2. The Lord Jesus never associateil omnipresence with infnitiide. HebreAV philosophy, in the person of its supposed founder, might exclaim : ' Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee' (1 K 8-") ; but no such thought ever came from the lips of Jesus. To Him the distinctive conceji- tion of omnipresence was : The child of God cannot go where his Father is not. He did not associate omnipresence with the inhnitely great, but rather with the inhnitely little. He was chiefly concerned to show that in the minute events of life God is present and observant ; and that there is nothing so trivial as to elude the vigilance of our Father in heaven. The Lord Jesus left it for philosophers to lash their weary imaginaticms so as to trace the ubiquity of Gocl in the inhnite recesses of space, and to prove that everywhere there are indications of the same law and order as in the world around us, and that the indications of the presence of a supreme Mind are as apparent in the sidereal heavens as here. If we may so say, Christ's con- ception was microscopic rather than telescopic. To trace the tokens of the presence of God's work- manship in the colours of the lily, or in the pro- vision God has made for feeding the ravens, yielded great joy to the Saviour's heart because it sug- gested so strikingly that God is ' round about us,' and enabled Him the better to impress on the hearts of His discijtles, when their faith Avas so feeble, that God was very near to them, to sympa- thize, to succour, and to bless, as well as to further the interests of His Kingdom.
3. It is probable that Christ's teaching on this subject was intended to be a corrective to much of the current Jewish theology of that period. An outstanding peculiarity of the religious thought of Christ's time was the emphasis j)laced on the doctrine of God's aloofness. The Jews had im- ported, probably from Persia, the belief that matter is essentially evil. Hence it was considered to be beneath the dignity of the Divine nature that God should be .supposed to have direct contact with inert matter, or immediate intercourse with sinful men ; and under the influence of this belief God Avas gradually pushed further aAvay from His Avorld. This conception Avas operative in tAvo Avays : (ct) To the Palestinian JeAvs God Avas con- ceived of as enjoying the otiose majesty of an Oriental monarch, Avho is kept informed of the deeds of men and the events of the Avorld by the ' angels of the Presence,' Avho ' at His bidding
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speed o'er land and sea,' and report what they have seen and heard. (6) The Alexandrian Jews, of whose beliefs Philo was the chief exponent, ti'eated the matter more philosophically, and they pushed the doctrine of God's ' separateness ' from all that is material, earthly, and human, to such an extent as to deny that God has any qualities at all. Philo maintained, as some moderns have done, that to assign any quality or attribute to God is to limit Him : Avhich is inadmissible, since God is the absolutely unlimited, eternal, unchangeable, simple substance. 'Of God,' said Philo, 'we can only know that He is, not ivhat He is' (Drummond, Philo Judceus, ii. 23-30). Knowing as we do that this was the trend of Jewish thought in Christ's day, it is difficult to believe that Christ's teaching as to the Divine omnipresence and fatherly care, in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, was not meant to be a corrective of the current theology, which in its endeavour to de-humanize God was in danger of un-deifying Him.
And now we are jirepared to consider in detail the intimations of omnipresence which meet us in the Gospels ; and we may conveniently arrange them in three groujis, according as they refer to the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit.
i. Passages which teach or imply the omnipresence of God the Fatlier. We know what kind of in- timations to expect. We shall not meet with much that will satisfy our intellectual, philo- sophical nature, but with much that will appeal deeply to our religious nature.
As Dr. Stevens says : ' He (Jesus) aims to rescue the idea of God from the reahn of cold and powerless abstraction, and to make it a practical, living power in the heart. He sought to inspire in men an intense and constant sense of God's presence and care' {Theol. of NT, 66). Similarly, Dr. Orr teaches that ' Christ's doctrine of the Father is entirely unmetaphysical. . . . He takes up into His teaching all the natural truth about God. He also takes up all the truth about God's being, character, perfections, and relation to the world and man, already given intheOT.' But ' the attributes of God . . . are never made by Christ the subject of formal discourse, are never treated of for their own sake, or in their metaphysical relations. They come into view solely in their religious relations' (Christian View, 77 f.).
The distinctive feature as to the omnipresence of God in the Sermon on the Mount is to be found in the words, ' Thy Father who is in secret' (Mt 6^**). Others may expatiate on the fact that God tran- scends the heaven of heavens, our Lord was con- cerned to bring home to the religious consciousness of His disciples, that God is in the secret place of their lowly dwelling, where no other eye can see them. To use the words of Beyschlag— Christ taught that —