Another one of those words Christians like to trot out to show off how they know a little theology is “omnipresent.” The Latin omnipraeësse means “being before all,” or “being available to all,” but when they say it Christians usually mean God is everywhere—and for that you need a different Latin word, ubique. God is ubiquitous. Yeah, that’s an English word; just not a commonly-used one.
The way it’s usually understood is that no matter where you are, God is in that same place. God is inescapably here. The way David put it is this:
I can never escape from Your Spirit!
I can never get away from Your presence!
If I go up to heaven, You are there;
if I go down to the grave, You are there.
If I ride the wings of the morning,
if I dwell by the farthest oceans,
even there Your hand will guide me,
and Your strength will support me.
I could ask the darkness to hide me
and the light around me to become night—
but even in darkness I cannot hide from You.
To You the night shines as bright as day.
Darkness and light are the same to You.
—David, Psalm 139.7-12 NLT
The thinking is that we can never get away from God.
For some, that’s a very comforting idea; for others, not so much, because they want to get away from God. Certain people also find it bothersome that God is always here… and yet sometimes bad things happen, and if God is always here, and sees it happening, shouldn’t He intervene? They would do something if they were God. So, because they conclude that sometimes God doesn’t act (in the way they would) maybe He’s not there, or not almighty. That gets into theodicy,* which I discuss elsewhere.
Holding the universe together.
The writers of the bible believed that God needs to be everywhere, since He’s pretty much the only thing that keeps living things alive. Job’s friend Elihu commented, “If God were to take back His spirit and withdraw His breath, all life would cease, and humanity would turn again to dust.” (Jb 34.14-15) Paul’s quote of the Greek philosopher Epimenides, “In Him we live and move and exist,” and “We are His offspring,” (Ac 17.28) is one example of this thinking in the New Testament. One psalmist commented about ocean life,
They all depend on You
to give them food as they need it.
When You supply it, they gather it.
You open Your hand to feed them,
and they are richly satisfied.
But if You turn away from them, they panic.
When You take away their breath,
they die and turn again to dust.
When You give them Your breath, life is created,
and You renew the face of the earth.
—Psalm 104.27-30 NLT
Rather than God creating all life in the beginning, and leaving the machine to sputter along without Him, God sustains His creation by being everywhere and creating new life where He sees fit—new babies, new animals, new species, new angels… I realize the last two are controversial, ’cause many Christians actually do believe He created all life at the beginning, and stopped, and everything else happens automatically, with no input from Him. (Although they’ll often make an exception for human babies.) But that’s just cessationist* thinking, and not biblical.
But greater than just God sustaining life, there’s also the idea that God sustains everything. Paul wrote that Jesus “existed before anything else, and He holds all creation together.” (Cl 1.17) The atoms would fall apart without Him. Though nature is not God, they aren’t all that separate; God is in nature, keeping it functioning.
The unfortunate side effect of this belief is that there are a lot of Christians who don’t care about pollution, about climate change, about being irresponsible with natural resources, because hey, God has it all in hand. It’s the same as those Christians who think they can sin themselves silly because God’s grace has them covered; they just extend that same evil thinking to nature, and think they can befoul our environment because God’s grace has them covered here too. They think grace means that actions don’t have consequences. But they do… and I’ve discussed that elsewhere too, and don’t need to go off on that tangent again.
It does mean, though, that we can learn quite a bit about God through nature. Since it’s another one of His creations, and since His fingerprints are all over it, we can pick up clues about His logic and order and complexity through it. The reason a lot of Christians have got into the sciences is because they believe understanding the universe will help them understand God better. And they’re not wrong. (However, for the details that they just won’t be able to figure out by observing nature, God has also provided revelation.)
Interacting with everyone.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis noted that because every human has an idea of what good and evil consist of, because all these ideas—regardless of background or culture—line up with one another, and because he believed that morality is not something that can be deduced through logic or science, it’s a sign that the Holy Spirit pokes every human in the conscience, telling us to behave ourselves.
I am not sold on the idea that morality can’t be deduced by logic. Society works far better when people respect one another’s rights to life, liberty, property, and beliefs. One can’t determine whether people realizing this, is a result of God putting that in us directly, or God putting it in nature for us to find and figure out. Most “innate knowledge” is really just stuff we don’t know how we know. Maybe God gave it to us, but maybe not. We can’t just jump to the conclusion that He’s the reason why people have figured out morality. As I pointed out above, the scriptures describe Him as interacting with everybody, so that, not Lewis, is my starting point. Save Lewis for people who don’t read bible.
God sustains nature, and of course humans are part of nature. God sustains our lives. He doesn’t do it by indwelling us in the same way He indwells a Christian, but He does interact with every human on the planet. Certainly He could and does nudge people to make moral choices rather than immoral ones.
There are examples in the bible of God interacting with people who were definitely not His followers. The pharaoh of Egypt during the Exodus, for example; God told Moses many times that He intended to “harden his heart so he will refuse to let the people go.” (Ex 4.21) God’s thinking was that because the pharaoh was difficult, He would have to do mightier things to free His people, which He wanted to demonstrate in order to show off His almightiness. (Ex 14.4) The worse an adversary is, the greater it is when God turns things around despite that adversary, whether it’s the nameless pharaoh, or Ahab of Israel, or Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, or the Romans who killed Jesus and Simon Peter and Paul and thousands of Christian martyrs. To some degree God arranges certain evildoers and circumstances so that He can ultimately defeat evil, and be gracious, and be seen doing it. (Ro 9.22-23) I just don’t buy the Calvinist* belief that He does this in every instance. Taken to its logical conclusion—that every evil act is done because God controls every tiny thing, and even wants it done—makes God the cause of all evil in the universe, which He is certainly not. Calvinists try to avoid teaching this idea with some clever wordplay, but it’s just not clever enough.
God’s interaction with everyone makes it so that everyone has a starting point by which we can share God, and specifically Jesus’s revelation of God, with them. Every culture knows what a god is; even the atheist cultures began with people rejecting the lousy descriptions of God that their culture tried to introduce to them. Evangelists never have to explain the basic concept of God to anyone, though we usually have to correct people’s concepts a great deal.
And it also means that sometimes we can interact with, and work with, organizations and people that aren’t Christian. Now, there are Christians who insist that we ought have nothing to do with non-Christians; we shouldn’t work for them, or do business with them, or vote for them, or make friends with them. They feel the only interaction we should have with non-Christians is to share Jesus with them. (They don’t consider that, since we carry Jesus with us, all interaction we have with them shares Jesus with them.) But because a person isn’t a Christian, that doesn’t automatically make them evil, or immoral, or wrong; no more so than anyone else, including Christians. (In many cases, I have found Christians, particularly those who are taking God’s grace for granted, to be worse.) Non-Christians have accomplished many great and wise and good and truthful and loving things. And since all of those attributes ultimately come from God, these non-Christians are interacting with God to a certain degree; they’re ultimately getting those things from Him. They just don’t realize it. It’s up to us to make them aware of it, and point them to Him.
God’s attitude about ubiquity.
Again, God’s omnipresence was something Jesus voluntarily gave up. He became human and lived with us, (Jn 1.14) in one specific place on earth, in one specific point in time. So while we tend to think of it as part of the nature of God, it isn’t really; Jesus didn’t have it, yet didn’t stop being God. While Jesus on earth knew things that suggested He might be everywhere at once, like when He told Philip He saw him under the fig tree, (Jn 1.48) this is little different from when Elisha knew what the king of Aram was plotting. (2Ki 6.8-12) Though Jesus was depowered, the Holy Spirit was not, and Jesus had the Spirit without limit. (Jn 3.34)
Like almightiness, ubiquity is not an attribute of God that describes who He is; it is only what He can do. Take it away and Jesus is still Himself; still God. But it is an attribute of God that is very important to us. Not because we’d like to manipulate it ourselves like we would with power—we really can’t imagine being everywhere at once, since our experience has only been as finite beings. No; we appreciate that God has this, because we want that constant access to God that His ubiquity makes possible.
There is a distinction, however, between His ubiquity and His presence… which I’ll get to next week.