God’s Presence Is Not Always Comforting

You may feel alone, but if you belong to Jesus you are never alone. He is always there to minister His grace. “When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:17–18). Again, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Ps. 46:1).

God’s Encouraging Presence

It may be that you are walking through some deep valleys and dark trials at the present time. You may feel very isolated. It may seem that others have abandoned you in your distress. It may be that those who seek to help just cannot comfort you because your distress is too deep. Perhaps someone you trust has failed you and it seems there is no one left to whom you can turn. In such a time, the believer’s simple but profound comfort is this: God is with you and He hears your cries. He is close to the brokenhearted; He is their refuge and strength and ever-present help.

Reflecting on this wonderful truth, A. W. Tozer wrote:

The certainty that God is always near us, present in all parts of His world, closer to us than our thoughts, should maintain us in a state of high moral happiness most of the time. But not all the time. It would be less than honest to promise every believer continual jubilee and less than realistic to expect it. As a child may cry out in pain even when sheltered in its mother’s arms, so a Christian may sometimes know what it is to suffer even in the conscious presence of God. . . . But all will be well. In a world like this tears have their therapeutic effects. The healing balm distilled from the garments of the enfolding Presence cures our ills before they become fatal. The knowledge that we are never alone calms the troubled sea of our lives and speaks peace to our souls.[1]

God Is Always Watching

The truth that God is omnipresent encourages us in our trials. It also serves to chasten us in our sin. Proverbs tells us that “the eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good” (Prov. 15:3). Not only does God see the good things that happen in this world, He sees what the wicked do too. He sees the thoughts and intentions of our heart, so that everything is laid bare before Him as we saw earlier in Hebrews 4. When we are walking in rebellion and doing things that we would prefer no one saw, the sobering truth is that God is there, He sees, and He is watching.

For a long time a legend circulated that the writer Arthur Conan Doyle—best known, of course, for creating the character Sherlock Holmes—once sent a prank telegram to twelve leading figures in British society. The telegram was unsigned and simply read: “Flee! All is revealed.” As the legend goes, within twenty-four hours, all twelve had left the country. Of course, none of us would want all our sin put on display. Sin flourishes in the darkness and we would be rightly ashamed to have every thought and deed seen and known by others. Yet the simple fact of the matter is that God always sees.

Do not fool yourself by thinking that you can outrun God or escape His claim on your life.

Many of us quickly acknowledge the truth of this. If God is God, He must see. But do we take that reality seriously enough? I think that if we really believed it, this truth would be a tremendous motivation for us to flee sin. Maybe you are engaged in patterns of behavior that you would be terribly ashamed for friends and family or Christian brothers and sisters to witness, but the omnipresent God is always there.

Sometimes even believers think they can keep God at a distance or can somehow outrun Him. Perhaps you are actively fleeing the Lord today. You believe He exists, you know that He has a call on your life, you may sense He is not pleased with the way in which you are living, but you are simply hoping you can keep Him at arm’s length.

Do not fool yourself by thinking that you can outrun God or escape His claim on your life. Do not fool yourself by thinking that you can ultimately escape the demands of His justice. The very idea is absurd. If you are running away from the all-present God, why not run to Him instead?[2] Why not find the gracious welcome that He will give you through the Lord Jesus? He opens His arms to those who turn from rebellion and who come to Him in faith.

[1] A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (New York: HarperCollins, 1961), 76.

[2] See Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), 182, who draws upon Augustine at this point.