Immanence Maintained

God is everywhere. That doesn't mean He is "near" things, or "beside" things; He is present inside them as well. He is in a rock, or in a stick, or in the smallest molecule or atom. God is truly everywhere, and holds all things together, for His Divine purpose (Col. 1:17; Acts 17:28; Heb. 1:3). Now, someone will say: Are you saying God is a stick?  No! That is pantheism, which says God IS the material world. I'm not talking about "what" God is, I'm talking about "where" He is. And if God is truly omnipresent, and He is, then there is no place where He isn't.

What is God? Jesus said, “God is a spirit…” What is a Spirit? We know that God’s Spirit is different from the spirits he made in the angelic realm. They have finite bodies, but God has no body. He is described as the logos, which really is logic (Clark). Logic has no substance to it, and it occupies no space. We cannot imagine what non-space looks like. Just think, God occupies no space; yet He can have space, time, and matter, within His thoughts. We have our existence because we were thought of by God. Nothing exists outside of God, because He cannot transcend Himself. To give to the material universe an existence outside God, would be to give to the material universe an existence where God is not present.

Out of what then did the material universe come from? If it appeared out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo), then nothing was a place where God was not, and so God wouldn't be omnipresent. Is there really a “nothing” out there where God is not present? If God is truly omnipresent (and He is), then He cannot be considered “near” or “beside” things, He must be considered present within them as well. To say that God’s presence is beside the material universe, is to say that God is not omnipresent. I don’t see how one can explain how God can be considered omnipresent if He is not present "IN" the things that make-up the material universe.

I say we came out of God, as out of His thoughts, not as out of some “divine stuff,” or out of some “nothingness” from which God is not present. We are OF incorporeal thought, and not the result of some kind of metamorphoses. What is real to us is actually a thought in God. We are a reality of the execution of God’s Divine purpose (forever known, and at the appointed time, executed according to His will). Real, only as the Creator has given us reality. Divine, only in the sense of His Divine purpose. Other, only with respect to how His Divine purpose is different from His person. There is a distinction between the universe and the One who created it, by WHAT is thought of, versus, WHO thought of it; yet the One who created the universe is not separate from it.