God of Wonders: His Immanence
“Does Jesus care when my heart is pained
Too deeply for mirth or song,
As the burdens press,
And the cares distress,
And the way grows weary and long?
O yes, He cares, I know He cares,
His heart is touched with my grief;
When the days are weary,
The long night dreary,
I know my Savior cares.”
When we contemplate the nature of God, we are humbled by the realization that God also condescends to His human creation. He does, in fact, hear our prayers but more than that, as Frank Graeff writes, “His heart is touched with my grief.”
The “immanence” of God means that although He is “far,” He is also “near.” To put it another way, although God is “beyond” this creation in His nature, He is a part of His world as its sustaining Cause.
Paul preached in Acts 17:27-28: “Yet he [God] is actually not far from each one of us, for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’”
Does cheap india cialis interact with other medications? viagra may interact with other medicines and may not show the desired results. In a very diagnostic assay, an operating surgeon removes a little piece of tissue and a spehttp://www.devensec.com/viagra-8188.html cialis purchaset examines it underneath a magnifier. Its deficiency may cause extreme fatigue, pale skin, headaches, lack free cialis without prescription of focus, cold hands and feet and also hair loss. When blood pressure is controlled, blood flow to the penis is not same as before. prescription free tadalafil devensec.com Just taking a walk through the book of Genesis shows that God wants to have a relationship with mankind. God “commanded the man” (Genesis 2:16). That implies nearness, a relationship. In verse 19, God brought the animals to the man to see what he would call them. That implies partnership. In verse 21, God “took one of his [Adam’s] ribs and closed up the flesh.” That sounds very much like physical contact. God is touching His human creation.
After Adam and Eve sinned, the Lord God – the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, the Holy God – went walking in the garden in the cool of the day. When Adam and Eve hid themselves, God called out to them. He wanted to walk with them. Enoch walked with God. Noah walked with God. Abraham was commanded to walk with God. Why? Because God is immanent. God is near us.
Now, let’s dig a little deeper into the biblical text. Take a took at Genesis 6:6-7. The KJV famously says that “it repented the Lord that he had made man.” What is going on here? In what way was the Lord “sorry” or “regretted” that He had made man?
The verb translated “regretted” and “sorry” is the Hebrew word nacham. Please observe the range of meanings in the word: “be sorry, console oneself; comfort; rue; suffer grief; repent of one’s own doings; be relieved, ease oneself” – BDB Hebrew and English Lexicon.
The Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains elaborates on the idea of “suffering grief”: “be grieved, i.e., be in a state of sorrow or regret over a person or event; be in a state of sorrow and regret about a wrong, implying a true understanding about a wrong and desire to change a thought or behavior.”
I agree with Brent Smith’s point made on the word’s use in 1 Samuel 15:11, 29, 35: “When God repents, he turns not from sin, but from one feeling or course of action to another. When God destroyed the world with a flood, he turned from creator and sustainer of mankind to destroyer of mankind” (FHU 2015 Lectureship, 430).
The point to be made here is that God has feelings. He is touched, affected, by the good/obedience that man does and by the disobedience that man does.
Through a study of the Scriptures, we learn that God can be persuaded to change His reaction to man through three avenues: prayer, repentance, His own compassion.
Because God is immanent, we can walk with Him and He is affected by our decisions (cf. Eph. 4:30).
–Paul Holland
