The Pursuit of God

Chapter 3: Removing the Veil

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God formed us for his pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as he can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities. He meant us to see him and live with him and draw our life from his smile. But we have been guilty of that “foul revolt” of which Milton speaks when describing the rebellion of Satan and his hosts. 4 We have broken with God. We have ceased to obey him or love him and in guilt and fear have fled as far as possible from his presence. Yet who can flee from his presence when the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain him (2 Chron 2:6)? When, as the Wisdom of Solomon testifies, “the Spirit of the Lord fills the world?” 5 The omnipresence of the Lord is one thing, and is a solemn fact necessary to his perfection; the manifest Presence is another thing altogether, and from that Presence we have fled, like Adam, to hide among the trees of the garden (Gen 3:8–10), or like Peter to shrink away crying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8). So, the life of humankind upon the earth is a life away from the Presence, wrenched loose from that “blissful center” which is our right and proper dwelling place, our first estate which we kept not, the loss of which is the cause of our unceasing restlessness. The whole work of God in redemption is to undo the tragic effects of that foul revolt, and to bring us back again into right and eternal relationship with himself. This

4 John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: Simmons, 1667), 1.33. 5 Wisdom of Solomon 1:7. See Robert F. Lay, ed., Books Jesus Read: Learning from the Apocrypha (Wichita, KS: TUMI Press, 2022), 180. This statement is consistent with truths taught in the canon of inspired Scripture.