One thing I think I often lose track of is how offensive sin is to God. I have had a verse from Job in my mind, intermittently, since our local Bible study went over that book last spring (the entirety of it, which was refreshing, since most just look at the beginning and end). Toward the end of the book, Elihu, who is normally seen as the more doctrinally correct of the characters in the book (Job aside), says this (35:5-8):
Look up at the heavens and see;
gaze at the clouds so high above you.
If you sin, how does that affect him?
If your sins are many, what does that do to him?
If you are righteous, what do you give to him,
or what does he receive from your hand?
Your wickedness affects only a man like yourself,
and your righteousness only the sons of men.
This seems like a very rational thing to say. For how does it change God if I sin, and how is he affected by my righteousness or sinfulness? I am less than a gnat in the transcendent presence of God. There is a sense in which this is true, but ultimately, I have come to think that Elihu is fundamentally mistaken when he says this.
Elihu takes into sober consideration the incomparable holiness of God, set apart and above humanity. But he fails to take into consideration another quality: God’s omnipresence. Every time in Scripture that we see God acting, we see he has knowledge of what is going on – and not as a passive observer in the heavens with a thousand eyes pointed toward earth, but as a present and privy party member to what has happened. He often interacts with his creation in a manner less than fully revelatory of this portion of his nature. I think this is because he desires relationship (which requires response on our end, not mere passive transfer of knowledge), and because a full understanding of the omnipresence of God, as we are, would crush us. Consider how personally God has known…
Abel’s murder (Gen 4:10): “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”
The plight of the Israelites in Egypt (Ex 3:7-8): “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey…”
Hezekiah’s plea (Isa 38:4-6): “Go and tell Hezekiah, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of your father David, says: I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will add fifteen years to your life. And I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria. I will defend this city.’ ”
Jesus calling Nathaniel (Jn 1:48): ” ‘How do you know me?’ Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, ‘I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ ”
When God moves to interact with men and women, he does so in response and in answer to what he has seen and what he knows: and this is everything. This does not seem to me to be a knowledge gained from afar, and when we read about how God delights in his creation (Gen 1, Ps 104, 148, etc.), I cannot help but think that this knowledge is personal and immediate.
So when Elihu rhetorically asks Job “If you sin, how does that affect him?” the answer can and must be one of terror. For if God is here, not mediating his knowledge of creation through angels or from a distance, but if he is here, if he is present, then we sin and profane him not in some separate sphere of reality, but to his very face. It is true that we are not in the presence of God in the same way Christ is in the presence of the Father, or the saints who have gone ahead of us are in his presence, for we see encounters of the terrifying and awing glimpses of the fullness of God in Scripture (Mt. Sinai, Isaiah’s vision, the Transfiguration) and these are not our experiences, for “we see through a glass darkly”. Yet God’s omniscience implies his omnipresence, and this is a frightening thought indeed. For such means that every private deed or word, every mild act of cruelty and objectification, every synapse that fires to bring into my mind the degrading of God, his creation, and his children, wherever I am and at whatever time – all of these are done not in my own corner of earth, but before God himself. Sin is precisely so offensive because it is done not from afar but in the very presence of the one it contradicts. I have treated men and women with contempt and indifference before their creator. I have cursed God in his presence, and even if only in my mind, he was still there. There is nowhere to go, and nothing I can do to escape from his terrible and numinous presence.
I have said that God’s omniscience implies his omnipresence. C.S. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory,
St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (I Cor. viii. 3). It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully re-echoed in another passage of the New Testament. There we are warned that it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words: “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all.
This is a sobering thing to think of: that the offense of sin is removed when the presence of God is utterly removed, so that he no longer has to endure the insults we are constantly heaping upon him and his character. He will have nothing to do with it, and not because he has not been patient or long-suffering with us (indeed, when we become even the slightest bit aware of our sin, we can have only an overwhelming sense of how much greater it must be to God). But because like anyone who is just, and anyone that is loving, he cannot continue to force his presence upon those that reject it. There is a point beyond which to do so is futile and cruel. Lewis writes again in The Great Divorce,
At the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.
And here we have one of Lewis’ many profound insights: that the presence of God in Heaven, and the absence of God in Hell, work backward through time into all our experiences on earth. In a very real sense, at this very moment you and I are either coming more completely into the full presence of God, or we are leaving it. And it is in light of this that the inconceivable offenses of our sin, which is rejection of God (that is, his attributes and his character) in his presence, becomes a burden which cannot be lifted or removed, for we have done this before an ever-present God, entailing the necessity that he will not always be ever-present to those like us.
(I will follow up this post in a few days with another completing the rest of the story)
This is the mystery which I cannot write about, or speak about, or even communicate to my fellow man. The best I can do is say ‘grace and peace’ – or try to encapsulate in my feeble words the unbelievable news that I have found acceptance where there was none. In the introduction to the Gospel of John, he tries to communicate the unprecedented love of God saying that “the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” This is a much greater statement than we 21st century Westerners can appreciate, not having lived with an oppressive law crying out God’s low view of us, only to have discovered and seen and touched this God, and found him wholly loving where we expected otherwise. All I can say is that such grace overflows into every aspect of life. It recreates the creation, it redeems every person under heaven, it brings joy in the middle of sadness, it brings God into the midst of humanity, and humanity is not destroyed. Its nature is to be received, its rejection is anathema, and now what words I had to describe the grace found in Christ are gone, and I can only place my hand over my mouth and wonder at the freedom and love that exists in God. It is far too much for me.
