The Presence of God - for real

Scripture describes the nature and character of God. We have two specifics that are hard to reconcile on human terms. God is love, and God is holy.§ As parents, and as spouses, we struggle when those we love do wrong. We want them to be happy and this means we rue the consequences they will face. We disciple our children as Scripture commands. We warn of consequences that are the natural and/or supernatural result of actions. And we believe that God in His love for His children does also. But we struggle with how God reconciles His love and His holiness.

The most straightforward understanding is that God, in His love, desires the best for us. He knows that wrong actions will result in Consequences. So He disciplines out of love. Tough love we should have for our children, and for others. There is certainly a lot of truth in this. I think it was C. S. Lewis who said, would a father see his daughter happy as a whore? We sense that this love transcends the emotional effusion of affection, that some people call ‘love’.

There is a flip side, Pharisaical legalism.  Knowing that we are best off by always doing what is right, legalists point out and accuse any transgression of law or regulation, or even custom or personal opinion. You can find legalists in almost every church, as well as the woke movement or any other purveyor of political correctness. Legalists cling to the truth that God in His word said to do certain things and not do some other specific things.

In experiencing God’s presence, we become aware of a deeper truth. God’s love and holiness are in Him fused inseparably, as attributes of His divine nature. I do not know of any word that denotes this integrated nature. It is the burning bush that is not consumed, the fire that comes as a rushing mighty wind to appear as tongues on individuals. It is the glowing radiance of a face brighter than the sun, emanating from the transfigured Jesus. It is the voice of One saying to a woman caught in the act of adultery “neither do I condemn thee. Go and sin no more,” and saying to a corpse that has been dead four days “Come forth!” In times of quietness in our own lives (nearly banished by modern technology), we sense His presence, both His deep love and His unblemished holiness. They are not in tension, but in synergy generating divine power, like fuel and oxidizer mix to generate thrust in a rocket engine. 

We need to link this to the power of Jesus. He created the universe and all that is therein. This power is directly resulting from the divine nature. He answers our prayers, but often the answer is that we don’t understand Him or we asked the wrong question. He can miraculously do anything, but one reality of the universe He created is spiritual causality. He tried to explain it in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the final discourse on the Passover night He was betrayed. He invites us to partake of His nature and character in order to see His power and glory.

There are degrees of knowing God, just as in any relationship.

• We intellectually understand the atonement, the reconciliation between God and man, and between love and holiness, through the death of Jesus on the cross.
• We make a decision to accept Him: repent of our sins, make a commitment to obey Him, and make Him our Lord.
• We experience His work in our life through answers to prayer, providential interventions, innumerable “coincidences”.
• We pray regularly and frequently.
• We see Him working in our life to purify us, to change us into His likeness, singling out spiritual defects and causing us to cleanse ourself from them.
• We experience a sense of His presence, the weight of His glory, in an inexpressible awareness that He is near, and awe at the sense of His nature and character.
• We take on His nature and character through the empowerment of the indwelling Holy Spirit, and our determination to become like Him to the best of our ability, in humility knowing that we cannot.

It is in this last stage that love and holiness become in us a powerful reaction that unleashes all that He can do in and through us. Revival (as at Asbury and historically) tends to exhibit the penultimate level of knowing God above. The challenge to us is to move to the next and final (in this list) stage, of choosing to become like Him, to see the world with His eyes and respond as He would. This would be His real Presence.

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§ Relevant verses

• God is love, and loves the world and those in it.

•  For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)
• The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8)
• For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

• God is holy and commands His children to be holy

• For I am Yahweh your God. Therefore, set yourselves apart as holy and be holy, for I am holy. …. For I am Yahweh who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God; thus you shall be holy, for I am holy.’” (Leviticus 11:44-45)
• Speak to all the congregation of the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘You shall be holy, for I, Yahweh your God, am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2)
• … like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your conduct; because it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:15-16)