The Omnipresence of Christ

Omnipresence — to be wholly present everywhere at once, undivided and undiminished — is not a gift that the creature can receive or the creature's nature be stretched to hold. The highest seraph stands in one place; the glorified saint, however near to God, is here and not there. To fill heaven and earth is the prerogative of the Creator alone, who asks through Jeremiah, “Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the LORD” (Jeremiah 23:24), and before whom the Psalmist confesses that there is no flight: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” (Psalm 139:7). It is precisely this incommunicable attribute that Jesus of Nazareth claims for Himself — not by argument, but in the plain, sovereign promises He leaves with His Church.

Two Universal Promises#

To the assembly gathered for prayer and discipline, however small, Christ pledges His own personal presence: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). The promise is not that He will be remembered, nor that His teaching will linger, but that He Himself — “there am I” — will be in the midst, in every such gathering, in every land, in the same hour. A rabbi of the period taught that where two sit and study Torah the Shekinah, the divine Presence, rests between them; Jesus quietly puts Himself in the place that Jewish piety reserved for God.

The Great Commission carries the same claim across time as well as space: “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20). The disciples would scatter to the ends of the earth and labour through every generation until the consummation, and to all of them at once He promises an abiding, simultaneous presence. No prophet ever spoke so; Moses could not go up with Israel and remain in the camp, and Elijah, caught away by the Spirit, was carried from one place to another. The “I am with you” of Matthew is the standing pledge of the One who is not bound by place at all.

Filling All Things#

Paul makes explicit what the promises imply. The Church is Christ's body, “the fulness of him that filleth all in all” (Ephesians 1:23); the ascended Son went up “that he might fill all things” (Ephesians 4:10); and in Him “all things consist,” or hold together (Colossians 1:17). To fill all things and to hold all things in being are not the acts of a localized creature but the continual work of the omnipresent God. The Johannine witness presses the same point when it speaks, in the received text, of “the Son of man which is in heaven” (John 3:13) even as He spoke on earth with Nicodemus — He is below in the flesh and above in His deity in one and the same moment.

He was not, as might be imagined, circumscribed in the body, nor, while present in the body, was He absent elsewhere; while present in the whole of creation, He is at once distinct in being from the universe, and present in all things by His own power.

This is the ancient answer to the natural objection: if the Word truly took a body that could be weary, hungry, and crucified, how could He be everywhere? The Fathers replied that the Son was never imprisoned by the flesh He assumed. The body localized His manhood; it did not confine His Godhead. He who lay as an infant in the manger was, in that same instant, upholding the stars by the word of His power. The omnipresence claimed in Matthew is therefore not a stray hyperbole but the steady confession of the Church: that Christ is truly present in every gathering, on every altar, to every dying believer, because He is, with the Father and the Spirit, the one God who fills heaven and earth.