Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
    and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
    the night will shine like the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.

Psalm 139:7-12

From a purely literary point of view, this is a beautiful passage. From a personal and human point of view, this passage is full of comfort and reassurance. From a Biblical or spiritual point of view it is both of the above and quite a bit more than that.

The first verse, verse 7, is a Hebrew parallelism in which both statements refer to exactly the same thing: God’s presence. Take another look

Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?

Do you see it? Sprit and His presence are the same, and there is no place our author can go to be away from God’s Spirit (presence). In the Psalms, this is not an unusual feature. Yet for us to fully understand this, we must remind ourselves that they were writing these passages under the Old Covenant in which the Spirit of God dwelt in the midst of His people in the Most Holy Place in the Temple at Jerusalem. That chamber was cut off from all human contact except for the High Priest once a year under very strict regulations, because God and His People were separated by sin. In essence, when the Psalmist writes passages like this one, he is looking far into the future to the time when Messiah has redeemed Mankind and taken the separation between humanity and God away.

Of course, we are living in that time.

For the Christian, we are not only in the presence of God’s Spirit, by God’s grace, we have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within us. Thus, whereas the author is writing somewhat wistfully about an abstract idea, we are living that idea as a day-to-day reality.

Take a moment and let that sink in…

We all have our ups and downs as we go through life, and sometimes we go through some very tough periods, yet through it all, even in the most difficult moments, we are richly blessed by God in ways that we may find hard to fully comprehend: We are blessed indeed!

So, let’s remember this as we go along, thanking God daily for all He has done both in and through us. Let’s also take the time to share some of this huge blessing with others around us who might be struggling, so that they too might share in the abundance of God’s grace.