"WHERE IS GOD?"

Where is God?

This sounds very much like a theological question in which someone is longing for the close presence of God. The Psalmist similarly asks or says to God,

    “Why, O LORD, do you stand far away?” (10:1)

    “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (22:1)

    “Do not forsake me.” (38:21)

    “Draw near to me.” (69:18)

At the same time, the Psalmist's enemies taunt him by saying, “Where is your/their God?” (42:3; 79:10)

Well, none of that is what I had in mind at all. I want to deal with the literal question of where exactly geographically or cosmologically God is living. Now that may sound like a totally ridiculous subject to pursue, but it turns out that others have taken it quite seriously.

Eden 

At least in the time right after the Creation, Michael S. Heiser in his books such as Supernatural and The Unseen Realm takes it for granted that God lived in the Garden of Eden along with Adam and Eve.

    “Eden was God's home on earth. It was his residence.”

    “Eden was both the divine abode and the nerve center for God's plan for Earth.”

    “Eden was the divine abode and, therefore, the place where Yahweh held council meetings.”

    “Earlier we discovered that Eden was the dwelling place and headquarters of the divine council.”

Of course, the biblical account only says, highly figuratively, that God would walk in the garden in the cool of the evening, not that he actually had his abode there, and certainly no hint that his heavenly council of angels set up camp there also.

The above will give you an hint of Heiser's style throughout his books. He starts by asserting a fact over and over again without actually giving any real evidence for what he is saying, and then concludes by stating that he has already proved his point. His only actual justification for saying that God physically lived in Eden is to rely on imagery from neighboring pagan nations as well as taking some very figurative language from the poetic writings in the Bible in a woodenly literal manner.

In the Sky

At least the inhabitants of Babel had the wisdom to realize that the Creator of the whole universe couldn't be pinned down to one earthly location. But they were just as literal as Heiser in thinking that maybe He could be found somewhere in the atmosphere if they built a high enough building to reach Him. The only hint that they might be correct in their reasoning is given in God's comment in Genesis 11:6 where He appears to be very concerned that these humans may actually attain their goal of reaching heaven. Of course, that is not the correct understanding of God's words in that passage.

After the flood, He had commanded people to spread throughout the earth and populate it. Instead of doing that, the people of Babel decide to make a name for themselves by settling down in one spot. Whatever God's original motive was in telling the people to scatter (and we can certainly speculate on reasons), these people were in disobedience and had to be forced into doing what He had directed. The idea that the omnipotent God would be worried that mere humans could find Him by their own actions is ludicrous.

Sinai

Apparently, by the time of the Exodus, God had abandoned Eden (as well as His place in the sky), packed up his council, and moved his headquarters. As Heiser says “God had since changed addresses. Sinai was now his domain...God's home and meeting place.” But though it is quite easy to show that Sinai was a meeting place, that is a far cry from saying that it was “God's home.” And even if that were somehow true, the problem is pinning God down geographically is still not an easy one since the Bible seems to give contradictory answers as to the location of Mt. Sinai. And here we run into three closely related biblical passages:

        “The LORD came from Sinai,

        and dawned from Seir upon us;

        he shone forth from Mount Paran.” (Deuteronomy 33:2)

        “LORD, when you went out from Seir,

        when you marched from the region of Edom.” (Judges 5:4)

        “God came from Teman,

        the Holy One from Mount Paran.” (Habakkuk 3:3)

All of these parallel place names except Mt. Sinai are located in southern Transjordan, which apparently indicates that Sinai also is located there. Thus, God by this time had apparently decided to become an Edomite and live alongside Esau's descendants instead of with Jacob's offspring. A rather unknowledgeable Bible teacher who visited our mid-week study to present a series of talks quoted the last passage above and told us seriously that it identified the “hometown” of God as Teman, as if it were the place where He had grown up.

Well, here are a few scholarly comments on these poetic verses:

Deuteronomy 33:2

Cousins: “The majesty of Yahweh is described in terms of a theophany, like the sun rising on (significantly) Sinai.” This is a poetic description of the giving of the law, not an indication of where God was residing at the time. If that were true, then the three parallel lines in this verse would just as well be used to prove that God was living in Seir or on Mount Paran.

Judges 5:4

This verse is part of the Song of Deborah following the defeat of the Canaanites in battle due to a thunderstorm coming sent from God.

Cundall: In poetic language the Song links the present deliverance with the past revelation at Sinai, when at the covenant-ceremony, God spoke to the accompaniment of a great storm...The same Almighty God had gone before them on the present occasion.”

D.R. David: “It is difficult to know whether Yahweh's going forth from Seir and marching from Edom refer to his contemporary coming to the conflict with Sisera or whether the reference is to his ancient coming to his people in Egypt and his meeting with them at Sinai.”

Thus, Grey feels that the liturgical language here does not refer to God helping at a specific battle, but “to his presence in the sacrament of the covenant” (also Weiner)

Boling says that this passage is “not a contradiction in tradition regarding the location of Sinai but an affirmation that Yahweh and Israel conquered a large extent of Canaan together, coming by way of Edom in southern Transjordan.”

Habakkuk 3:3

Robertson: “According to Habakkuk,the Lord comes from Teman and Mount Paran. By these designations, the prophet traces back along the steps by which God led Israel into the possession of the land...Habakkuk recalls Israel's past experience as a means of anticipating the intervention of the Lord in the future.”

R.L. Smith: “The petition is for God to renew his awesome work of salvation of his people which had become only a report in Habakkuk's time.”

Stephens-Hodge: “The implied prayer is, therefore, that God will come now in the fulness of that revealed nature which once He showed to Israel at Sinai.”

Jerusalem and the Temple

The strongest indications of God's dwelling on earth involve his residence in the land of Israel (as in Numbers 35:34), more specifically in Jerusalem, yet more specifically on Mt. Zion where the temple was located (Psalm 9:11;74:2; Isaiah 8:18; etc.), and even more specifically in the Ark of the Covenant located in the Holy of Holies within the temple. And yet even these references are ambiguous and certainly not designed to limit God's existence within any earthly place.

On the one hand, we have God stating in II Samuel 7:6, “I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle.” (see Exodus 29:45-46) One gets the clear impression that God is tired of being hauled around in the Ark from place to place and is ready to set down roots somewhere. But then in Isaiah 66:1, God sarcastically asks, “Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house you would build for me?” This verse is quoted twice later in the NT, at Matthew 5:35 and Acts 7:48-50.

In the same vein, Solomon rightly asks, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you much less this house I have built!” (I Kings 8:27; II Chronicles 6:18)

Another OT phrase that appears more than once to describe where God lives says that He is “enthroned above the cherubim.” See II Kings 19:15; Psalm 80:1; and Isaiah 37:16. Tanner points out that “Dwelling on the cherubim represents both the ark that traveled with Israel in the wilderness and the holy of holies later in Jerusalem (Exod. 25:8). But according to Ps. 99:1, it also represents God's eternal [celestial] throne.” And keep in mind that the Psalmist of Ps. 123:1 speaks equally of God being “enthroned in the heavens.”

The same ambiguity applies to statements asserting that God resided in the Jerusalem temple:

    II Kings 19:15-16: Paul House notes that although Hezekiah speaks of God being in the Temple (referencing the ark of the covenant), “Hezekiah furthers the image beyond Israel by stating that the Lord 'is over all the kingdoms of the earth...'”

    Isaiah 33:5 says,

        “God dwells on high,

        He fills Zion with justice and righteousness.”

Blenkinsopp explains the first line as referring to God's dwelling in the sky, although the second line would appear to restrict His activities to Mt. Zion.

Psalm 11:4 presents that same dual image:

        “The LORD is in his holy temple;

        the LORD's throne is in heaven.”

As Anderson says, the phrase in his holy temple “could denote the heavenly abode of God, as is implied by the parallelism, but it may equally refer to the Temple on Mount Zion, which was a representation of Yahweh's dwelling place in heaven.”

Similarly, God promises to reside on Zion with His people forever (Psalm 68:16; 132:14). But that promise is qualified (as are other seemingly unconditional promises in the OT) in Jeremiah 7:3-7 as being dependent on the people amending their evil ways. Thus, in Zechariah 8:3, God has to talk about a future time when He will return to Zion and dwell in the midst of Jerusalem.”

My own conclusion to this whole section is that God was (and is) especially close to the Jewish people throughout their history, but that they often took that idea to far so as to exclude His presence elsewhere in the Creation. For example, look at the priest Eli learning that the Ark has been captured by the Philistines. He apparently implies from that fact that God Himself has been carried off to a foreign land without the power to return again, and he falls over dead from the shock. (I Samuel 4:17)

Or look at those Babylonian exiles who hang up their harps and moan, “How can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?” (Psalm 137) They may just be expressing their lament that Jerusalem and the temple are no longer available to them in which to worship, but there is possibly the common pagan idea being expressed that said all gods were regional gods who lost all their power outside the geographical realm under their control.

It might also be helpful to consider the prophet's Temple Sermon in Jeremiah 7:1-15 to close out this section. It is most known for the sarcastic comment in v. 4: “Do not trust in these words: 'This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.'” D.R. Jones explains:

    “The thrust of Jeremiah's teaching is that, though the Temple belongs to the Lord...it is not in itself the object in which people should repose their trust, giving them confidence of deliverance. He will do what he wills with his own, and when it becomes a fetish he will destroy it as he destroyed Shiloh...It is not the LORD himself who lives in the Temple. Indeed his dwelling-place is in heaven. But he permits himself to be known here...”

Outer Space

This last possibility for God's abode is the one that most of would have to admit is at least subliminally what we think about when we picture heaven. It has been widely reported that when Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into outer space, he remarked “I don't see any God up here.” It turns out that there is no truth to this story, and actually that cosmonaut and his children were all baptized into the Orthodox faith. Instead, the rumor probably arose from a remark that Khrushchev made in a speech afterward saying, "Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there.”

Well, even when I was back in high school, I could have told Khrushchev that was a ridiculous statement. Not because I was a budding theologian back then, but because I was a budding scientist. At one point, I had been pondering the strange statement in Revelation 8:1 concerning the silence in heaven for about a half-hour. Most commentators today explain it as simply a dramatic pause in the action preceding the plagues ushered in by the seven trumpets, but I took the time period very literally at the time.

I noted that immediately after this period of silence and before the actual plagues, an angel offered the prayers of the all the saints, perhaps indicating that what was to follow was in response to those particular prayers. But what if that was the reason for waiting a half-hour, to allow enough time to receive those prayers from earth? Transmitting prayers from earth to heaven at the speed of sound would not work since sound can't travel in a vacuum. In addition, many of those prayers would not have been spoken out loud. Therefore, another form of energy must be utilized as a means of communication, one traveling close to the speed of light, i.e. 671 million miles per hour. If they took one-half hour to reach heaven, that would translate to a distance of 336 million miles.

Now if you consider the average distances of the planets' orbits, earth is about 93 million miles from the sun, Mars is 170 million miles, and Jupiter is 550 million miles. Since we are only, on average, 77 million miles from Mars, that would place heaven somewhere beyond its orbit. The next nearest planet to earth is Jupiter, with an average orbit 550 million miles from the sun and 457 miles from earth. Thus, by my very rough calculations, heaven is located somewhere in the solar system between Mars and Jupiter. So obviously Gagarin came nowhere close enough to see God.

Conclusion

Of course, all of the above is nonsense but it does illustrate the futility of trying to pin down a God who is omnipresent and try to safely contain Him in a box of our own making and liking.