Dr Paul Allen

One of God’s attributes is His omnipresence. This means He is present everywhere in all creation. There are no limits or boundaries that restrict Him; God is not confined to any one space or moment of time for He has no physical properties. God is spirit and does not take up space in the way an object or person takes up space. There is nowhere we could go that God is not also there because He fills the heavens and earth. This is hard for our finite minds to grasp. We have bodies that can only occupy one space at a time. I have a hard time imagining that God has no such limitations. We often try to think of God’s omnipresence in terms we understand. We might try to compare Him to something we know, such as a gas that spreads throughout a room, but even that comparison doesn’t express the reality of God’s omnipresence, for gas is a state of matter. Nothing can contain our infinite God; He is everywhere all the time. “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest ...

One of those most frequently brought forward is the apparent contradiction between John 1:18, where we read, “No man hath seen God at any time,” and Exodus 24:10, where we are told that Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel “saw the God of Israel. ” (There are also other passages in which men are said to have seen God.) Now this certainly looks like a flat contradiction, and many besides skeptics have been puzzled by it. The solution of this apparently unanswerable difficulty is in reality very simple. We must remember first of all that two statements which in terms flatly contradict one another may both be absolutely true, for the reason that the terms are not used in the same sense in the two statements. For example, if you should ask me if I ever saw the back of my head, I might answer, “No, I never saw the back of my head,” and this statement would be strictly true.  Or I might answer, “Yes, I have seen the back of my head,” and this statement wo...

Jesus sat and spoke to a Samaritan woman in John 4 and it was an interesting conversation.  “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.m 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain,n but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is comingp when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ)“ is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”   The New International Version. (2011). (Jn 4...

“Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings.” ( Psalm 17:8 ) There are twelve references in the Bible to God’s “shadow,” understood as a type of His invisible, but very real, guiding presence. The reference in our text above is the first, and there are three other references to this beautiful metaphor—the “shadow” of the wings of God. Psalm 36:7 assures us that men can “put their trust under the shadow of thy wings,” and Psalm 57:1 that we can take refuge there “until these calamities be overpast,” and then we can “rejoice” there ( Psalm 63:7 ). The Lord’s presence is like “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land,” according to Isaiah 32:2 . The same prophet quoted God as saying that “I have covered thee in the shadow of mine hand” even as He formed the heavens and the earth, while hiding us “in the shadow of his hand” ( Isaiah 51:16 ; 49:2). Then there is the wonderful promise of Psalm 91:1: “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High s...