God is not here or there but carries here and there in His heart. He fills heaven and earth as the ocean fills the bucket that is submerged in it, and as the ocean surrounds the bucket so does God in the universe He fills. God is not contained: He contains.
God created us as living souls and gave us bodies through which we can experience the world around us and communicate with one another. When man fell through sin, he began to think of himself as having a soul instead of being one. It makes a difference whether a man believes that he is a body having a soul or a soul having a body.
We tend to be body-conscious and the concept of near and far seem quite natural to us. The Lord said of Israel “Their hearts are far from me”. Here is the definition of far and near in our relation to God. The words refer not to physical distance, but to likeness. It is dissimilarity that creates the sense of remoteness. Two creatures may be so close physically that they touch, yet because of dissimilarity of nature be millions of miles apart.
For the moral unlikeness between man and God the Bible uses the word alienation. The truth is He is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. What we cannot do, Christ did. The new birth makes us partakers of the divine nature and the work of undoing the dissimilarity between us and God begins.
So when we feel a sense of remoteness: It may be temporary, so trust God in the dark until the light returns. And/or look to your inner life for wrong attitudes or evil thoughts, confess them and put them away. God was never away in the first place.
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