The Reality of God's Presence

Can you imagine what it cost Jesus to lay aside His wisdom, power, and omnipresence, and come to earth to be one of us, with us? To know the wonder and glory of God’s intimate, total presence—and then because He was only a baby, have no awareness of it. What a sacrifice! He was no super-baby, unlike any other human babies ever born. He had for a time, I believe, no consciousness of being God; moreover He did not even have memory of it.

For perhaps three years or seven or ten—we don’t know—Jesus lived as any other child. At age twelve, Scripture tells us, He recognized who He was; until then, He had perhaps no extraordinary sense of God. But the Father was there all along! At the end of life too, hanging bloodied on the Cross, Jesus lost for awhile the consciousness of God’s presence, crying out, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” And yet knowing God was there—even though not sensing Him any longer—He prayed, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

No doubt there were times when Jesus sensed very particularly His Father’s presence, perhaps in lonely hours of prayer on the mountain side. But sometimes, busy with the needs of the people around Him, He did not stop for extended prayer. He simply recognized that the Father was there. At the miracle meal where five thousand families were served AYCE *, He “took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the multitude.” (Luke 9:16 NKJV). Had you or I been doing it, we probably would at least have prayed, “O God, please make this work!”

Another time, people brought to Jesus a man who could neither hear nor speak plainly. After Jesus took the man aside, away from the crowd, He put his fingers into the man’s ears and touched his tongue. He looked up to heaven with a deep sigh, and then declared, "Be opened!" Immediately the man’s ears were opened and his tongue was loosened so that he spoke without difficulty. (See Mark 7:33-35)

At Lazarus’s tomb, Jesus only “looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, thank you for hearing me. You always hear me, but I said it out loud for the sake of all these people standing here, so that they will believe you sent me.’ ” (John 11:41, 42 NLT) He did not need to make a desperate petition, even though He was going to raise a man who had been dead for four days! Access to the throne of God was already established and maintained.

A look to heaven, a sigh, a prayer of thanks. So then, did Jesus live by knowledge of God’s presence, just as we now have to do? I think so; He was made one of us. He showed us that we could live in the reality of God’s presence, regardless of whether we moment-by-moment sense it or not.

*All you can eat

Scripture marked NKJV taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotation marked NLT is taken from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. United States of America. All rights reserved.

MaryMartha
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Email: mrymrtha@gmail.com