God is Always Everywhere and Sometimes Somewhere

I believe an aspect of God’s nature is that He is everywhere. You can sense this for yourself if you spend a moment examining your consciousness, and asking whether there are any boundaries or edges to it. When I do this myself, I have a sense that reality is boundless, and this means that if God exists, He must also be boundless. There is not a place where the world ends and God begins, but instead the being of God extends boundlessly, and it logically follows from this that our world must be contained within the being of God.

God’s boundlessness makes perfect sense. If God can beat my heart when I am in London, and can beat my heart when I am on the Moon (okay, I haven’t tested that, but my astronaut friends could testify to this, I’m sure!) then this means that the being of God is just as present on the Moon as on the Earth. If you pray for God to keep you safe while you go away on holiday (for example), you are acknowledging that God can control all the events in your life wherever you are. He can do this because His being is everywhere (He is omnipresent).

Here are a few scriptures from the Bible that point to God’s omnipresence:

For in Him we live and move and have our being

Acts 17:28

He is before all things and in Him all things hold together

Colossians 1:17

“Can a man hide himself in hiding places
So I do not see him?” declares the Lord.
“Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?” declares the Lord.

Jeremiah 23:24

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the dawn,
If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
Even there Your hand will lead me,
And Your right hand will lay hold of me.

Psalm 139:7-10

As well as being omnipresent, God also manifests His being in a way that is localised. In the Old Testament, God appeared to Moses in a burning bush (Exodus 3:1-5), and in certain instances He appeared to people in the form of an angel (see, for example, Genesis 16:7-10). The most obvious example of God appearing to human beings in a localised way is of course the Incarnation, when God appeared in the person of Jesus Christ.

One of the great mysteries of the Christian faith is the concept of the Trinity, which says that the being of God is manifested in three forms (or ‘persons’): God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Without wishing to get into complex theological formulations, I will just note that when God walked the Earth in the person of Jesus Christ, He still existed in His omnipresence as God the Father. So we can see that God is always everywhere and sometimes somewhere.