Lesson 4 Omnipresence/Immensity, Eternal/Omnitemporal

1. It would be a ______placed on God if He was able to be constrained by time or space or human’s choices. God is not able to be constrained by anything. One way to articulate this truth is to affirm that God is infinite.

2. God’s infinity in regard to space is known as His Omnipresence. Omnipresence refers to God relative to space; and space, like time, is a part of creation. Omni = all and presence= presence. It means God is present (or co- exists)______.

3. Prior to creation, there was no “where-ness”; there was no ______as we know it. There was only God, and He was not anywhere; He simply was (or is). Since He was all that there was, there was no “where” relative to His existence.

4. God cannot be ______in creation; the universe cannot hold him. When God created all things out of nothing, he did not have to “move out of the way” to make room for the world, He is where it is.

5. Another term used to describe God’s attribute of Omnipresence is Immensity. It comes from the Latin word “immensus”, which means______.

6. Omnipresence emphasizes God’s immanence, while Immensity emphasizes His______. There is nowhere, where God is not, and there is no way God can be contained—by space, or by time.

7. God is bigger than the universe, and beyond it, and yet at the same time He is "Immanuel" - God ______us.

8. Another term you might see used in place of omnipresence is “ubiquity.” Ubiquity = the fullness of His being is equal at all times and in all places - the idea of His ______presence everywhere. Ubiquity relates to God being present everywhere in His entirety at the same time, and all times.

9. Because God is self-existent, He exists Eternally in his ontological (ad______) transcendence of time. God also exists Omnitemporally (omni=all, temporally=in time) —that is to say, immanently (ad ______) at every point in time

10 .If God is to be A Se and if He is to be One & Simple, then there cannot be other things that God’s transcendent essence______, or needs, or can be affected by—things like space or time.

11. God works in a temporally ______pattern (from our perspective). The sequence is foreordained by God’s decree, but He brings it to pass in time. He is both inside and outside of the temporal box – a box that can neither confine Him nor keep him out.

12. In order to save us God had to become man. The divine Son assumed a genuine human nature in order to: perfectly obey God’s law (in order to fulfill the covenant of works as the 2nd Adam), and to suffer and die on the cross as a ______atonement in our place. And Only Christ - as God - could bring a sacrifice of infinite and eternal value that would satisfy God’s wrath. He suffered an infinite amount of punishment in a finite amount of time.

13. An increasingly prevalent teaching in charismatic circles is the doctrine of Kenoticism (derivative of kenóō). The doctrine of Kenoticism (or Kenosis Theory) is the ______teaching that in the incarnation the Son divested Himself of some or all attributes of Deity, making him less than fully divine, and so not truly divine. It declares that Jesus is not fully God.

14. There was no vacancy in the Trinity during our Lord’s earthly ministry! The incarnation was a miracle of______, not subtraction. The Son took on humanity; He did not divest himself of deity. He did not “parachute” out of the Trinity.

15. The doctrine of the two natures of Christ (known as the Hypostatic Union) maintains that Jesus possessed a full undiminished human nature and a full undiminished divine nature, which were not combined or confused into some new nature but were added to each other ______(yet remaining distinct) in the one person Jesus Christ. Christ is one “who” (person) with two “whats” (natures).

16. Christ’s human nature stayed human, and Christ’s divine nature stayed divine, and those two natures did not communicate attributes to each other, but rather to the person of Christ. This is called the doctrine of Communication of Properties. The Reformed tradition's classic distinctive is that God is always and ever God, and man is always and ever man. Even in the unity of the person Christ, the two natures remain______.

17. The divine Son (the pre-incarnate Jesus) is fully and ______united to but never totally contained (swallowed up) within the human nature and, therefore, even in the incarnation his divine nature is to be conceived of as beyond or outside of the human nature. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it: “Since divinity is not limited and is present everywhere, it is evident that Christ’s divinity is surely beyond the bounds of the humanity he has taken on, but at the same time his divinity is in and remains personally united to his humanity” (Q/A 48)

18. The Reformed argue that Christ cannot be present bodily in the Lord's Supper, because he reigns ______from heaven. It is Christ’s ubiquitous divine Spirit that enables us to commune with Christ and to feed on his body and blood in the Sacrament. The Lutherans, however, believe that what can be said about Jesus’ divine nature can also be said about His human nature. The two natures communicate with each other, they mix with each other. The Lutherans emphasize the bodily presence of Christ’s body and blood by reason of the communicated omnipresence to the human nature of the Son

19. The Reformed thinking is that the finite human nature of Christ is incapable of receiving or grasping infinite attributes such as omnipresence. These two natures don’t switch on and off by some toggle-switch deep in Jesus’ consciousness. The human nature doesn’t limit the divine nature, nor does the divine morph the human nature Rather, these natures with all their properties ______within the one person of Christ who then performs actions according to both natures.

20. ______what He was (fully God), He became what He was not (fully man). Colossians 2:9 - “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.”

21. There was no division in the Trinity when the Father forsook Jesus at Golgotha. The mystery of divine ______remained intact. We can say God the Father forsook His Son according to the Son’s human nature, and the Father was never separated from His Son ontologically according to the Son’s divine nature.

22. The important key concept in this orthodox doctrine is that whatever Christ did, He did as a ______person. For instance, when His human body was beaten, tortured, and died, He experienced it as a whole person. In other words, things which only one nature does can be considered to have been done by Christ Himself. So that even though God cannot be killed, it can be said that God died for Our Sins. ONLY the God-man could die for our sins because only the eternal Son of God Himself can provide a sacrifice that can deal with the eternal punishment our sins deserve. Persons act, not natures.

23. Right now as we speak, Christ is present with us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (1 Co 3:16), but the ultimate fulfillment of the promise of God’s presence will not be realized until Christ returns, and the New Heavens and New Earth descend. On that great day when our faith becomes sight we will gaze upon the beauty of our Lord for ______(Rev 22:4). And we will hear “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” (Rev 21:3)