Chapter 9

A God Who Is Somewhere

Dake keeps the word omnipresent and puts God in one place

Picture a grandmother who prays every night for a grandson stationed on a base six thousand miles away. She closes her eyes and asks God to be with him, and she thanks God for being with her. She does not think of this as a theological claim. She simply believes that the God she is talking to is in her living room and in her grandson’s barracks at the same moment. The Bible says she is right. The man who wrote the notes in the Dake Bible said she was wrong.

Finis Dake put it in a single sentence in his correspondence course.

God has a body and goes from place to place like anybody else. Finis Jennings Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 61¹

Dake means this literally. In the same lesson he says that God’s body is “of ordinary size” and “must be at one place at a time,” so when God acts somewhere else, He has to travel there.² Theologians call the doctrine at stake omnipresence. It means that God Himself is present everywhere at once. Dake kept the word. He gave a section of Lesson Four the heading “God is Omnipresent,”³ and he asked his students to “Define and discuss the omnipresence of God. Is He omni-body?”⁴ Under that heading he gave the word a new meaning. God Himself lives in one place, and what reaches the rest of the universe is a presence that people feel through their relationship with Him.

A God who is personally in one place and has to travel to the others is not the God of the Bible. This teaching is heresy. It denies what God says about Himself in Jeremiah 23:24, “Do I not fill heaven and earth?”, and what Solomon confessed in 1 Kings 8:27, that heaven itself cannot contain Him. It also belongs with the embodied God of Chapter 8. Once God is given a body of ordinary size, He has to be put somewhere.

Why a located God matters

The grandmother’s prayer rests on God being with her grandson. Help can be sent from a distance, but presence cannot. Either God is with the young man or He is not. Christians who pray in a car, a jail cell, or a waiting room are counting on the same thing. They believe they are speaking to Someone who is there. If God is actually in one place a long way off, then what is with them is a feeling of God, and God Himself is elsewhere.

Dake was right about one thing. He insisted that God is a person and pushed back hard against the idea of God as a vague force. God, he wrote, “is not a universal nothingness floating around in nowhere,” and against that error he was correct.⁵ The trouble lies in what he put in its place.

The word kept, with a new meaning

These passages come from God’s Plan for Man, the fifty-two-lesson course Dake first mailed to students in loose-leaf installments and later published as one large volume. Its 1977 Foreword says many preachers have used it as a source of sermons.⁶ Lesson Four is titled “The Truth About God.” Partway through it, Dake sets a heading and writes this paragraph beneath it.

God is Omnipresent

God is not a universal nothingness floating around in nowhere. He is not impersonal, immaterial, intangible—an unreal person. He is not a universal mind, soul, spirit, conscience, goodness, principle—an abstract power or force filling the whole of space and solid matter, as false cults teach. He is not omni-body; that is, His body is not everywhere at all places at the same time. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 60⁷

The paragraph sits under a heading that promises omnipresence. Most of it denies that God is impersonal, which every Christian would agree with. Its last sentence makes a different claim: God’s body is not everywhere. No one in the historic church ever said that God’s body is everywhere. The church has said that God has no body at all, and Chapter 8 takes up that question. Having denied a view nobody holds, Dake lets his own answer pass almost unnoticed: God Himself is in one particular place.

On the next page he says what he thinks presence is.

Presence is governed by relationship, not bodily sight. When the body of anyone is not literally present, one cannot say that it is present. The presence of two persons may be felt though thousands of miles may separate them bodily. In such a case, presence consists of union, relationship, memory, acquaintance, and association to the same end in life. The closer two persons are to each other in any relationship, the more they feel each other’s presence in the thought life. So it is with God. God dwells in Heaven and persons on Earth that know Him and are in union with Him in spirit can feel His presence in their lives regardless of where they are on the Earth or under the Earth. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 61⁸

Here the new meaning is spelled out. Presence is union, relationship, memory, acquaintance, and association. God is in heaven and you are on earth, and what crosses the distance is the bond between you. Dake does not say that God is everywhere by His Spirit, or by His power. He says that presence itself is relationship, and that God’s presence works the way a man’s does, only on a larger scale.

A God who travels

If God Himself is in one place, then He has to move to be in another. Dake says so in a list of God’s ordinary activities.

God goes from place to place in a body just like anyone else (Gen. 3:8; 11:5; 18:1-22, 33; 19:24; 32:24-32; 35:13; Zech. 14:5; Tit. 2:13). He is omni-present, but not omni-body, that is, His presence can be felt everywhere but His body cannot, as seen in Point 9 below. He wears clothes (Dan. 7:9-14; 10:5-19); eats (Gen. 18:1-22; Exodus 24:11); rests, not because he gets tired, but because he ceases activity or completes a work (Gen. 2:1-4; Heb. 4:4); dwells in a mansion and in a city located on a material planet called Heaven (John 14:1-3; Heb. 11:10-16; 13:14; Rev. 3:12; 21:1-27); sits on a throne (Isa. 6; Rev. 4:1-5; 22:3-5); walks (Gen. 3:8; 18:1-22, 33); rides upon cherubs, the wind, clouds, and chariots drawn by cherubims (Ps. 18:10; 68:17; 104:2; Ezek. 1:1-28). God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 57⁹

Most of his proof texts are scenes from Genesis: God walking in the garden, coming down to see the tower of Babel, visiting Abraham, and wrestling with Jacob. The last two references on his list come from somewhere else. Zechariah 14:5 and Titus 2:13 describe the return of the Lord Jesus Christ in glory. Every Christian who confesses the creeds believes that Christ will return bodily, because the Son took a human body at Bethlehem and has never laid it aside. That truth about the incarnate Son cannot prove that God the Father has a body that travels.¹⁰

The same picture shows up in places where Dake is not arguing the point at all. In his lesson on the age of law he writes this.

Before this, God Himself came down to talk and intervene personally in the affairs of man at the ending of one age and the beginning of another. God also appeared many times during the different ages. In the time of the Dispensation of Innocence He came down and had fellowship with man in the cool of the day. . . . Man continued in the Dispensation of Conscience until he became so wicked that God came down again to intervene and bring judgment. God’s Plan for Man, p. 304¹¹

In an earlier lesson he says, “It was not until God came down to see the rebellion of the post-diluvians, Sodom and Gomorrah and others, that God took action.”¹² That sentence also makes a claim about what God knows, and Chapter 10 deals with it. Here the order of events is what matters. First God came down, and only after that did He act. In Dake’s picture the trip had to come before the judgment.

His Bible teaches the same thing. His note on Abraham’s visitors in Genesis 18 says, “This plainly teaches that God, as well as men and angels, is limited to one place as far as the body is concerned.”¹³ His note on Ezekiel’s vision of the throne says, “God also has many other means of travel and goes from one place to another bodily as all other beings in existence. He is omnipresent, but not omnibody.”¹⁴

One place at a time

A body that is in one place at a time needs a place to be. Dake gives the reason it cannot be everywhere, and then he names the place.

Dake names God first among the spirit beings, and the reason he gives is size. God’s body is of ordinary size, so it can be in only one spot, the same way your body can. Everywhere else, God is present only to people who have enough “sense of presence” to feel Him. The place where God’s body is comes in the next paragraph, which is printed here in full.

God personally dwells in Heaven, not everywhere. Jesus addressed His Father and referred to Him as being in Heaven. Eighteen times He said, “Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16, 45, 48; 6:1, 9; 7:11, 21, etc.). Shall we conclude that Jesus did not know what He was talking about? Not one time does one Scripture refer to God as being bodily everywhere. God is omni-present but not omni-body, that is, His presence can be felt by moral agents who are everywhere, but His body cannot be seen by them every place at the same time. God has a body and goes from place to place like anybody else. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 61¹⁶

Dake’s argument is that Jesus called God the Father “which is in heaven,” so heaven must be where the Father is and nowhere else. That only works if “in heaven” means “in heaven and not anywhere else.” In the same sermon Jesus told His disciples to go into a room, shut the door, and pray to their Father “who is in the secret place” (Matthew 6:6). He saw no conflict between a Father in heaven and a Father in the closet with the one who prays.

Later in the course Dake describes heaven as “a real planet like the Earth,” the capital of the universe, where God has His city, His temple, and His throne.¹⁷ Whether heaven is a planet belongs to Chapter 16. For this chapter one point is enough. In Dake’s system heaven is a location, and God’s body is there.

The great texts, read through his rule

Dake does not skip the verses that teach omnipresence. He quotes the strongest of them and then tells his readers what they may mean.

This is what is meant by statements men use to prove that God personally fills the whole of all space and matter. In Ps. 139:7 the psalmist said, “whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” God said to Jeremiah, “Do not I fill heaven and earth?” (Jer. 23:23-24). Paul said, “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28). We must understand all like passages, as teaching the omnipresence of God, but not the omnibody of God. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 61¹⁸

The last sentence sounds like an agreement with the church, but it works as a filter. The verses may teach omnipresence in Dake’s sense, a presence that is felt. They may not teach that God Himself fills heaven and earth, because in his system that would require a body everywhere, and he has already ruled that out. Then he gives an illustration from his own life.

While I write I feel the presence of my wife and children who are hundreds of miles away at this time. They are in my thoughts, my plans, my life, and all that I do. I do nothing without them, yet they are far away. I am building a home for them to move into. I plan for them. I see them in the new home. I experience the thrill of having them with me. They are here in spirit and presence, planning with me, and we are working together to the same end in life. This presence is constant, though distance separates bodily at times. . . . Man has the same faculty that God has to make his presence felt by others, only it is on a finite scale. God’s attribute of presence is infinite, but it works literally on the same principle as that of man. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 61¹⁹

It is a tender paragraph. A man far from home misses his wife and children, and he says so. But the illustration shows what is wrong with his doctrine. Ask what is actually present with that family while he writes. They have his letters, his plans, their memories of him, and their love for him. Those are good things, but none of them is the man himself. Dake says that God’s presence “works literally on the same principle.” Apply that to the grandmother at her bedside, and what is with her is her thought of God. God Himself is somewhere else.

Dake applies the rule to every person of the Godhead. He says that Jesus, who has a body, “is local in body—one place at a time,” and then adds, “We know that the personal body of Christ, or those of believers, are not omnipresent when they are in the lives of others in spirit presence, so the same thing is true of the Father and the Holy Spirit.”²⁰ His note on Psalm 139 brings the same teaching into the Bible itself: “Though God’s personal body is only at one place at a time, His presence is felt in all parts of the universe. No man can escape His presence even though he cannot see God’s body due to the distance from earth to heaven where He dwells.”²¹ The psalm says to God, “You are there.” The note beside it says that God’s body is far away.

What Jeremiah, David, Amos, and Paul say

Now open the Bible itself. I quote it from the New King James Version, which is also the text of one edition of the Dake Bible.²² Start with Jeremiah, because Dake quotes the end of the passage and the beginning answers him.

“Am I a God near at hand,” says the LORD, “And not a God afar off? Can anyone hide himself in secret places, So I shall not see him?” says the LORD; “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” says the LORD. Jeremiah 23:23–24 (NKJV)

God is asking about Himself here, not about how people feel. The question is whether a man can get out of His range. The answer is no, and the reason God gives is that He fills heaven and earth. Psalm 139, which Dake quotes only at verse 7, says the same thing at greater length.

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there Your hand shall lead me, And Your right hand shall hold me. Psalm 139:7–10 (NKJV)

David names the farthest places he can imagine: the sky, the grave, and the far edge of the sea. At each one he finds God Himself, not a message from God. “You are there,” he says. He also puts heaven, where Dake places God’s body, beside the realm of the dead, where Dake says that body has never been except to create it, and he finds God at both in the same breath.²³

Amos says it with even more force. A man who digs down into Sheol will be pulled out by God’s hand. If he climbs up to heaven, God will bring him down, and if he hides on top of Carmel, God will find him there.²⁴ The prophet describes a God from whom no one can hide, because there is no place where He is not. Paul said the same to the pagans of Athens, who thought their gods lived in temples.

so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being . . . Acts 17:27–28 (NKJV)

Paul’s point was that this God has no address. He is not far from any one of us, and the picture in verse 28 is that we live within Him.

Solomon at the temple

If any moment in the Old Testament could have tied God to one place, it was the day Solomon dedicated the temple. The work was finished, and the glory of the LORD had filled the house. Here is what Solomon prayed.

But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You. How much less this temple which I have built! 1 Kings 8:27 (NKJV)

Solomon does not say that God is too large for the building. He says that the highest heaven cannot contain God either, because God is not the kind of being that a place can hold. In the same prayer Solomon asks God again and again to “hear in heaven Your dwelling place.”²⁵ He saw no conflict between the two statements. Heaven is where God has His throne, and heaven cannot contain Him.

God’s Plan for Man cites four other verses from this prayer as proof that God lives on the planet heaven, but it never cites verse 27.²⁶ The Study Bible does take up the verse, and it reads it through the same filter. Its note says, “Solomon could have been referring to omnipresence here, not omnibody. God’s body cannot be everywhere present; but His presence can be in all places at the same time. This is governed by relationship with others, not substance.”²⁷ In his list of God’s attributes, Dake even cites 1 Kings 8:27 as a proof text for “Omnipresent (not omnibody,” and adds that “God’s body is not omnipresent, for it is only at one place at one time like others.”²⁸ At the same words in 2 Chronicles 2:6, his note says that Solomon was not “trying to give us the idea that all space could not hold him.”²⁹ That is exactly the idea Solomon gave. The verse that says heaven cannot contain God has become a proof that God’s body is in one place.

How the Bible uses “came down”

The strongest point in Dake’s favor is that the Bible really does say God came down. Genesis 11:5 says it about the tower of Babel, and Genesis 18 says it about Sodom. Dake’s rule is to read such language literally wherever possible, and Chapter 4 looks at that rule.³⁰ So it is fair to ask why these verses should not be read as travel. The answer is that the Bible itself does not read them that way, often in the very same scenes.

Take Sinai, the most dramatic descent in the Old Testament. Exodus says the LORD came down on the mountain in fire. Then Moses, recalling that same day, tells Israel, “Out of heaven He let you hear His voice, that He might instruct you; on earth He showed you His great fire” (Deuteronomy 4:36).³¹ In one event God speaks from heaven and shows His fire on earth. If coming down meant moving a body from one place to another, Moses’ sentence would put God in two places at once, which is the very thing Dake says a body cannot do.

Jacob’s night at Bethel points the same way. He dreams of a stairway with angels going up and down on it and the LORD standing above it. When he wakes he says, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.”³² Jacob does not say the LORD came to Bethel while he slept. He says the LORD is there and had been there all along. The dream opened his eyes to it.

Micah uses the same language. He says that the LORD is coming out of His place to tread on the high places of the earth. The verse before it says the LORD speaks from His holy temple, and the verse after it says the mountains melt like wax under Him.³³ No one reads the melting mountains as a geology report. This is the language of a King arriving to judge. The judgment Micah announces is real, and his description of God’s coming is poetry.

“Came down,” then, means that God has turned to act. The One who is everywhere has taken up a case and moved from patience to judgment, or from silence to speech. Genesis 11 makes the point with something close to irony. The builders meant their tower to reach the sky, and God had to “come down” even to see it. The distance in that story is between the greatness of God and the smallness of man, and it cannot be measured in miles. Reading “came down” as physical travel buys one literal phrase at a high price. Jeremiah 23, Psalm 139, Amos 9, Acts 17, and 1 Kings 8 all have to be turned into figures of speech to make room for it.

Present without a body

The historic doctrine needs one distinction, and it can be said in plain words. God is not present the way a body is present. A body takes up room and pushes other things out of it. God is not present the way air fills a room either, spread thin with a little in each corner. God is present in a third way. All of God is wholly present at every point.³⁴ He is fully present at a bedside and fully present at the far edge of the galaxy at the same time, because He has no parts to divide and no size to stretch.

That is why the classic Protestant confessions set God’s presence and His lack of a body side by side. The Thirty-Nine Articles call the one living and true God “without body, parts, or passions” and “of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness.” The Westminster Confession calls God “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions,” and in the same sentence calls Him “immense” and “most absolute.”³⁵ These belong together. A being with a body of ordinary size has edges, and whatever lies outside those edges is somewhere He is not. Dake saw that clearly and drew his conclusion from it: God has a body, so He is not everywhere. The church reasoned from the other end. God is everywhere, so He has no body.

The church has also always said that God draws near in another sense, the sense of His favor and glory made known. He was present in the tabernacle in a way He was not present in a field in Moab, and He meets His gathered people in a way He does not meet an empty building. Pentecostal believers are right to expect that kind of nearness. It is real, and it rests on the deeper truth that God is already everywhere. It does not replace that truth.

The world is in Him

Scripture goes one step further, and Dake’s system cannot follow it there. The Bible does not only say that God can reach every place. It says that everything is held in being by Him at every moment. Of the Son, Paul writes that “in Him all things consist,” which means they hold together in Him. Hebrews says the Son upholds all things by the word of His power, and Paul told the Athenians that in God we live and move and have our being.³⁶

A star no one has named is being kept in existence right now by God Himself, at that point and at this moment, and not by a law He set running and left behind. A being who is in one place at a time cannot do that, and no amount of felt relationship can make up the difference. Dake’s God can be loved from a distance, but He cannot hold the distance in being. A located God, however great, is the largest being inside the universe, sitting on its finest throne. The God of Scripture is not inside anything. Everything else is in Him.³⁷

But isn’t God everywhere by His Spirit?

This is the most common defense, and it sounds orthodox. Christians do say that the Spirit is with us and in us. So some readers will ask what harm there is in a Father who stays in heaven while the Spirit is everywhere on earth.

Dake himself rules this out. Right after saying that Christ is local in body, he writes that “the same thing is true of the Father and the Holy Spirit.”³⁸ His Bible’s index entry on the word says it outright. It defines “Omnipresent” as “everywhere present” and then says of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, “All three go from place to place bodily as other beings in the universe do.”³⁹ In Dake’s Godhead the Spirit is a third separate being with His own body, and that body is in one place at a time like the others.⁴⁰ Chapter 6 documents that Godhead, and Chapter 7 answers it.

Even if Dake had made the Spirit an exception, the problem would remain. In his system, a Father who knows all about a place but is not there is simply absent from it. Sending someone else does not make the sender present, as any parent who has missed a child’s recital knows. The historic faith says something else entirely. Where the Spirit is, God is, because the Spirit is not a second God but the one God. That is why Psalm 139 can move from “Your Spirit” to “Your presence” in one line without changing the subject. Chapter 14 takes up Dake’s doctrine of the Spirit.

But the Bible calls heaven God’s dwelling

Other readers will say that Scripture calls heaven God’s dwelling on page after page, so the one arguing with the Bible is the critic, not Dake. That much is true. Jesus taught us to pray to our Father in heaven. The church has always confessed heaven as the seat of God’s throne and the place where His glory is seen without a veil, and no one who reads Revelation 4 can treat it as a metaphor.

The question is what “dwelling” means. Solomon answered it in one prayer, as we saw: heaven is God’s dwelling place, and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him. Isaiah puts both truths in one verse: “Heaven is My throne, And earth is My footstool. Where is the house that you will build Me?”⁴¹ A throne is where a king reigns openly. It is not a box that marks the edge of his reach. Dake and the church agree that heaven is real and that God is there. They part over one word. Dake wrote that God dwells in heaven, “not everywhere,” and Scripture never says that.

Isn’t omnipresence Greek philosophy?

Some will say that the church borrowed omnipresence from Greek thinkers and read it back into the Bible, while Dake simply took the Bible at face value. I understand the instinct. Dake spent his life opposing teachers who explained away plain sentences, and he was often right to oppose them.

But the doctrine comes from Israel’s own Scriptures. Jeremiah 23 is Hebrew prophecy, spoken to a nation in crisis. Psalm 139 is a Hebrew hymn, sung in worship. Amos was a herdsman from Tekoa preaching judgment, and Solomon’s words are a prayer at the dedication of the temple. No Greek philosopher wrote, “If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.” And it is Dake’s notes, not the church, that have to turn “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” into a figure of speech.

The God who is here

Dake kept the word omnipresent, used it as a heading in his course, and tested his students on it. Under that heading he taught that God has a body of ordinary size, that it is in one place at a time, that God personally dwells in heaven and not everywhere, and that God goes from place to place like anybody else. He then redefined presence as a bond felt across a distance. Jeremiah, David, Solomon, and Paul knew a God who fills heaven and earth. Dake’s teaching denies that God, and it is heresy. The notes that teach it should not be trusted on the doctrine of God.

The true doctrine gives the believer far more than the notes allow. The God of the Bible does not need to be told where you are or travel to get there. “The LORD is near to those who have a broken heart,” the psalmist says, and he means near.⁴² No prayer has to cross a distance to reach Him, and no grave or hospital or barracks lies outside His presence. When Jesus sent eleven men out into the world, He did not promise to think of them. He said, “and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”⁴³ He would be with every one of them, in every place they went, at the same time. Only God can keep a promise like that. The grandmother praying at her bedside is right. God is with her, and He is with her grandson six thousand miles away, and He is fully present in both places at once.