A God Who Is Somewhere

A grandmother stopped me in a church hallway on a Wednesday night. Her grandson had shipped out to a base six thousand miles away, and she prayed for him every night at nine o'clock, her time.¹

“I know the Lord is right there with him,” she told me. “And I know He is right here with me.”

She was not trying to make a theological claim. She thought she was saying something obviously true. And she was.

She had a Dake Bible under her arm. The man who wrote its notes taught, in print, that what she just said was wrong. He taught that God has a body, that the body is of ordinary size, and that it is in one place at a time. He taught that God lives at an address. When He acts somewhere else, He travels there.

Read that sentence one more time. He is not saying God's power reaches everywhere. He is not saying God comes near when we call. He is saying God goes from place to place like anybody else.

The doctrine at stake here has a long name and a simple idea. Theologians call it omnipresence. It means that God Himself, in His own person, is present everywhere at once. Not a rumor about Him. Not a substitute for Him. Him.

Dake keeps the word. He uses it warmly. He gives a whole section of Lesson Four the heading “God is Omnipresent.”³ In the study questions at the end of the lesson, he asks his students: “Define and discuss the omnipresence of God. Is He omni-body?”⁴ A reader skimming the headings would never notice anything had changed.

That is the pattern Chapter 5 describes and Appendix D catalogs. Keep the vocabulary of the church and replace the meaning underneath. So we will do what this whole book does. His pages first, at length, in his own words. Then the Bible he wrote notes on.

2. Why It Matters

I want you to feel the weight of this before we look at the exhibits. It would be easy to file a question like this under “theology” and keep walking.

Think about that grandmother again. Her whole prayer life rests on one thing: God is with her grandson. Not just powerful enough to help him from far away. With him. You can send help from a distance. You cannot send presence. It is either there or it is not.

Every Pentecostal service I have ever sat through rests on the same thing. When a church sings that the Lord is in this place, they are not describing a mood. They are saying something about God. When a mother puts her hand on a hospital bed rail at two in the morning and whispers a name, she believes she is speaking to Someone who is in the room.

Take that away and a great deal falls with it. The promise at the end of Matthew is a promise of presence, not of postage. The comfort of the twenty-third Psalm is that He is with me in the valley. The whole logic of prayer without a temple, prayer in a car, prayer in a jail cell, rests on God being there. Not informed about it. There.

So the question this chapter asks is not academic. When you pray tonight, is God in the room? Or is He in heaven, thinking warmly of you from a long way off?

Let me also say what Dake gets right here, because he does get things right, and fairness means printing both halves.

He is right that God is a person and not a fog. He is right that a lot of religious talk empties God of everything personal and then calls the emptiness reverence. When Dake writes that God “is not a universal nothingness floating around in nowhere,” he is taking aim at a real error, and he hits it.⁵ He is right that the God of the Bible speaks, decides, loves, grieves, and acts. And he is right that presence between persons has a relational side. Paul really did say he was with the Corinthians in spirit while his body was somewhere else.

Hold on to all of that. My argument is not that Dake wanted a small God. My argument is that he built one anyway. He took a real truth about relationship and put it in the place of a bigger truth about God.

3. Dake in His Own Words

Everything below comes from God's Plan for Man, the fifty-two-lesson course Dake wrote and mailed to students in installments. It ran to more than a thousand pages. Thousands of preachers used it as a sermon storehouse.⁶ This is not a stray remark in a margin. This is the textbook.

Exhibit 1: The word kept, the definition swapped

Lesson Four is called “The Truth About God.” Partway through, Dake sets a heading in bold type:

Look at what happens in that paragraph. It opens under a heading that promises omnipresence. It spends four sentences denying that God is impersonal. Then it lands on a claim that has nothing to do with impersonality: God's body is not everywhere.

Nobody in the historic church ever said God's body is everywhere. The church has said God has no body at all, which is Chapter 8's subject. Dake has knocked down a position nobody holds. And while the reader nods along, the real question has been answered quietly: God's person is in one particular place.

There it is, in one paragraph, in his own hand. Presence is union, relationship, memory, acquaintance, and association. God is in heaven. You are on earth. What crosses the distance is the felt bond between you.

I want to be exact about this, because exactness is what this book promises. Dake does not say God is present everywhere by the Holy Spirit. He does not say God is present by His influence. He says presence is relationship, and that God's presence works the way yours does, only bigger. That is his explanation, and I am printing it as it stands.

Exhibit 2: The traveling God

If God's person is somewhere, then His person can move. Dake says so in a list of ordinary activities, as calmly as you would describe a neighbor.

Look at the proof texts he picks. God walking in the garden. The Lord coming down to see the tower at Babel. The visit to Abraham. The wrestling at Peniel. Then Zechariah 14:5 and Titus 2:13, which are about the Second Coming.

Those last two texts do not belong in this list. Zechariah 14 and Titus 2 describe the return of the Lord Jesus Christ in glory. Every Christian who confesses the creeds believes He will come back bodily, because He took a body at Bethlehem and has never set it aside. Using the Second Coming to prove that God the Father has a traveling body is a step Dake needs but the texts do not give.¹⁰

The travel language shows up in other places too, in ordinary passages where Dake is not arguing the doctrine at all. In his lesson on the age of law he writes:

And in an earlier lesson, on the testing of free creatures: “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 carries a claim about God's knowledge as well as His location. The knowledge question belongs to Chapter 10, and I will leave it there. What I want you to notice here is the sequence. God came down. Then God took action. In Dake's picture, those are two separate events, and the first has to happen before the second can.

This is not only in the course book. The Study Bible's note on Ezekiel 1 says the same thing in nearly the same words: “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.”¹³

Exhibit 3: The address

I would ask any Dake reader to sit with that sentence. Including God, Himself. The reason given is size. God's body is of ordinary size, so it can only be in one spot, the same way your body can only be in one spot.

Then comes the flat statement. I am printing the whole paragraph so you can see that nothing was cut.

Seven words carry the whole doctrine. God personally dwells in Heaven, not everywhere.

His case is that Jesus called the Father “which is in heaven” eighteen times. So heaven must be where the Father is, and not anywhere else.

But that only follows if “in heaven” answers the question “where, and not anywhere else.” The same Jesus told His disciples to go into a closet, shut the door, and pray to a Father who is there in the secret place and sees in secret (Matthew 6:6). He said both things in the same sermon, minutes apart. He did not think they contradicted each other.

Later in the course Dake explains where heaven is. Heaven is “a real planet like the Earth,” the capital of the universe, holding God's capital city, His temple, and His throne.¹⁶ Whether heaven is actually a planet is Chapter 16's business. For this chapter one thing matters. In Dake's system, heaven is not a way of saying God is beyond us. It is a location, and God is at it.

Exhibit 4: The three great texts, re-explained

Here is where I want to be most fair to him. Dake does not skip the verses that teach omnipresence. He quotes them. He quotes the strongest ones and then tells the reader what they can and cannot mean.

That last sentence sounds like a concession. It is really a filter. The verses may teach omnipresence in his sense, which is felt relational presence. They may not teach that God's person fills heaven and earth, because that would mean a body everywhere, and he has already ruled that out.

Then he offers an illustration. It is the most revealing paragraph on the page. It is also, I think, the most human. He is writing far from home.

That passage is touching. I mean that. You can feel a man missing his family while he types. But it is also the passage that settles the case.

One more page seals the system. Dake writes that Jesus, having a body, “is local in body, one place at a time,” and then extends the rule to the whole Godhead: “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.”¹⁹

So the Spirit is not the exception. In this system the Spirit is a third separate person with His own body, and a body of ordinary size is at one place at a time. The rule Dake gives covers all three. The structure behind that claim belongs to Chapter 6, which prints it in full. Here I only need the result. No member of Dake's Godhead is personally everywhere.

The Study Bible confirms the same teaching. In the note on Psalm 139, Dake writes: “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.”²⁰ Even at the very psalm that says “You are there,” the note says God's body is somewhere else.

4. The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

Now we open the Bible. I am using the New King James Version, which is one of the two texts the Dake Bible is printed in. We are reading on his readers' own ground.²¹

Move 1: What the passages actually say

Start with Jeremiah, because Dake quotes half the passage and the other half is what answers him.

God is asking a question about Himself, and it is not a question about how people feel. It is a question about whether a man can get out of range. The answer is no. The reason is that God fills heaven and earth.

Look at those two verbs. You are there. Not “I would still think of You there.” Not “Your influence reaches there.” You are there. David stacks up the furthest places he can imagine: the sky, the grave, the far edge of the sea. At every one he finds not a message from God but God.

And notice which places he picks. Heaven is where Dake says God is. Sheol is where Dake would say God is not. David says God is at both, in the same breath.²²

Amos says the same thing with more force. Dig down to Sheol, and God's hand pulls you out. Climb to heaven, and He brings you down. Hide on the top of Carmel, and He finds you there.²³ The prophet is not describing a God who gets good intelligence reports. He is describing a God with no blind spots, because there is nowhere He is not.

Paul was preaching to pagans who believed the gods lived at addresses. His whole point was that this God does not. He is not far from any one of us. And the picture in verse 28 is not that God is in the world. It is that the world is in God.

Move 2: The verse that is not on his page

There is one text that goes to the heart of this question, and it comes from the single best moment in the Old Testament for saying that God lives at an address.

Solomon had just finished the temple. The glory had filled the house. If ever a man had reason to say that God now had a street corner in Jerusalem, it was Solomon on that day. Here is what he prayed.

The heavens cannot contain Him. Not the sky. Not the highest heaven either. Solomon is not saying God is too big for the room. He is saying God is not the kind of being a room can hold.

A few verses later, in the same prayer, Solomon asks God to “hear in heaven Your dwelling place,” and says it again and again.²⁴ One prayer holds both truths. Heaven is His dwelling. Heaven cannot contain Him. Solomon saw no tension between those two claims, and neither has the church, because dwelling has never meant being boxed in.

Here is a fact about the record, and I want to be careful with it. In the whole text of God's Plan for Man as it exists in the source file, 1 Kings 8:27 is never cited. Verses 30, 38, 43, and 49 from the same prayer are cited, in support of the claim that God dwells on the planet heaven. Verse 27, the verse that says the heavens cannot contain Him, is not there.²⁵

The Study Bible's note on 1 Kings 8:27 does address the verse. It reads the passage as supporting omnipresence in Dake's sense, not in the church's: “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.”²⁶ So even when Dake meets the verse head on, the answer is the same filter. Presence yes. God Himself, no.

Move 3: Reading “came down” the way the Bible reads it

The strongest thing in Dake's favor is that the Bible really does say God came down. Genesis 11:5 says it about the tower. Genesis 18 says it about Sodom. Chapter 4 covers his rule for reading this kind of language: take it literally wherever you can.²⁷ So the question is fair. Why not?

Take Sinai, the loudest descent in the Old Testament. Exodus says the Lord came down on the mountain in fire. Then Moses, retelling that very day, says this: “Out of heaven He let you hear His voice, that He might instruct you; on earth He showed you His great fire.”²⁸ In one event, in one sentence, God is speaking out of heaven and showing fire on earth. If descent were literal travel, the sentence would make no sense. God would have to be in two places, which is exactly what Dake says a body cannot do.

Take Jacob at Bethel. He dreams of a stairway with angels going up and down and the Lord standing above it. He wakes and says, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.”²⁹ Not “the Lord came here while I slept.” The Lord is in this place. The dream did not deliver God to Bethel. It opened Jacob's eyes to what had been true all along.

Take Micah. The prophet says the Lord is coming out of His place to tread the high places of the earth. Read one verse before that and one after. Before: the Lord speaks from His holy temple. After: the mountains melt like wax and the valleys split open.³⁰ Nobody reads the melting mountains as geology. This is the language of a King arriving in judgment. The arrival is as real as the melting is literal.

So what does “came down” mean? It means God has turned to act. It is the Bible's way of saying that the One who is everywhere has now taken up a case, moved from patience to judgment, from silence to speech. Genesis 11 makes the point with something close to humor. Men build a tower to reach the sky. God has to come down to see it. The joke only works if the distance is moral, not measured in feet.

Reading “came down” as physical travel costs more than it buys. It buys you one literal sentence. It costs you Jeremiah 23, Psalm 139, Amos 9, Acts 17, and 1 Kings 8, all of which have to be softened into figures of speech. That is the opposite of the literalizing rule Dake says he follows.

Move 4: What the church has always meant

The historic answer is not complicated. It needs one distinction, and I will give it in plain words.

God is not present the way a body is present. A body takes up room and crowds other things out of it. God is not present the way air is present either. Air fills a room by being spread thin, a little here and a little there. God is present in a third way. He is wholly present at every point.³¹

All of God is at the bedside. All of God is at the far edge of the galaxy. At the same time. He is not divided up and He is not stretched out, because He has no parts to divide and no size to stretch.

That is why the old confessions put omnipresence right next to the denial of a body. The Thirty-Nine Articles say the one living and true God is “without body, parts, or passions,” and in the same breath call Him “of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness.” The Westminster Confession says the same, calling God “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions,” and then “immense” and “most absolute.”³²

Those two claims are really one. A being with a body of ordinary size has a boundary. A being with a boundary has an outside. And whatever is outside Him, He is not present to. Dake saw this clearly and drew the conclusion honestly: body first, so not everywhere. The church started at the other end and drew the opposite conclusion: everywhere first, so no body.

The historic answer also gives a better account of what Dake was reaching for. The church has always said God is nearer to some places than others in a different sense: the sense of manifest favor and glory. He was present in the tabernacle in a way He was not in a field in Moab. He is in a gathered church in a way He is not in an empty parking lot. That is real. Pentecostals are right to expect it. But that nearness sits on top of the other nearness. It does not replace it.

Move 5: The world is in Him

Scripture does not just say God reaches everywhere. It says the universe is held in existence moment by moment by Him. “In Him all things consist,” Paul writes, meaning they hold together.³³ Hebrews says the Son upholds all things by the word of His power. Paul at Athens says that in Him we live and move and have our being.

Think about what that requires. Every atom of the star nobody has named yet is being held in existence right now by God. Not by a memo from God. Not by a law God set in motion and left to run. By God, personally, at that point, at this moment.

A being who is at one place at a time cannot do that. No amount of felt relationship makes up the difference. Dake's God can be loved from a distance. He cannot hold the distance in being.

This is also where the question stops being about geography and starts being about greatness. A located God is a large creature. He may be the largest one, sitting on the finest throne in the universe. But He is inside the universe with everything else. The God of Scripture is not the biggest thing in the room. There is no room He is in. Everything else is in Him.³⁴

Move 6: What the true doctrine gives back

Doctrine is not a museum piece. It gives things to the people who hold it. Here is what this one gives.

It means there is no unreached hospital room. “The LORD is near to those who have a broken heart,” the Psalm says, and near is not a figure of speech.³⁵

It means no grave is unattended, including the one you may be standing beside this year.

It means your prayer is not routed through a switchboard. It does not travel, it does not queue, and it does not lose anything to distance, because there is no distance to lose it to.

And it means the last promise in Matthew is as large as it sounds. “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”³⁶ Jesus said that to eleven men who were about to scatter across the world. He did not say He would think of them. He said He would be with them, all of them, everywhere, at once. Only God can keep a promise shaped like that.

The grandmother in the hallway had it right. Right there with him. Right here with me. Both, at the same moment, with nothing stretched thin.

5. Answering the Defenses

Three responses come back whenever this subject comes up. All three deserve a real answer.

First, the Spirit is not his escape hatch. On the same page as the rest of this doctrine, having said that Christ is “local in body, one place at a time,” Dake adds that the same is true of the Father and the Holy Spirit.³⁷ In this system the Spirit is a third separate person with His own spirit body, and a body of ordinary size is at one place at a time. The rule he gives covers all three.

The Study Bible's index entry on omnipresence says it plainly. Under the heading “Omnipresent,” it defines the term as “everywhere present” and then immediately says: “All three go from place to place bodily as other beings in the universe do.”³⁸ All three. Not just the Father.

Second, the structure matters. In Dake's Godhead the three are three separate beings, each with His own body, soul, and spirit.³⁹ Chapter 6 prints that in full and Chapter 7 answers it. Given that structure, a Father who is absent but well informed is not omnipresent by proxy. He is absent. Sending someone else to a place does not make you present there. Every parent who has ever missed a child's recital knows the difference.

The historic doctrine says something entirely different. Where the Spirit is, God is, because the Spirit is not a separate God but the one God in the third person. That is why Psalm 139 can move from “Your Spirit” to “Your presence” in the same line without changing subjects. Chapter 14 takes up the Spirit's person in full.

The second defense: “The Bible says heaven is God's dwelling on nearly every page. You are the one arguing with Scripture.”

I concede this gladly and without a hedge, because a defense half-answered is a defense not answered.

Heaven is God's dwelling. Jesus taught us to pray to a Father in heaven, and He said it more than the eighteen times Dake counted. The church has always confessed heaven as the seat of God's throne, the place where His glory is seen without a veil, the home He is preparing for His people. Nobody who reads Revelation 4 can treat heaven as a metaphor.

The question is what “dwelling” claims. Solomon settled it in one prayer. Heaven is His dwelling place, and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him. Isaiah puts those two truths in a single sentence: “Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool. Where is the house you could build for Me?”⁴⁰ A throne is where a king reigns in the open. It is not a container, and it does not limit where the king's rule reaches.

So the disagreement is not about whether heaven is real or whether God is there. It is about the word “not.” Dake wrote “not everywhere,” and Scripture will not sign it.

The third defense: “Omnipresence is Greek philosophy the church read back into the Bible. Dake just took the Bible at face value.”

I understand the instinct. Dake spent his life fighting people who explained away plain sentences, and he was often right to fight them.

But look at where the doctrine actually comes from. Jeremiah 23 is Hebrew prophecy, given to a nation in crisis. Psalm 139 is Hebrew poetry, sung in worship. Amos 9 is a farmer-prophet preaching judgment on injustice. Solomon's prayer is a dedication liturgy. None of that is Athens. The Greek philosophers never wrote a line like “If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.”

And notice which side has to do the explaining away. It is not the church that has to soften “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” into a figure. It is the notes.

6. Conclusion and the Words

Here is what we have seen. All of it came from one course book and its companion Study Bible, with page numbers you can check for yourself.

Dake keeps the word omnipresent, gives a section of his course that title, and tests his students on it. Under the heading, he denies what nobody claimed (that God's body is everywhere) and settles what everybody claims (that God's person is in one place). He says God's body is of ordinary size and must be at one place at a time. He says God personally dwells in heaven and not everywhere. He says God goes from place to place like anybody else. And he redefines presence as union, relationship, memory, acquaintance, and association, working on the same principle as a man's bond with a family hundreds of miles away.

I have not asked you to take my word for any of it. Every claim carries a page number.

But I do not want to leave you with a list of errors. I want to leave you with the God the notes gave away.

He is not far off. He has never been far off. Before you put the first word of tonight's prayer together, He was already in the room. He was already in the room six thousand miles away, too. He was holding both rooms in existence while you were still thinking about how to begin. He does not arrive. He does not commute. There is no country He has to fly to and no bedside He has to be told about.

That is not an abstraction. It is the only reason anyone has ever prayed in the dark and been heard.

Keep your Bible. Read the page. Then read Psalm 139 out loud and see which one sounds like the God who came looking for you.

Notes

↑ 1. The conversation is recalled from pastoral ministry; identifying details have been changed, and no living person is described. Unlike Ray, the recurring reader introduced in Chapter 1, this figure does not return.

↑ 2. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; copyright renewed 1977), Lesson Four, 61. Page numbers throughout this chapter follow the printed running heads embedded in the resident digitization of the 1977 one-volume printing (GPFM library). The resident copyright page reads: “© Copyright 1949 by Finis Jennings Dake; © Copyright renewed 1977 by Finis Jennings Dake.”

↑ 3. Ibid., Lesson Four (“The Truth About God”), 60. The heading stands as a section title in the body of the lesson.

↑ 4. Ibid., “Questions on Lesson Four,” question 41, p. 66. Question 42 asks the parallel question about omniscience and directs the student to “name some things He does not know,” which is Chapter 10's subject.

↑ 5. Ibid., 60. The target of the paragraph is pantheism and the impersonal absolute of nineteenth-century idealism, together with the metaphysical movements Dake elsewhere calls “false cults.” On this he and the historic church stand together.

↑ 6. Ibid., front matter and Foreword. The Foreword records that the work was first issued in twenty-six loose-leaf books of two lessons each, mailed bimonthly as a correspondence course; that the questions at the end of each lesson were “designed for the student's self-examination”; that the first publisher was Bible Research Foundation, Inc.; and that “to a great many preachers of various denominations this 52-lesson course has become their storehouse of sermon material.”

↑ 7. Ibid., Lesson Four, 60. Quoted in full from the section opening; the em dashes are Dake's. Minor scan artifacts (broken words at line ends) have been silently rejoined without altering wording, per the source-handling rule for this digitization.

↑ 8. Ibid., Lesson Four, 61. The digitization reads “tan feel” for “can feel” at one point, an obvious optical-recognition artifact of the printed page; it is corrected here without comment in the quotation itself.

↑ 9. Ibid., Lesson Four, 57. The quotation is complete through the cherubim clause; the sentence continues, “and does do and can do anything that any other person can do bodily that is right and good.” Dake's parenthetical Scripture citations are reproduced as printed, including his own abbreviations.

↑ 10. Zechariah 14:4–5 and Titus 2:13 concern the appearing of the Lord in glory. That the incarnate Son has a true human body, now glorified, and will return in it bodily, is the confession of the whole church and is not at issue anywhere in this book. The Christological questions raised by Dake's handling of the incarnation belong to Chapter 13.

↑ 11. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 304, in the lesson on the Dispensation of Law. Ellipsis marks omitted material on God's appearances “at the beginning and end of the Dispensations of both Innocence and Conscience,” with Dake's supporting references.

↑ 12. Ibid., 115. Dake's parenthetical references at this point are Genesis 11:1–9 and Genesis 18:21.

↑ 13. Finis Jennings Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales), note on Ezekiel 1:26–28, O.T. p. 1365 (scan resident in Dakes_annotated_reference_Bible__Omnis.pdf and Dake_Bible_Misc_Passages_From_Images_Folder.pdf). The full sentence reads: “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. See God in Index.”

↑ 14. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 60–61. The quotation runs across the page break; the sentence beginning “the sense of presence enough” opens page 61 in the printing digitized here.

↑ 15. Ibid., Lesson Four, 61. The paragraph is quoted entire, from its opening sentence to its close. Dake's internal Scripture quotation is KJV and his abbreviated references are reproduced as printed. The closing sentence of this paragraph is the one quoted at the head of this chapter.

↑ 16. Ibid., 834, “The Truth About Heaven,” points 2 through 4: “IT IS A REAL PLANET LIKE THE EARTH”; “Besides the planet called Heaven where God dwells . . . there are two other spheres called Heaven”; “HEAVEN IS THE CAPITAL OF THE UNIVERSE, for God has His capital city, the New Jerusalem, His capitol building, the Heavenly Temple or Tabernacle, and His throne in the Temple in Heaven.” Point 6 places the planet “IN THE NORTHERN PART OF THE UNIVERSE,” citing Isaiah 14:12–14. The materiality of heaven, the eternal state, and the resurrection body are developed in Chapter 16.

↑ 17. Ibid., Lesson Four, 61. Dake's internal Scripture quotations are from the King James Version and are reproduced exactly as he printed them, including his capitalization and punctuation.

↑ 18. Ibid., Lesson Four, 61. Ellipsis marks omitted sentences in which Dake extends the illustration to families he has never met. The closing sentence of the paragraph reads: “It is governed by relationship and knowledge as well as bodily sight.”

↑ 19. Ibid., Lesson Four, 62. The full sentence about Christ reads: “In this sense Jesus Himself, who has a flesh and bone body and who is local in body—one place at a time, is with all men everywhere even to the end of the age (Matt. 28:19-20).”

↑ 20. Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, note “r” on Psalm 139:7–8 (scan resident in Dakes_annotated_reference_Bible__Omnis.pdf and confirmed in Dakes_annotated_reference_Bible_Godhead_New_Version.pdf and Dake_Annotated_Study_Bible___Trinity_New_Version.pdf). The full note reads: “In what sense is God in hell? In the same sense that His presence is everywhere. His personal body is not in hell and never has been there except to create it (Mt. 25:41), as far as we know. . . . 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 Dake Annotated Reference Bible is published in both King James and New King James texts. Scripture in this chapter is NKJV unless noted. Dake's own biblical quotations, inside his material, are KJV and are left as he printed them.

↑ 22. Psalm 139:8. The Hebrew is she'ol, the realm of the dead, rendered “hell” in the KJV and NKJV and “Sheol” in many modern versions. The psalm's point does not turn on the translation: the poet names the highest and lowest points he can conceive and finds God at both.

↑ 23. Amos 9:2–3 (NKJV).

↑ 24. 1 Kings 8:30, 39, 43, 49 (NKJV). The refrain “hear in heaven Your dwelling place” recurs through the dedication prayer, always after verse 27 and never in tension with it.

↑ 25. Searches of the resident text of God's Plan for Man for “1 Kings 8:27,” “Kings 8:2,” “heaven of heavens,” and “contain thee” return no citation of 1 Kings 8:27. The citations of that chapter which do appear are 8:10–15, 8:16–17, 8:18–19, 8:25–26, 8:30, 38, 43, 49, 8:33–34, and 8:35. The reference to verses 30, 38, 43, and 49 appears at p. 834 in support of “the planet called Heaven where God dwells.” This footnote records a fact about the resident text of one book. It makes no claim about his Study Bible notes on 1 Kings, which are addressed in footnote 26.

↑ 26. Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, note “h” on 1 Kings 8:27 (scan resident in Dakes_Bible_Planets.pdf, p. 30 of the scan). The full note reads: “This question can be answered in the affirmative. God will indeed dwell on the earth, in person and in visible form in all eternity, as He now dwells on the planet heaven (Isa. 66:22–24; Tit. 2:13; Rev. 21:1–27; 22:4–5). This does not mean, however, that His presence will be limited to the earth any more than it is now limited to heaven. 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. See God in Index.”

↑ 27. The Foreword to God's Plan for Man states the author's governing principle: “the general principle adhered to is that of literalizing instead of spiritualizing the statements of the Scripture. The rule observed is: Take the Bible literally where it is at all possible; if symbolic, figurative, or typical langauage is used, then look for the literal truth it intends to convey” (spelling as printed). The rule and its consequences are the subject of Chapter 4.

↑ 28. Exodus 19:18, 20; Deuteronomy 4:36 (NKJV). Compare Deuteronomy 4:12 and 4:15, where the same event is remembered as one in which Israel “saw no form,” a point developed in Chapter 8.

↑ 29. Genesis 28:12–13, 16 (NKJV).

↑ 30. Micah 1:2–4 (NKJV). Micah 1:3 is not among the texts Dake lists at God's Plan for Man 57 in support of God's bodily travel; his list there is Genesis 3:8; 11:5; 18:1–22, 33; 19:24; 32:24–32; 35:13; Zechariah 14:5; Titus 2:13. Micah is opened here as the present writer's example of descent language in prophetic poetry, not as an exhibit of Dake's reading.

↑ 31. The scholastic vocabulary distinguishes circumscriptive presence (a body bounded by place), definitive presence (a finite spirit present at a place without filling it), and repletive presence (God wholly present at every place). The distinction is old and standard in Reformed and Lutheran dogmatics alike. It is glossed here in plain English because the idea, not the vocabulary, is what the reader needs.

↑ 32. Articles of Religion (1571), art. I; Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), 2.1. Both are public-domain texts. The Confession's word “immense” carries the older sense of “not able to be measured or contained,” which is precisely Solomon's point in 1 Kings 8:27. The Athanasian Creed's bearing on the doctrine of the Trinity is developed in Chapter 7, which owns that material.

↑ 33. Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:3; Acts 17:28 (NKJV). The Greek verb in Colossians 1:17 (synestēken, “hold together, cohere”) is a perfect form carrying continuing force: the holding is not a past act but a present one.

↑ 34. This is the doctrine usually called transcendence, and it should not be confused with distance. The God who transcends creation is nearer to every creature than that creature is to itself, precisely because He is not one item within the world alongside the others.

↑ 35. Psalm 34:18 (NKJV).

↑ 36. Matthew 28:20 (NKJV). Compare Matthew 18:20, which Dake takes as his model case of omnipresence at God's Plan for Man 61, explaining that Christ cannot be bodily present in many gatherings at once since His body is in heaven.

↑ 37. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Four, 62: “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.”

↑ 38. Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, index entry “Omnipresent” (scan resident in Dakes_annotated_reference_Bible__Omnis.pdf, confirmed in Dakes_annotated_reference_Bible_Godhead_New_Version.pdf and Dake_Annotated_Study_Bible___Trinity_New_Version.pdf). The full entry reads: “Omnipresent, everywhere present. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are all present where there are beings with whom they have dealings; but they are not omnibody, that is, their bodies are not omnipresent. All three go from place to place bodily as other beings in the universe do.” The entry then lists scriptural support for each person of the Trinity traveling and concludes: “Omnipresence then, is different from omnibody, and is governed by relationship and knowledge of God. Like the presence of someone being felt by another who is thousands of miles away, so it is with the presence of God among men (1 Cor. 5:3–4).”

↑ 39. Ibid., Lesson Four, 64: “if one person of the three in the Godhead has a personal body, soul, and spirit, all three persons must also have separate bodies, souls, and spirits.” Compare page 60: “Each member of the Divine Trinity has His own personal spirit body, His own soul . . . and His own personal spirit.” The full documentation of this Godhead, from both God's Plan for Man and the Study Bible, is printed in Chapter 6 and answered in Chapter 7.

↑ 40. Isaiah 66:1 (NKJV). Stephen quotes the verse at his trial for exactly this purpose, against the assumption that God is housed (Acts 7:48–50).