Title: Omnipresence

Topic: Trinity

Summary: We look at what Scripture says about God's omnipresence and how it is that God can be everywhere, and yet seem absent or distant.

Use the reference links below to follow along in the Bible as you watch.

References:
Psalms 46; 139:8, 10
Jeremiah 1:4; 23:23-24
Amos 9:1-2
Acts of the Apostles 17:27-28
Ephesians 4:9-10
John 8:58; 12:37, 39
Psalms 5:6-8
Leviticus 26:11-12
Ezekiel 34:20, 25, 30
John 12:26; 14:1
2 Corinthians 6:16
1 John 4:16
Revelation 21:3
Jonah 1:1, 15, 17; 2:9-10, 3

4603. 'The sons of Jacob were twelve' means a state in which all things were now present in the Divine Natural. This is clear from the representation of 'Jacob' as the Divine Natural, often dealt with already; and from the meaning of 'twelve' as all, and when used in reference to the sons of Jacob, or to the tribes named after these, as all aspects of truth and good, dealt with in 2089, 2129, 2130, 3272, 3858, 3913, 3939. The subject so far has been the way in which the Lord made his Natural within Him Divine, for 'Jacob' has represented the Natural; but now the subject becomes the joining of the Divine Natural to the Rational. This joining together is represented by Jacob's coming to Isaac, for 'Isaac' represents the Lord's Divine Rational. This explains why all the sons of Jacob are listed once again, since every aspect of truth and good had to be present within the Natural before it could be fully joined to the Rational. The reason for this particular listing of them is the service which the natural renders the rational as the receptacle for it. But one should recognize that Jacob's sons are now mentioned in a different order from before; the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah - Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher - are mentioned last, though in actual fact these were born before Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin. The reason for this difference is that at this point the subject is the order in which truths and goods exist within the Natural when this has been made Divine, for it is the state belonging to the subject under discussion that determines the order in which their names appear, see 3862, 3926, 3939.