinking black coffee, except I kind of wish it had some substance to it, had some body to it, right? So I just want you to think about this idea of body.

And how is body measured? What's the measurement of this idea of body? Density, which is measured in mass. Mass is the word that I'm looking for. Not Catholic mass, not capital M mass, science mass. So when we think about this idea of incorporeality, when we think about the idea of God being incorporeal, we acknowledge that he has no mass, right?

And that's kind of a way that we can think there's nothing physically measurable about him in his omnipresent nature, right? And this, by the way, is helpful if you think about the kind of the ramifications of his omnipresence, if he were measurable in a physical context, right?

What would that look like, by the way? I mean, this is kind of like a weird thought experiment, but if God is infinite in all of his essence, and God were manifest physically in his omnipresence, what would that look like?

Exactly. It would be weird. Like, he would just be physically everywhere. It would be very odd, right? There's no real way that we can kind of put all of the facts that we know together and reconcile them with God in a physical plane, even though that's, like, in our analogical language, like, that's how we interpret the world.

So it's not sufficient for us merely to say that God is incorporeal. We can conceive of this, right? Ghosts are incorporeal. Slimer was incorporeal until he, like, spit up on people, or whatever it was.

But, you know, Casper, the friendly ghost, is that a better example? I guess that's a better example, right? Ghosts are incorporeal, but you can, at least in the fake realm of where these ghosts exist, they're limited.

I'm getting there. They're limited, okay? You can see their beginning, you can see their end. And that's, again, where we go back to this definition, this aspect of God's infinity. God is incorporeal, and he is also infinite, right?

His omnipresence is an aspect—man, I am moving—his omnipresence is an aspect of his infinity. He is infinitely present in his incorporeal nature. Sure. Yep, yep, absolutely. And we'll talk about that a little bit here.

So, we're getting there, we're getting there. So, he's infinitely present in his incorporeal nature, in the same way that God is atemporal—what does that mean? Atemporal? Outside of time. Good. In the same way that he is atemporal—chapter, I keep saying chapter, question number two—he is also aspatial.

Ooh, fancy word, right? And the reason why I thought that this was such a valuable thing to literally lift from the book is because that term, aspatial, helps us mentally with our picture of what omnipresence really means, right?

And the comparison—because we spent a long time last week developing this idea of God is not, you know, a line that is infinite in one direction and infinite in another direction in the context of time.

He is outside of time, right? And when we think about the omnipresence of God, it's the same idea. God is not merely everywhere. He is outside of the concept of space. He is aspatial. And that was kind of one of those moments for me when I tried to reconcile these things.

And it also has a lot of other really interesting ramifications as we look at the way in which God interacts with us in space. And now we're back to the space-time continuum stuff, right? But truthfully, the only way in which we can really nail that down—because there's a lot of analogical language even about God going from place to place—is the fact that there is nothing other than God that has as its essence infinity, right?

And so everything outside of God is created. Everything outside of God has some kind of limit to it. And so that is really the way in which we can nail down that there is some limitation or some definition to the spatial construct, if you will, of things like the angels.

One commentator pointed out a necessary connection between being atemporal and being aspatial when he said, those who believe God is atemporal extend this concept and think of God as present at all times.

So when we think of omnipresence, and again, this goes back to it transcends the limitations of space and is present in all places at all times, omnipresence is not just, you know, in the now. He's everywhere, right?

God is everywhere in all times. Another commentator described omnipresence as an exemption from the limitations of space. A special exemption from the limitations of space. It isn't that he is everywhere.

He simply isn't in space, right? In the same way that he isn't in time. And of course, again, we see many pictures in scripture of God injecting himself into space for various reasons to interface with his people.

But talking about this question three, not chapter three, question three, Barrett describes this idea of being outside of space and being infinite as non-spatial ubiquity. He's got some words, huh? Non-spatial ubiquity.

Bavink, Herman Bavink, who we've quoted a number of times. By the way, does anybody know of a book explicitly on the omnipresence of God? Because I couldn't find one. It was pretty much just culled from systematic theologies.

That's where the vast majority of what we're going through today. But if you are aware of a book, please let me know, because I would be fascinated to read it. It's just an aside. So, Bavink, he described the idea of existing somewhere, the idea of being in a space, as necessarily limiting.

Which, of course, stands in contrast to the very essence of the God that we are talking about, the God that we worship, right? There's an implication that if a physical being is somewhere, they aren't somewhere else.

So, although God is not physically present in his nature, his infinite presence as an incorporeal being means that he is actually present everywhere. That means he's in this room, he's in the hall, he's in the office, God is in Fitchburg, God is everywhere, right?

Fitchburg is the go-to place for BBC to blame for things. I'm sorry. All right. God is limitless, okay? Another way to think about him, infinite, limitless, right? When we think about God being in the whole of a space, it's tempting for us, because of our analogical mindset, to think that God kind of stretches himself out to fill something, right?

This gets back to the volume that Corey was talking about. Gases will stretch out to fill a space, right? If you put a drop of ink in a bathtub, what happens? You wait a minute, maybe, and the entire bathtub is filled with this ink, right?

It is diffused into all of the water that is in the bathtub. Sorry, I should have said a bathtub that was full of water. That probably would have made more sense, right? Obviously, it's not in my notes.

But in doing so, in diffusing in this way, in filling this space, what happens to stuff in the physical world? It dissipates. It thins itself out, right? The molecules have to stretch a little bit further to really get into everything.

But again, that need to stretch out, that need to diffuse, that need to do all these things, it implies some form of finite substance, right? If I've got a drop that's filled with, I don't know, a million molecules of ink, and I drop it into a bathtub, if I then take a drop of the bathtub water, it no longer has a million molecules of ink in it, because those million had to stretch out to fill the bathtub.

And so we have this idea, rightly so in physics, that things have to stretch out because they have finite substance. God is not measured in this way. God is, as we said before, omnipresent. In fact, he can't even really be measured at all.

We talked about this last week, this idea that if something is infinite, in order for something to be qualified as infinite, it really only has to be more infinite than the thing that's less infinite.

We talked about this last week. There's no way to measure these things, right? That drop of ink has the same mass, even though it's spread out. If you were to figure out a way to undiffuse that mass, you would still have the same thing.

It's the law of the conservation of matter, right? So God's limitless essence and nature means that he exists everywhere with the wholeness of his being. This also gets back to simplicity. If we think that God can stretch his parts out, then we're implying that he has parts to be stretched out.

God being the full manifestation of his attributes means that all of his attributes are everywhere. We talked about this with the stained glass analogy before. That really, again, goes back to the simplicity of God.

A proper understanding of the simplicity of God helps us to see that God is infinitely present everywhere with all of his attributes in their full capacity. No hands, no questions. Okay. Oh, no, no, please, no.

So he certainly does insert himself into time and space, right? We see that in many places. So he is, but in his nature, that's not where he resides. It's he, God cloaking himself with physical form is not descriptive of the essence of God.

I don't know if that helps. Sure, he is. He certainly does. Yeah, right. So what we talked about, you know, the angel of the Lord before, you know, when we talk about Old Testament visions of Jesus, right, the pre-incarnate Christ, he certainly steps into time and into space and interacts with his people.

We're going to talk about it in a minute. This idea of the incorporeal nature of God means that he can exist in a space, but unlike anything physical, he doesn't need to displace anything to do it. And so when we're, when we talk about this idea of God not existing in a physical space, it doesn't mean that he isn't present because he absolutely is, but it means that he doesn't take up space.

Does that make sense? Pantheism. That's pantheism. We're going to get to pantheism. He upholds everything. And in the execution of his decree, all things are created and are held together, but they're not mixed together.

It is of him. I like of him, of him. Yeah. And when it says in him there, it's important. Yeah. Just read the chapter. You'll be fine. Well, so, I mean, that's a good conversation to have. It's not really germane to this topic, but what is it, what does it mean when it says in him, right?

What does, does it mean that like God is all things and part of God is creation? No, it doesn't. But all things proceed forth from God. So they are definitively other, but he maintains all of those things, right?

And that, I think, is what Colossians is speaking to there. I don't want to miss another hand. We'll scan. So Aquinas notes something that, again, Corey was talking about when he talked about volume. Aquinas says that bodies fill places by excluding other bodies from where they are.

God's presence in a place does not exclude the presence there of other things. Rather, God fills all places by giving existence to everything occupying them in him. So that also kind of speaks to kind of what you were asking about as well.

Barrett observes that if part of God is in, oh, I skipped something. I'll read this anyway. If part of God is in every time and place and part is not, then God has parts, which is true or false? False.

That's partialism, Patrick. That's actually not partialism, but that's okay. I like the reference. Therefore, he does not partly exist in every time and place. He fully exists in every time and place.

And this idea that Aquinas refers to, this idea that God fills all places by giving existence to everything occupying them, is what? Question four. It is the infinite immensity of God. The infinite immensity of God.

I don't love the term immense because it implies measurement, but it is a kind of an old theologian, classical theology term, the immensity of God, the unmeasurable. It doesn't say unmeasurable, but really it is the unmeasurable immensity of God.

And I kind of wrote in my book, I was like, oh, that's heavy. I think of Pastor Mike talking about heavy. Sorry, I'm not old enough for heavy. But it was this idea that something has a lot of gravitas to it.

And I think about God and I'm like, that's a heavy thought to think about him in this way. God's presence does not exclude the presence of other things. Right. The word other is still there. God is not corporeal at all.

He is not mixing with corporeal things or even coexisting with them. Again, leaning on simplicity of God, we're able to mix with something else that would be adding to him. Or assuming that he has parts to mix.

And so that would be inconsistent with the simplicity of God. So we'll actually, oh, I hope I didn't just delete everything. Okay, I didn't. Good. I looked down, it was blank. I was like, I need this to answer Charlie's question.

So if you remember, we talked about a couple of weeks ago, I don't remember when, we talked about the eternal spiration of the spirit, which is that the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from God the Father and God the Son.

And so this idea that Jesus would go and prepare a place for you, Christians, and that he would send the Holy Spirit. Again, this is this idea of like, these are spatial terms, right? And a lot of this is analogical language to help them understand and also then recognize that at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit would descend upon them.

The Holy Spirit is an incorporeal being that dwells within us. And we'll get into this a little bit later if we have time. But it's actually, this is a really important thing. I'm going to sort of go through a little bit of this and I'm answering your question kind of at the same time.

So just bear with me. This is also true in the Incarnation. When we think about the Incarnation, again, hypostatic union, one of the great mysteries of God, we will never fully understand it. But Jesus Christ, we know, is both fully man and fully God.

Yes? Yes. Okay. But these are not blended natures. It's not a mix. He's not 50 -50, one or the other. He is fully man, fully God. If these two natures, the corporeal finite human nature of Jesus Christ, the man, and the incorporeal infinitely godly nature, mixed, it would be no different than what I talked about before when we were talking about the essence of God mixing with anything physical.

Jesus is no exception to that as the Incarnate Son. During the Incarnation, I texted this one to Corey this week and he's like, is this a trick question? During the Incarnation, God did not cease to be omnipresent.

His infinite nature was, and still is, his infinite nature. God is infinitely omnipresent and was infinitely omnipresent even as Jesus Christ inhabited the earth. So when we think about the Holy Spirit indwelling us, getting back to what Charlie was asking about, the Holy Spirit is incorporeal and dwells within us.

I'm sure there's an aspect to your question that I'm not getting to. No. Then why send him? That's a great question. It's time to send us something for us to look through. We'll get to it later. The same question could be said for why is the holiest of holies the holiest of holies?

It's the same question. It is because God declares through Jesus Christ the Son that we are the new covenant temple and we are the place on this earth where God sees fit to dwell. So he indwells us, which is crazy when you think about the idea, getting ahead of myself, that right now the most secure place on planet earth is probably the crown jewels under lockdown.

That's my guess. It's probably more secure than Fort Knox, even though Fort Knox is the one that gets all the credit. In ancient Israel, probably the most secure place on earth was the holiest of holies.

That's my guess. I don't really know, but that's my conjecture. When you think about Jesus Christ on the cross, he gives up his life, the veil is torn, and then where is the covenantal presence of God after that?

It is inside the New Testament believer. That is incredible to think about. That's a remarkable thing. Many hands. Dave, is it TCP or UDP? That's what I really want to know. All the nerds in the audience love that answer.

That's very true. We may or may not get to it, but later on we have the opportunity to talk about this idea of drawing nearer to God. God drawing nearer to us. That's not a physical thing. In fact, many old theologians would say that as we draw near to God, in reality what's happening is we're being sanctified by the Holy Spirit and we're becoming more like Christ.

It is a spiritual aspect, it's not a physical one. Look at question six. Yes, there is. There isn't a difference in God's omnipresence. God's omnipresence is infinite and immutable. It doesn't change, but there certainly are different aspects in the sense of the essential and the gracious presence of God, which we'll maybe get to.

Throughout Scripture we see many, many examples of the Holy Spirit interceding for us. It is through the work of the Holy Spirit that we are made more like Christ. This progressive sanctification, not salvation, there's no progressive salvation, that would be heretical, but the progressive sanctification of our lives is made possible through the work of the Holy Spirit within us.

Well, he doesn't occupy space because he would have to displace some of us to do it. If he's in us, that would be uncomfortable. But does he occupy time? Sure, in the sense that there is progressive sanctification going on in our lives.

Right, totally, totally. It's the frame of reference. All right, let's attempt to... I have no idea where we are at this point. Mostly, I want to make sure I capture the questions, because that would be...

What's that? Yeah, okay, let's jump in here. Barrett writes that to conclude that God's omnipresence stems from his infinite nature, true, is also to conclude that it is the necessary outcome of a perfect being.

As Charnock reminds us, no perfection is wanting to God, but an unbounded essence is a perfection. A limited one is an imperfection. So, in any way, if we seek to intentionally or otherwise limit God, we are implying an imperfection upon him.

God's unbounded essence, which means his nature... God's essence is unbounded, which means his nature is unbounded. This is number five on your sheet here. His essence, or his quiddity... You remember the term quiddity?

The thing that makes God what God is. It defines his nature. If his nature is unbounded or infinite, then his presence is unbounded as well. That's what we learned from Charnock. So, if God's essence is unbounded, that means his nature is unbounded.

If God's nature is unbounded, then his presence is unbounded, because they're all bound together. That is a good way for us to think about the conclusion that God is omnipresent. Okay, we've danced around this a little bit.

Question. If God is not omnipresent, how would he interact with his creation? Something happens in New York. God is not omnipresent. God interacts with his creation in New York, and then something happens in LA.

What happens next? Well, that's a good question, isn't it? Right? That is a good question. She's busy. She's busy. But seriously, God interacts with his creation. This is a non-omnipresent God interacts with his creation in New York.

Then something happens in LA. What does God have to do? He's got to move. This is supposed to be an easy question, guys. He would have to go to LA, right? Hmm? I don't know. I mean, we don't have In-N-Out Burger.

Where's that? So what is necessary for something to move from one place to another? What happens to that thing? You need to have a body. It's confined in space. It changes. That's where it's going. So we know that God is immutable.

God cannot change. But then we also see scripture describing God as one who moves from one place to another. So again, how do we reconcile all these things? How do we figure out what's happening? Look at Solomon's temple.

What was the expectation of Solomon's temple? Why did he build the temple? It was a house for God, so that God would dwell in that house. Right? Scripture talks about God's presence in certain places, but never describes God as confined to those places.

I touched on this earlier. Chonok wrote, I love, I think this is another one of those things that I texted to our super secret chat, deacon chat, or whatever it is. Chonok wrote that heaven, quote, is the court of his majestical presence, but not the prison of his essence.

I love that quote. I really like that quote. Heaven is the court of his majestical presence, but not the prison of his essence. We know we are frequently reminded by scripture that God is in heaven. We also know that God is in the temple, but God is not confined to these places, despite the analogical language that scripture uses to describe God as entering this place, or entering that place, or dwelling with the nation of Israel in the wilderness.

Right? We see that he is everywhere, but all of these things are merely manifestations of his presence. Barrett writes that God is present everywhere equally, even if he is present somewhere uniquely.

This gets a little bit to what Josh was talking about. He can be in both places, speaking of, in this case, heaven and hell, equally, though differently, due to the immensity of his essence. So the ramifications of this are the same as some of the ones that we've kind of already explored.

Though God's essence is omnipresent, the effects of his actions are felt by us differently. Right? This idea, I mentioned it before, the idea of God drawing near to us, James 4 .8. It's a matter of perspective.

God is not moving. Right? The picture that Barrett uses in the book is one of a boat that is stranded, and someone from an island throws a rope to them. Right? And as you're pulling on the rope, it looks like the island is getting bigger, but the island is not moving.

Right? You are moving, and you're getting pulled closer to that island. Psalm 139, very well-known psalm, starting in verse 7, where shall I go from your spirit, or where shall I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there, etc., etc. God is actively involved in the lives of his people. It isn't merely that he is there, verses 7 and 8, but he is also guiding.

Verse 10, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. Right? Verse 12 describes God's familiarity with his creation. Even the darkness is not dark to you. The night is bright as day, for darkness is as light with you.

Right? Darkness is a problem for people. If you've ever walked through a room being too lazy to, like, go like this, which is me basically all the time. If we can't see, it's a lot harder to really do basically anything effectively.

Right? But with God, even darkness is a problem. He is so intimately familiar with everything, that this physical idea of darkness is just not a problem for him. Paul even describes this in Acts 17, the active work of God in the lives of New Testament believers, when he says, verse 27, yet he, God, is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live, this gets back to what you were saying, Jonathan, and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring.

Right? God is actively working in the lives of everyone. Okay? And this gets into question six on our worksheet. There is a difference between, as Barrett puts it, God's essential presence and God's gracious presence.

Okay? God's essential presence and God's gracious presence. So the first one I put on here is covenantal presence. You guys can take a guess on this one. I'm about, I'll talk about it in a minute, but let's kind of work through these together.

God's covenantal presence, gracious presence or essential presence? Gracious presence. Good. God sustaining, preserving, and governing creation? Essential. Good. Regenerating, justifying, sanctifying?

Gracious. Special grace? Gracious. Common grace? Essential. Good. So you guys got it. We're good here. Right? Yes. Those are all exactly right. So covenantal presence, this is the gracious presence of God that we see when he communes with his people.

Okay? This would be things like God walking in the garden with Adam and Eve. This would be things like the Holy Spirit indwelling the New Testament believer. Right? The special presence of God in the life of the nation of Israel as he continually intercedes for them.

Right? Over and over we are reminded in the Old Testament, but God was with Israel. But God was with Joseph. Right? All of this language that we see, my presence will go with you and I will give you rest, God says to Moses.

This is the gracious presence of God. Again, we are best served to remember that God's presence in a case like this is in one place because his essence is both infinite and incorporeal. So he's there doing these things, showing his gracious presence, but he's also everywhere else.

So if you remember back when we talked about the stained glass, I'm going to keep going back to the stained glass analogy because it's convenient for me. God's gracious presence is essentially in some places and sometimes layered on top of his essential presence.

And the best way for us quickly to kind of think about this is our understanding of common grace and special grace. They're very closely related aspects. I mean, there's certainly an aspect to that. When we talk about the essential and the gracious presence of God, it's really looking at things in an analogical context as it relates to us and as it relates to people.

Not like us, like individually us, but as it relates to people. And so that's why I kind of go back to the common grace, special grace explanation because I think we have a pretty good understanding of what those are already and the difference between the two of them.

Someone being a subject of the special grace of God does not exclude them from also being the recipient of the common grace of God. We're reminded in scripture that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, that God provides for all of creation in some way, but he provides, he has a special love for his people.

I mean, sure, yeah, I mean, the word grace is in there, so that works out, but it's a question of how you want to define the terms that are being used here. So when we think about gracious presence, again, this is a chapter on omnipresence, he's really using it to define this special, reserved presence that we would experience with the Holy Spirit, for example.

The Most Holy Place and the New Covenant Temple

Okay, last thing I want to talk about, and we're pretty much out of time, but that's okay, is the parallel, and I kind of already talked about this anyway, between the Old Testament most holy place, the holiest of the holies, and how that relates to God's presence in the New Testament, right?

So we kind of touched on this. In the Old Testament, you think about the most holy, how often was the most holy place on the planet Earth entered in the Old Testament? Once a year, right? One time a year, one person goes in, and I don't know if the rope on the ankle thing is an apocryphal story or not, but it, really?

We've never heard about the rope? I don't know, I don't think it's in scripture, I think it's an apocryphal story. Yeah, the bells and the rope and all that stuff. The bells are, the rope isn't. Thanks, Josephus, one of those things, yeah.

But it really underscores the regard that people had for this place, right? That they wouldn't even, if somebody was struck dead in there, I'm not even going to get them. We're dragging them out, right?

That's the idea. And this is the place where God dwells, where there's the interface between God and man through the sacrifice over the Ark of the Covenant in which the stone tablets were laid, right?

And then under the Abrahamic Covenant, we have Immanuel, which means God with us. Jesus comes to earth, dwells with us. God the Son cloaks himself with humanity. I like that language, too, because it reminds us that the humanity of Christ and the divinity of Christ are different things, right?