The Unavoidable Spirit of God

Where can we hide from God’s Spirit?

By Don Ruhl

 

If I can go there, why can’t God go there? Someone thinks, God cannot be two places at one time. If so, He would not be God. If He is not God, who is He? If He can be two places at once, He can be 6 billion places at once. If He can listen to millions of prayers at once and work with each of those prayers, He can be as many places as He needs to be or desires to be.

Psalm 139.7–12 The Unavoidable Spirit of God 

David wondered, “Where can I go from Your Spirit?” David imagined places as far from Earth as possible. Could we go to heaven and escape God?

Perhaps David asked that because someone might think that while God inhabited the tabernacle, He could not be in heaven. However, whether in the tabernacle or in heaven, there God was, for as God He can be everywhere and anywhere, otherwise, He is not God.

Perhaps by “heaven,” David meant, the heavens. Could we go to some distant place in the universe and hide from God? If we can be there, He can be there.

Is God present everywhere or is everywhere present before Him?

What if we go in the opposite direction? Can I hide from God in hell, Hades, Sheol, or the grave? He created all these. Why could He not also go there?

Can we hide in the deepest part of the sea? If we, the creation of God, can create vessels to go to those depths, why can’t the Creator of such creatures go to such places? Can we, the creatures, outdo the Creator? Can we make devices that will take us where the Creator cannot find us?

How about the darkness, can it hide us from God? That is like a child who covers his eyes and says you cannot see him. If we cannot see anything, such as in darkness, does that mean God cannot see either? God is Spirit. Hence, He is not subject to the limitations of this world. (See also Jer 23.23, 24; 1Ki 8.27; Eze 8.7–9, 12.)

Amos 9.2–4 God’s Omnipresence Is No Comfort to the Wicked 

In Amos 9.1, the prophet saw the Lord standing by the altar. Then the Lord issued an order for someone to strike the thresholds, striking them hard enough that the thresholds shook. God promised that He would slay the last of the disobedient with the sword, sending a foreign power after them and the Israelites would not be able to get away. To drive that home, He promised, “Though they dig into hell, from there My hand shall take them…” and the Lord said the same about fleeing to heaven, to the mountains, to the sea, and to captivity in a foreign land (Amos 9.2–4). There was no way that they could escape God’s judgment. God knew where they would try to hide and He would send the Assyrian soldiers right to the very spot where any Israelite would hide.

 

The unavoidable Spirit of God can be taken in two ways. The wicked will take it as terror and the righteous will take it as comfort. How do you take it?