MaryEllen Montville
“Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.” –Psalm 139:7-8.
This isn’t my original message. While searching for the page in my devotional where the inspiration for my original message came from, the above verses caught my eye, and the Holy Spirit began speaking. He wants to use what He has chosen to set us free, if we’re willing to come clean with Him. To stop hiding our sins. Stop lying to Him, playing the blame game, and fess up!
The first 18 verses of Psalm 139 leave no doubt about how intimately God knows each of us. Verses like: “My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.” Or “you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”
Long before our earthly parents had a clue as to who we’d become, God knew.
He knew the day you’d come into the world, and God knows the day you’ll depart: “all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
God knows how you think. “You perceive my thoughts from afar.”
And He knows what you’ll say—before you do. “Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely.”
So what makes any of us think we can hide anything from the God who knows us far better than our earthly parents? Better even than we know ourselves. And yet, that’s what we try to do. Hide. Cover up.
As if!
We think God doesn’t know what we’re hiding, yet His Word makes it clear as water that long before it ever happened, God knew we’d try to hide it from Him!
This tendency to try to hide things from Jesus isn’t new, beloved.
Our impulse to hide from an Omniscient (All-Knowing) God was inherited from our original parents, Adam and Eve, after they ate what God told them would kill them—ending their face-to-face communion with Jesus and ushering in the physical death of the body. “It’s your sins that have cut you off from God. Because of your sins, he has turned away and will not listen anymore.” –Isiah 59:2. Created in the image of God and brought into a perfect world, these two got to commune with Him, face-to-face, physically. “And they heard the sound the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” –Genesis 3:8.
Some scholars believe it was Jesus, Christ’s pre-incarnate appearance to men, whom Adam and Eve saw in the Garden, not God the Father.
They came to this conclusion by comparing numerous verses of Scripture, such as John 6:46: “Not that anyone has seen the Father except the One who is from God; only He has seen the Father.” And Exodus 33:20, where, while speaking to Moses, God the Father said: “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!” These, coupled with numerous other Scriptures and the fact that Jesus is referred to as the Father’s physical representative on earth, all point to Jesus being the One Adam and Eve walked with in the Garden. “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being”. –Hebrews 1:3.
Now, Adam and Eve may have been the first to see Jesus face-to-face, but they weren’t the last. So did Father Abraham, Jacob & Moses, and others; each experienced a pre-incarnate visitation from Jesus. Read about these for yourself. (Genesis 18; 32:30 & Exodus 24).
Based on the certitude of Hebrews 1:3, and a variety of Scriptures, we know and believe Jesus, being fully God yet fully man, did walk this earth in physical form, and was seen by His disciples and many witnesses both before and after His Resurrection: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” –John 1:1
The Apostle Paul, referencing Jesus’ resurrection, tells us this: 1 Corinthians 15:6: “After that, Jesus was seen by more than five hundred of the believers at the same time. Most of them are still living today, but some have died.”
Okay. Got it! But wait. Isn’t Jesus God?
Correct!
How then could Jesus appear to both Adam and Eve, His disciples, and a multitude of others, and they all not drop dead before Him, “if no man can see God and live” – Exodus 33:20?
This answer leads us to our final theological term of the day, Kenosis. Defined as “emptying,” the giving up of divine glory by the eternal Son of God when he became incarnate. And what better way than Scripture to answer “how” anyone could stand before Jesus and not be consumed: “Who, being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.r” Philippians 2:6-7.
So, now that we’ve tried to wrap our heads around God, unintelligible, so unsearchable as to be Triune in nature, and yet One, a mystery so great that not even the likes of Solomon could fully understand Him. So Mighty, He spoke, and a whole universe, with everything from unplumed galaxies to amoebas, appeared. How then can we think, after reading about God in Psalm 139 and every other Scripture offered up today, that we might conceivably hide anything from this Jesus, who, not even the darkest of nights can conceal anything from: “If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day for darkness is as light to you.” –Psalm 139:11-12
Yet, though Mighty, holding the power of Life and death in His hand, God is full of tender mercy, long-suffering, and Love. “The Lord does not delay [as though He were unable to act] and is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is [extraordinarily] patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.” –2 Peter 3:9
We need only go back to Genesis, to the Garden, to catch our first glimpse of this Truth.
There, we’ll read about the innocent blood of animals God shed to cover the sins of His guilty children, Adam and Eve, and, by the revelation of the Holy Spirit, recognize His act for what it truly was: the foreshadowing of the innocent Blood Jesus, having been born in the flesh, would one day shed for the sins of every soul who’ll cry out to Him for forgiveness. “God presented Him as an atoning sacrifice in His blood through faith, in order to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance He had passed over the sins committed beforehand.” –Romans 3:25.
“And He [that same Jesus] is the propitiation for our sins [the atoning sacrifice that holds back the wrath of God that would otherwise be directed at us because of our sinful nature—our worldliness, our lifestyle]; and not for ours alone, but also for (the sins of all believers throughout) the whole world.”–1 John 2:2.
Don’t miss those last few Life-giving Words, friends: “but also for [the sins of all believers throughout] the whole world.” To be forgiven of the sins Jesus foreknew you’d commit, Scripture says this: “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.” Romans 10:9-10.
So, have you come clean with God?
If not, what are you waiting for?
Have you declared, believed, and professed to the One from whom not one thing you do, say, or think is hidden? “You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.” –Psalm 139:5-6.
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