The passage that is before us this morning, Psalm 139, sings of the ineffable, the unspeakable glory of our God. It's as if David, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, is plunged into the multidimensional, all-encompassing depths of the glory of God, and he's singing of the glory which he beholds. He speaks of the omniscience of God, the power of God, the providential sovereignty of God, the dominion of God over his enemies, the care of God for his people. And all of it, as you read through the psalm, it all just bleeds together. We're at seminary. We are theological specialists here. If you want to put it nicely, if you want to put it honestly, we're theological nerds here. We like to speak of God's simplicity. Our God is one. He's not composed of a bunch of various parts. He just is what he is. He is God. Well, how on earth do you explain that? Well, here we see David stammering in his attempt to do so. God is omniscient. He knows all things. And so David talks about that. And then all of a sudden, no transition, David talks about how God is omnipresent. He's everywhere. And then all of a sudden, no transition, David's talking about God's justice, how he judges the wicked with whom he always is present via his omnipresence. David, in meditating on the glory of God, is drawn from one perfection, one attribute, right down to the other attribute without transition, because there is no transition. This just is the God whose glory explodes the heaven and the earth. But we want this morning to fix our eyes, to fix our hearts, on one, on just one of these perfections of which David sings, and that is the omnipresence of God. We just now read the whole of Psalm 139, but as I mentioned, we're going to be focusing our attention on verses 7 through 12, where David meditates on the glorious, terrifying, trembling truth that our God is everywhere. He is indistant from every point in all of reality. The living God is everywhere present in his glory, comforting, sending, and calling his people. Now, the reality that David sets most immediately before us is that the living God is everywhere present in his glory. Look with me again at verses 7 through 12. Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee. Now here there's some important context. For the previous six verses, since the very beginning of Psalm 139, David has been speaking of God's omniscience. God has searched David and knows him, verse one. God knows when David stands and when he sits in rest, verse two. God even knows the details of David's thoughts, also in verse two. Not just what David does or what David says, are the very thoughts that pulsate through his mind. Think about that. How often are relationships preserved? How often is disagreement avoided? Simply because while others can hear your words, they can see your actions, they can't listen in on your mind. They can't know what you're thinking if you choose to keep those thoughts to yourself. But God knows. To God, what you think is laid as bare and it is as accessible as the movements of your hands. God doesn't just know what David does. He knows what David thinks. And so it comes as no surprise then that God knows all of David's movements and actions as well. Verse three. And when David's thoughts distill into words, when there's something that David is gonna bring before the world, something that he's gonna express to those around him before those words even slip off of his tongue, God knows them. Verse four. God is behind David, he's before David. There's no sliver of reality where David's thoughts can go where they are not known in their entirety by God. In Acts 17 verse 28, Paul tells the philosophers assembled in Athens that it is in God that we live and move and have our being. God isn't just one among a host of actors on a stage, bigger, larger, more important than all the others. No, God is the very air that fills the entire scene. There is nothing exterior to him. That realization is settling into David's mind. It's animating David's praise here in Psalm 139. There is nothing that God doesn't know. Nothing that God doesn't know before we even know that it's a thing to be known. And that meditation leads to the verses that are before us this morning. How does God know all these things? God knows all of these things because, among other things, He is everywhere present in His glory. David asks this question, a question that seems almost poised at the margins of exasperated worship. Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Now here we have to deal with the fullness of Scripture, the fullness of its meaning. You know, David here speaks of God's Spirit, his Ruach in the Hebrew. In the light of the clarity, the fullness of New Testament revelation, we know that Scripture here is speaking, at least in my opinion, of the Holy Spirit. God, by His Spirit, is present everywhere. Our God, who is triune, even before He revealed His triunity to His people, He was acting as the triune God. And here, Scripture speaks of that. David, writing under inspiration, is disclosing more than he even knows. But what David writes in verse 7 also has to do not just with the person of the Holy Spirit, but with the fact that God is spirit. In his triune fullness, God is a spiritual being. The scriptures are clear, they're frank on this. Jesus says very directly in John 4 verse 24, God is a spirit. Our reformed standards are equally clear. Question four of the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, what is God? The answer, God is a spirit. And what that means, all that's bound up with the spirituality of God, that could fill an entire sermon in its own right. But what it means specifically for our purposes here is that God doesn't take up space. He's not a spatial being. He's not defined by or limited by or located by physical presence or physical extension. He's not located by taking up space. Now, we creatures, we're not that way. We're spatial beings. We're spiritual beings also. We have created souls. But those souls are joined to bodies. And those bodies are physical substances. And that means, among other things, that we take up space. And we are defined by, in some senses, we're defined by taking up space. Right now, I'm standing in this pulpit. I'm behind it. My hands are on the pulpit. And so you, none of you, can stand in this pulpit. I'm in this place, and so by definition, none of you can be. The space right here, for now, is filled by me. And with me filling that space, that space is unavailable to everyone else in all of creation because I'm the one filling it. But it isn't so with God. God is a spirit. And so my being in this pulpit has absolutely no bearing on God's presence here. He isn't competing with me to fill this space. He doesn't fill space in that way. He's spirit. I can't bump up against him. I can't move around him because he's not material. He's spirit. The Children's Catechism puts it so simply, so well, it states it with a simplicity that when you push just a little bit, it beckons you into bottomless mystery. What is God? The Children's Catechism asks. And it answers, God is a spirit. He doesn't have a body like man. And meditating on that mysterious fact, David realizes that there is nowhere he can go to gain distance from that Spirit. Where can you go from God's Spirit? David can't reach the edge of that Spirit and then take just one step more and move beyond God. David can't go anywhere where the spiritual God is not. King Solomon Praying before the temple in 1 Kings 8, verse 27, he confessed about God that the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Him. God's everywhere. There's nowhere that one can venture where God is not. David repeats the same truth again in verse 7, or whither shall I flee from thy presence? There is no corner of the creation. There is no infinitesimal point in the created realm where the creator is absent. David frames it very starkly, very strikingly in verse eight. If I send up into heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. David, of course, is using a merism there, a figure of speech wherein you name two extremes, heaven and hell, the highest height, the deepest depth. David names these two extremes, and by naming those extremes, he's referring to, or he has in mind, the entire spectrum. God is present in heaven, God is present in hell, God is present everywhere. David is speaking figuratively here. But he also is speaking literally. If you were whisked into heaven's environs, God would be there. If you sank to hell's abyss, God would be there. There is nowhere in this world, in the world to come, there is nowhere where God is not. There's no point in this world or the world to come that is distant from him. Just as kind of an aside, consider what David is telling us here. We often consider that the damned in hell suffer in some sort of vacuum. God is absent. To be there is to be in isolation from God. Now certainly to be in hell is to be absent from God's favor, but it's not to be absent from God. The terror of hell is not that God is absent. He's imperceptible. No, the terror of hell is that God is there. The creator and judge of all things is there in the unmitigated fire of his holiness. He's judging. And so even those who are enemies of God, even those who deny Him, who hate Him, those who have sought to pull down the mountains upon themselves in order to introduce some distance, some space between them and the God with whom they want nothing to do, even they can't get separation from Him. Even they cannot exist, even for a moment, away from the presence of God. Even in hell, God is there. As Job tells us in Job 26, verse 6, hell is naked before Him and destruction hath no covering. And notice exactly how David expresses himself. It's going to push the divine language to its limits. David doesn't say that if he ascends to heaven, God goes there with him. And if he descends to hell, God goes there with him. No, if David instantly is transported to heaven, or if he immediately passes into hell, he finds that God already is there. God always is everywhere. He always is filling heaven and earth. There's no point this very moment, no space here in our midst, no space at home with your family, no point in your home country right this very moment where God is not. He's everywhere. David repeats the same thing. He turns it over in awe in his mind in verses 9 and 10. Even if David were to go to the remotest reaches of creation, even if he were to go to the furthest point that he could reach, he would find himself still in the sovereign presence of the living God. God is holding, he's guiding, God isn't present just as some sort of a persistent observer. No, He is present in His sovereign majesty. He's present in His glory. Even the things that normally hide a man, even those things that ordinarily obscure the darkness David cites, it doesn't obscure from God. The darkness is as the shining light of noon for God. It's not just that God sees everything and knows everything. Certainly He does, but it's more. God is everywhere. He doesn't just know. He is. God is present. Now David is ruminating again and again on the central fact that the living God is everywhere present in his glory. That's true. It's almost overwhelming in the breadth of the claim that David is making. But what does it mean? Is this just a meditation on God, a meditation on his being that has little to no connection with the lives of his creatures? Well, the answer there is of course not. This is a truth that overflows with implications. Implications that are no more avoidable than the God who is everywhere. If we follow out David's reasoning, we follow out the claims that he's making here, we see that the living God is everywhere present in his glory, comforting his people. You see David resting in that omnipresence, Really throughout Psalm 139, God always is with him. When David was in the womb of his mother, verses 13 through 16, God was with him. When David drifts off to sleep, and then he suddenly awakes, verse 18, God is with him. God hasn't left. He hasn't strayed. and David's brightest hopes for the future. When he ponders the way everlasting, verse 24, God is there. He's leading. There's no point in God's creation from which he is absent. When David sits on the throne in Jerusalem, when he stood alone in a field facing down Goliath, when he hid in caves from Saul, when he feigned madness in Gath, when he danced rapturous before the Ark of the Covenant as it came into Jerusalem, when he fled before Absalom, when he had mercy on Shammai, when he simply woke in the dark of a mundane night, God was there. He always was there. David never had to fear that his enemies, and there were many enemies for David, David never had to fear that his enemies somehow would succeed and interpose themselves between David and the God who was his shield. God always was there. David didn't have to fear that he would somehow wander beyond the reach of the God who was his protector. No, God always was there. And what we see David subtly doing here, he's taking our puny notion of God's omnipresence and he's swelling it. God isn't just present in all places. He's not just in that corner and in this corner too. God is present in all of time. Not only is there no place in the creation where God is not, there is no point in the timeline of David's life where God is not. There is no point in the ceaseless expanse of eternity where God is not. His omnipresence bleeds over into his eternity. All of it in David's stammering attempt to express the inexpressible grandeur of our God. And that makes a subtle detail of the psalm so precious. Notice how many times, we won't go through and count them, how many times David speaks in Psalm 139 in the first person. God is an omnipresent in some sort of abstract, philosophical, impersonal way. He's not just everywhere. He's everywhere with David, the God whose glory fills heaven and earth. He deploys that omnipresence to be with his people, to be near to them. You can hear David almost overwhelmed at the personal nearness of this God, the nearness of this God to him. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. The God who is big enough that he fills heaven and earth is not too big to be near to his servant. Now this morning, God wants you to know that he's everywhere. There's no place. There's no geographical point. There's no interior recess of your mind or of your heart or of your unspoken words and fears. There's nowhere where God is not. God wants you to know that. And He doesn't want you to know it simply as a boast. He wants you to know that He's always with you. He's always with you. The God who fills heaven and earth, He's with you. Little old you. Insignificant you. When David sings of the God who is everywhere, hear the might and the glory of God, but hear also his love and his concern for you. Because in his omnipresence, he is near. He is always near. He is always with you. Never are you forsaken. Never are you alone. Never are you left to the predations of those who would do you ill. God always is there. Nothing happens, nothing occurs out of his purview. The living God is everywhere present in his glory, comforting his people. But that's not all. God would have us here to know that the living God is everywhere present in his glory, comforting and sending his people. And we noticed this last semester, y'all don't remember that, I know, but last semester in chapel, when I had the privilege of being here, we looked at Matthew 28, verses 18 through 20, the Great Commission. And there, what did Jesus promise his people? As He sent them out to spread the gospel to all nations, tribes, and tongues, as He sent them into a world that He had told them would hate them and oppose them and reject them, as Jesus sent out His people, what did He promise them? That He would be with them always. When they preached in Jerusalem, He would be with them. When they fanned out through Israel, He would be with them. When they went to foreign shores, they would find Him already there. When they stood before princes and jeering crowds that held stones in their hands, He would be with them. He always would be with them. He was sending them, but He wasn't sending them alone. He would be with them. In His divine omnipresence, the glorified Jesus would be with them. Now, in Scripture, we have some, of course, who have had to learn this the hard way. If you think about Jonah, the Old Testament prophet Jonah, the Lord wanted Jonah to go to Nineveh to call for repentance from the Ninevites, but Jonah didn't want to go. Jonah didn't want the Lord to do what he knew the Lord would do in Nineveh through his word and through his servant. And so what did Jonah do? Well, Jonah 1 verse 3, we read, But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord and went down to Joppa. and he found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare thereof and went down into it to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord." Jonah tried to run, tried to hide. Called to go to Nineveh, Jonah went almost exactly the opposite direction to Tarshish. He boarded a boat, he went down even into the innermost parts of the boat to hide from the presence of the Lord. If you noticed in that one verse, Jonah 1 verse 3, twice, in the one verse, Scripture puts it very plainly. Jonah is seeking to flee from the presence of the Lord. He's seeking to do precisely what Psalm 139 verse 7 teaches us you can never do. So we know the story. God sent a fish. He drew Jonah to obedience. He sent him to Nineveh. Brothers and sisters, the Lord knows where He intends you to serve. He knows where He is sending you. And He is everywhere. You can't run from His service. You cannot run from and you cannot be waylaid from the precise pulpit, the precise field where the Lord intends to plant you and to use you. For some of you, that planting may be in the midst of a prosperous ministry, maybe even a prominent ministry, a ministry with all the visible trappings of enjoying the Lord's blessing. You'll praise the Lord. For others of you, that calling, that planting, that service will be in a small church, a struggling church. A ministry that hasn't been crushed, but has been beaten down. Maybe in a church, a ministry where you will face discouragements of many kinds. But know that the Lord is there. He fills heaven and earth. And you cannot find distance between yourself and Him. even in a struggling ministry. One of my foremost spiritual mentors, a godly man, is fond of saying, and he is a seminary professor, so he says this to me in training for the ministry, don't ever be ashamed to go to a small church because Jesus isn't. He's there. Even when you're preaching to a congregation at the uttermost parts of the sea, not at the center, under the lights, but at the uttermost parts of the sea, God is there, and He's there with you. In fact, wherever the Lord will have you serve, He already is there now. He's present with the people whom He will call you to serve, Right now. Do you pray right now for the sheep whom the Lord will call you to serve? You're not there in that charge yet, but God is. So pray for the sheep. Pray for the tilling of soil. Pray for the softening of hearts and of ears. Pray for them now. And when the Lord calls you, when he shuts doors that no man can open, and he opens doors that no man can shut, go confident that however unknown, however uncertain the field may be, you already know one thing about it, and that's that God is there. And his hand will lead you, and his right hand will hold you fast. Never will you find yourself alone. the living God is everywhere present in his glory, comforting and sending his people. But there's one thing more, or at least one more thing to which we have the time to attend this morning. With trembling, we have to realize in Psalm 139 that the living God is everywhere present in His glory, comforting, sending, and calling His people, calling them specifically to repentance, or to be specific, calling all men to repentance with a call that only His own, by His Spirit, will answer. You know, David lingers on this reality, especially in verses 19 through 22. The Lord who is everywhere present, he is where the wicked are too. And he knows their wickedness. And no matter where they are, no matter the halls of supposed safety in which they dwell, God can bring them into judgment. And God knows David's heart. He knows David's spirit-given integrity. All the evil that the wicked have done, even as they have prospered in this world, even as they have prospered at times at David's own expense, they haven't done these things behind God's back. He was there, and He knows. There's no sin done in secret. The prophet Jeremiah focuses this like a laser on sinners. Speaking through Jeremiah, God says in Jeremiah 23, verses 23 and 24, am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him, saith the Lord? Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord? God is near and God is far. He's everywhere. He fills the heaven and the earth. There are no secret places. There are no corners where he doesn't go. There is nothing done that he doesn't see. Hear God's prophet Amos. Amos chapter 9, verses 2 through 3. Though they dig into hell, then shall my hand take them. Though they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down. And though they hide themselves on the top of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence." There's no fleeing from the God who's everywhere. There's no safe distance for one's sin. Now, I've referred to this before. You may have heard me do it. But exactly the passage that's before us this morning, Psalm 139, verses 7 through 12, at one point in my Christian life, the Lord used this passage to bring me to, at least for me, the most profound point of conviction. When I had been at my worst, and my worst had been ugly, when I'd been at my worst, when I've been doing things that my reputation depended on no one else knowing about. God was there, and he saw. He didn't just know what I had done. He knew, and we all know things, but God didn't just know. He was there. I had been ever before him, not in a dark corner, but in the blinding radiance of His presence that I have never escaped. Never have I hated my sin so much. Brothers and sisters, the things that you do, the things that you say, the words that form even before they have formed, the thoughts that fire through your mind, God is there with you, in you. God is there and he sees. You must press after holiness, after sanctification. And you have to pour out your heart in gratitude day upon day because the God who was there and the God who saw has washed you in his own blood and he's made you as white as the driven snow. He's taken your guilt, not guilt in the abstract, not the guilt of his people, but your guilt. The God who saw the filth attached to your heart, he's taken that guilt And he's taken it as far away from you as the East is from the West. And not because you fooled him, but because you haven't. And all of your guilt, all of your defilement, he's washed it away. And now, there is no condemnation. There are no corners shrouded in darkness into which His glorious uncreated light hasn't shone. There is comfort there. It's a bracing comfort. It's a comfort that leads hard, but it's as soft as velvet. Do you realize that this morning? Do you realize that you sit here in a comfortable chair in a seminary chapel and God is everywhere around you? Do you realize that there are no dark corners and there is no hiding from the God who is everywhere? Augustine has this poignant line in his exposition of Psalm 74, and he writes, there is no place where you may flee from an angered God except to a God who is pacified. Hear that this morning. If you find yourself here at seminary unregenerate, Know that you cannot hide from God's judgment at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. And you can't hide from God's judgment in some pulpit somewhere. And you can't hide from God's judgment in a faculty study. The only place where you may flee from an angered God who is everywhere is to Jesus. But that Jesus, He never is far. He's always just there, knocking at the door. The living God is everywhere, present in His glory, comforting, sending, and calling His people. I saw 139. You could ponder it all the days of your life. You never would find its bottom. For all of our children, y'all don't really care about this, but for all of our children when they've been born, I've given them a psalm, I'll sing it to them as long as they'll abide my bad singing voice, out of the Scottish Psalter to a given metrical tune. And one of my children, I won't say which one, that doesn't matter, but for one of my children, these are the very verses of that psalm. Why did I choose it? Why is it in the Bible? Why, asked to preach on omnipresence, did I turn to these verses? Well, because these verses tell you something that you need to know. There'll be times in your life, there'll be times in your ministry when you desperately need to know it. God is there. He is with you. Don't allow yourself to get abstract. He is with you. And he never will go away. He'll never slumber, he'll never sleep. He'll never slip away. The living God is everywhere present in his glory, comforting, sending, and calling his people. Hallelujah, that such a God has set his love upon us, even upon me, even upon you. Amen. Let's pray. Our great God and Father in heaven, we come before thee this morning overwhelmed at the majesty of who thou art. Lord, indeed thou dost fill heaven and earth. Thou art the God in whom we live and move and have our being. And thou art the God who hath been with us and with our fathers, the God who shall be with our children all of their days. We give thee thanks, O Lord, that thou hast revealed thyself unto us, and that thou hast set thy love upon us, so that we can know that not only art thou everywhere, but that everywhere thou art with us. We ask, O Lord, that thou wouldst be with each of us in the hours and the years that lie ahead of us, Particularly, O Lord, for those whom thou art calling to difficult and isolating ministries and service, we ask, O Lord, that thou would always be near to them and that thy nearness always would be palpable to them. We ask, O Lord, that thou wouldst bless thy servants and use them mightily in every part of that creation. We'll do these things and be pleased, O Lord, to comfort thy people and to get glory unto thy name in all things. For we ask it all in the wonderful name of Jesus. Amen.