And I Knew It Not

“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” — Psalm 139:7 (KJV)

This chapter is built on one simple, enormous truth. What does it mean that God is everywhere? “It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is here. There is no place, there can be no place, where He is not.”

Tozer doesn't mean that God and nature are the same thing. God is in his world but far above it, the Creator and not the creation. Yet he is near: “No point is nearer to God than any other point.” Your bedroom is exactly as close to God as a cathedral.

David tried to imagine running away from God and couldn't: “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.” So, Tozer asks, why isn't everyone overwhelmed by this? Jacob gave the answer. Alone in the desert, running from his brother, he had a dream of God, woke up and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.” Tozer's comment: “That was his trouble, and it is ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they knew.”

So God's presence and our awareness of it are two different things. Getting nearer to God isn't about distance. Tozer uses a picture from family life. A father might say, “I feel that my son is coming nearer to me as he gets older,” even though his son has lived in the same house all his life. He means they understand each other better. That is the nearness we need: “We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts.”

Then a hard question: why do some people seem to find God in a way others don't? God has no favourites. “The difference lies not with God but with us.” The great saints were wildly different from each other, but they shared one thing, which he calls “spiritual receptivity,” an openness to God. “They differed from the average person in that when they felt the inward longing they did something about it.”

That openness, he says, isn't a fixed amount. “It may be increased by exercise or destroyed by neglect.” And here Tozer gets frank about the Christians of his own day. They wanted quick results: “We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away.” He saw shallow lives and a lot of entertainment in church. But he doesn't point the finger at others only. “No Christian is wholly free from blame. We have all contributed.” That includes him.

Instead of getting tangled in debates, he gives a promise to anyone who turns to God seriously: “the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in his leaner and weaker days.” Then he prays like a man who has just woken up, like Jacob:

“O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ's sake, Amen.”

God is just as present in the school corridor, the dinner table and the changing room as in church. You don't have to go somewhere special to be near him. You just have to wake up to him where you are.

And notice what Tozer says about practice. Openness to God is something like a muscle, or like learning an instrument. A thirty-second verse before you rush out is better than nothing, but what grows it is responding when you feel that pull: stopping, turning, paying attention. The saints weren't a different kind of person. They just did something about the longing.

One thing to do this week: choose three ordinary places you will be in this week, like a bus stop, the lunch queue or your bedroom. Each time you are there, pause for a moment and say Jacob's words in your head, changed so that they end the right way: Surely the LORD is in this place, and I know it.