Omnipresence

God everywhere

The psalmist looks for a place to hide from God and finds that there is none:

Where can I go to escape Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, You are there.

Psalm 139:7-8

"Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?" the LORD asks (Jeremiah 23:24). Solomon, dedicating the temple he had built, prayed, "The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain You, much less this temple I have built" (1 Kings 8:27). And Paul told the Athenians that God "is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:27).

Omnipresence does not mean that God is spread through the world like air, a little of him in each place. "God is Spirit" (John 4:24): he has no size or parts, and so he is present whole wherever he is. Nor does it mean that God is the world. He is the Creator, distinct from all he has made, and near to all of it. The Westminster Confession calls God ‘immense’ Westminster Confession 2.1: no space can measure or contain him.

God with us

Though God is present everywhere, Scripture also speaks of his presence in special ways. His glory filled the tabernacle and the temple; the Word became flesh and dwelt among us; and now the Holy Spirit dwells in those who believe (see indwelling). Jesus told the Samaritan woman that "a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem" (John 4:21). Augustine, commenting on the passage, gives this counsel: "Would you pray in the temple? pray in yourself; but first do you become the temple of God" Augustine.

Omnipresence is both a warning and a comfort. That no one can hide from God means that no sin is hidden from him. Yet the psalmist, at the farthest sea, says, "even there Your hand will guide me; Your right hand will hold me fast" (Psalm 139:10).

Where is Christ's body?

At the Reformation, Lutheran and Reformed churches came to speak differently about where the human nature of Christ is present, a question bound up with how Christ is present in the Lord's Supper. Lutherans teach that because the divine and human natures are united in one person, Christ's human nature shares in the divine majesty, so that he can be truly present with his body wherever he wills, and above all in the Supper Formula of Concord, art. 8. The Reformed confess that Christ's human nature ascended and is now in heaven, while his divine nature, being everywhere, is also beyond the bounds of his humanity yet always united to it:

Christ is true Man and true God: according to his human nature, he is now not upon earth; but according to his Godhead, majesty, grace, and Spirit, he is at no time absent from us.

Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 47

Both trust the promise, "And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20); they explain differently the manner of his presence. See the lesson What God is like.