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God is not far from every one of us.

I. IN THE NATURE AND ASPIRATIONS OF THE SOUL. "We are also His offspring." "We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone graven by art and man's device." The art of the sculptor may grave an exact resemblance of the human body, but cannot make a similitude of the soul. And it is in the soul that our child likeness to God is found. He who is the Father of our spirits must be Himself a spirit. And that our spirits are endowed with reason, affection and will, suggests the conception of a supreme intelligence, affection. The same is true of our moral endowments. Our sense of right and wrong (Romans 2:15) points upward to a Being of absolute truth and holiness. And so also the desires of our souls are indications of a Being in whose love we may find absolute repose, and from whose resources all our spiritual wants may be supplied. The offspring bear the likeness of the universal Father. It is His witness, His imprint and the mark of our Divine paternity; "in which He is not far from every one of us."

II. IN HIS ESSENTIAL PRESENCE. He is omnipresent in His authority and influence, as a king in all his dominions. But His presence is not only influential, it is actual. "In Him we live and move and have our being." He is God "above all and through all and in you all." "He fills heaven and earth." This universal and actual presence of God is, according to Scripture, the source of His perfect knowledge. There is no doubt a sublime mystery in this conception. But I can just as readily conceive of an infinite spirit filling immensity as of a finite spirit filling my own body. Nor is there any kinship between this Divine omnipresence and Pantheism. There is a worldwide difference between saying that God is everywhere, and saying that everything is part of God. The one degrades, the other exalts Him. The one is the foundation of all idolatry; the other lies at the base of all true worship and of all true religion. Let a man realise that he can never be alone, because the Father is with him, and the sublime thought will restrain him from sin, and just in proportion as he apprehends God's wisdom, power and love, it will fill his heart with confidence and his lips with prayer, and undergird his whole being with Divine strength.

III. IN THE DAILY WORKINGS OF HIS PROVIDENCE. He has "never left Himself without a witness" to His universal presence. His sun shining alike upon the evil and the good; all the revolutions and order of the material universe, and all the mysterious influences which hold human society together, bear a perpetual testimony to the presence and goodness of God. It is true that men do not always hear this testimony, and that when they hear it they often misinterpret and pervert it. It is easy for us to attribute all these things to the operation of second causes, and even to worship the things that are seen, and it is no less easy to attribute them all to the blind operation of natural law, and to exclude all thought of an intelligent lawgiver. But after all there is in the soul of man an intuitive perception of God and longing after Him. "For He has made of one blood," etc., i.e., He so constitutes their common nature "that they should seek the Lord," etc. And it is to this common religious nature which feels after God that the Scriptures constantly appeal.

IV. AS OUR JUDGE. The incompleteness and the disorders of the present life all point forward to retribution beyond the grave. Conscience warns us of it. Hope aspires to it. Fear shrinks back from it. And who shall determine that destiny for us but the God in whose hands our breath is and whose are all our ways? And how near judgment is! There is but a hand breath between us and death and the tremendous realities which it will reveal to us. The Judge standeth at the door. Our character will be determined, and our condition will be fixed by God in whom we live and move and have our being.

V. IS THE PREACHING OF THE GOSPEL AND IN ALL THE MEANS OF GRACE AND SALVATION. Here it is that revealed religion comes in to supplement and give efficacy to the teaching of natural religion.

(H. J. Van Dyke D. D.)

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KJV: That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:

WEB: that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.