SINFUL MAN: UNCOMFORTABLE IN GOD’S PRESENCE

“And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou” (GENESIS 3:9)?

Sin never feels comfortable in the divine presence!

 

Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden. Their fear and chagrin for the moment overcame their conscious need of God. Jonah, in his determined refusal to obey God’s command, rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

 

Peter, with a sudden acute consciousness of personal guilt, sought not to flee from the Lord’s presence but begged the Lord instead to depart from him!

 

Men need God above everything else yet are uncomfortable in His presence. This is the self-contradictory moral situation sin has brought us into.

 

The notion that there is a God but that He is comfortably far away is not embodied in the doctrinal statement of any Christian church. Anyone who dared admit that he held such a creed would be considered a heretic and avoided by respectable religious people; but our actions, and especially our spontaneous utterances, reveal our true beliefs better than any conventional creed can do.

 

If we are to judge by these, I think it can hardly be denied that the average Christian thinks of God as being at a safe distance, looking the other way!

 

 

  1. W. Tozer