God's Nearness To Us

God’s nearness to us, His constant awareness of everything about us, is woven like a thread throughout the Bible. The reminders are pervasive, from Genesis to Revelation. Any message repeated so often must be important. And it must be one we will have some difficulty grasping.

To believe that God sees, knows, and understands everything about every human being; that He sees us individually, not as a generic group; that He stays closer to each one of us than we can stay to each other; that He sees our actions, hears our words, and knows our thoughts requires faith.

At times, it even seems we must simply take His word for it. And we do, but not always. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we doubt. Sometimes we wish He were not scrutinizing our lives so closely, and then a moment later we fear that He has stopped seeing and hearing us – or worse yet stopped accepting us as we are, with all our foolishness and weakness.

God really is omnipresent. His omnipresence, of course, applies to ALL dimensions and realms, to those we live in (four space-time dimensions), and to those beyond what we can discover mathematically (ten space-time dimensions), and to those beyond what we could ever discover.

People say, “If I could just see God and have a human conversation with Him, I would believe!” We cannot help but think that the disciples had an easier time knowing Him, believing Him, understanding Him, trusting Him, and loving Him than we do. And when He said He was leaving, how on earth would they get along without Him? But Jesus promised He would not leave them to their own resources. By their choice of faith, the Holy Spirit (and Jesus Himself as Paul later teaches) would come to live in them. They didn’t understand how. But they couldn’t.

We can somewhat picture in our mind’s eye the kind of relationship we could develop with some characters we design on a computer screen. These screen people occupy only the two dimensions of the computer’s screen, while we reside in three. Given the right software, we could give them color and animation, and we could create splendid scenes for them to move around in, all the while sending electronic signals to let them know of our presence. In reality, of course, these two-dimensional beings would not possess the capacity to think, feel, and know anything in a physical sense like we do because atoms, molecules, brains, nerves, and so on require three large space dimensions. But, for the sake of the analogy, we can pretend they are able to physically think, feel, and know.

As their designers, we know everything about them. Whatever capacities they possess, we gave them. If we enable them to move about the screen, we know the possibilities and the limits of their mobility. Whether they come to recognize the fact or not, their existence depends entirely on us. They have not control over the power supply, the “on” switch, that keeps electricity flowing into the system that is their universe.

We can imagine the difficulty that Mr. and Mrs. Screen would have in comprehending us and relating to us. Could they be certain of our existence? Perhaps reasonably so, if they came to recognize their incapacity to create themselves or anything else in their screen environment, and if they discern that their power source is located outside their realm.

Could they perceive our three-dimensionality and how it compares with their two-dimensionality? Given adequate research, they may discover enough about themselves and their environment to recognize that a third dimension must exist for them to exist, but they will never fully comprehend what a difference that third dimension makes, nor will they be able to visualize more than two dimensions at a time.

A three-dimensional being (us) can approach their plane of the computer screen from the depth dimension and place a fingertip a hundredth of a millimeter from the body of either one of them. Despite this close proximity, Mr. and Mrs. Screen would be unable to detect the fingertip’s presence, much less understand and describe its physical characteristics.

As close as these characters may come to each other on the screen, they will remain unable to detect certain things about themselves, characteristics that we can easily observe from our three-dimensional perspective. All they can perceive of one another are various lines. If they are round, they may figure out that their bodies are circular by carefully moving around one another, but they will not see each other’s circles as we who look on from outside the screen see them. We can program them to rebound off each other and to make a certain sound when they do, but they have only growing and shrinking lines to indicate movement.

We observe something else about the screen people that they can never see. We can see what is inside them. The details and workings of their interior body parts, for example, are fully exposed to us. The amount of information we have about them is at least an order of magnitude (at least a factor of ten times) greater than what any of them possesses.

In this simple analogy, just one dimension separates the screen people from us humans. And yet, the advantage of that one extra dimension suffices to explain how we could be closer to the screen people than they are to each other, fully comprehending them inside and out, while remaining invisible and untouchable to them.

God’s dimensional advantage over us goes far beyond this one-dimensional difference. He can operate in a number of more dimensions. His capacity to maintain close and comprehensive contact with us – despite our incapacity to experience Him physically through our space-bound dimensions – becomes a living reality.

In “The Matrix” movie trilogy, a human being enters into the cyberspace of a computer program and interacts with it. In our analogy, visiting Mr. and Mrs. Screen by entering their cyberspace would bridge the gap. And this is exactly what the Trinity of God did. One Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, came and entered into the human four dimensions (three of space and one of time). And who stayed outside the screen to handle the controls? The Father within the Trinity.

By entering the computer program of the universe, and becoming like the creatures within the program, Jesus was able to teach and demonstrate aspects of His greater dimensions, even though human understanding was limited.

Making sense of His nearness (in fact, His living right within us when we choose to accept Him as Savior and Lord) is more important than physically sensing His nearness. Pleasure and physical nearness are good, but the pleasures and nearness available to us in His extra dimensions go immeasurably beyond what we can think or imagine, as His written Word declares.

In one sense, God’s invisibility and untouchability keep our yearnings focused where they rightly belong, on the supernatural realm that awaits us. His written Word combines with evidences in this spectacular but limited physical realm to communicate that His desire and plan involve transporting us, at some future moment along our time line, across our dimensional barriers into His super-dimensional realm.

Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Screen CAN jump off the computer screen and enter our living room with us and be like us.

We cannot begin to picture it, except perhaps by analogy, but it does make sense.

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