The omnipresence of God does not seem to be a teaching (at least on the surface) that has much to do with the doctrine of Christ. However, let us remember that Jesus the Christ had a divine nature as well as a human one. In His human nature He lived in the presence of His divine one. This is simply a wonderful way to approach this. While Christ walked on earth, His human nature was joined with the divine one. He knew the thoughts of people and He had the power over nature as well. He could turn water into wine because God is fully present in the water to turn it as He willed. He could turn a few loaves of bread into enough to feed thousands because God is present in every location and operates as He wills. God does not have to bake loaves of bread and transport them to a particular location, He is able to do it as He desires because He is everywhere at the same time.
We tend to think of Christ praying to the Father as if the Father and His host were way up in the sky somewhere and then the Father zooming down or perhaps sending an angel to do what He wants. It is true that He does send angels to do His bidding as He desires, but He is everywhere present and can do as He wishes at any moment. He was already in the tomb with Lazarus and when Christ prayed to the Father His divine nature was one with the Father in the tomb and it was a simple matter of the present Father to do as He pleased and Lazarus rose from the dead. It is not hard to imagine Christ healing since the omnipresent God is always present at every location and can do as He pleases. How hard is it for the God who is present in and throughout an eye that He designed and created to energize Himself in a powerful and intelligent way so that the eye can see? The omniscience of God helps explain the miracles of Christ and of how Christ could heal people who were not even present with His humanity.
The omniscience of God also explains the promise of Christ in Matthew 28:18-20. After giving the Great Commission, He told them that “lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” The very promise of Christ is that He would be with all of His believers as they went out into the entire world with the Gospel. If Christ is not omnipresent in His divine nature, then Christ could not be with His people and would not be telling the truth.
The omnipresence of Christ is also necessary for Christ to live in His people. Christ is said to be the life of His people (Colossians 1:4) and to live in His people (Galatians 2:20). He is said to dwell in His people by faith (Ephesians 3:17). There is simply no way to explain how these verses and theological assertions could be true apart from the omnipresence of Christ. How could Christ live in believers who live in one part of the world at the same time as those that live in many other parts of the world? This could only be true if He is omnipresent. In other words, as we examine all that Christ did and claimed, He must be omnipresent or these things could not be true.
But does the Gospel rest upon the omnipresence of God? In many senses it does. We are to go forth and preach the Gospel to all because all are sinning in the presence of God. The first commandment teaches us that we are to have no other gods before Him which means in His presence. That commandment, then, to be applied to the entire world requires for God to be present. In the very nature of evangelism we rely upon the fact that God is present in all places in order to tell the Gospel. We rely on the fact that the Holy Spirit is present in all places and can energize His Word and use it as a sword in the heart or to apply it and regenerate a heart. Unless God is present in all places, we have no confidence that these things can be done.
So our very confidence in the Gospel is that God is present in all places. We have confidence in praying for the accomplishment of the Gospel because we believe that God is present in the hearts of people and can change those hearts. We believe that God can apply the propitiation of Christ to any heart in the world because He is there. We believe that God can impute the righteousness of Christ to any person in the world at any time because He is there. We believe that God can raise any soul in the world from the spiritual dead because He is there. We believe that at some point in the future that every soul will be raised from the dead from everywhere on the earth because God is there. We cannot believe in Christ as He presents Himself in the Bible apart from the truth of omniscience. We cannot but believe in the omnipresence of God if we believe that the Gospel is to go to all peoples of the world. There is no territorial god here and there, but instead there is only one glorious and all-present God. The teachings of Christ and the Gospel demand for these things to be true. So they are.
God Loves... Himself 
Leave a comment