Do we have a conviction of
God's abiding presence wherever we are? There is nothing more needed
in this generation than a larger and more Scriptural idea of God. A
great American writer has told us that when he was a boy the
conception of God which he got from books and sermons was that of a
wise and very strict lawyer. I remember well the awful conception of
God which I had when a boy. I was given an illustrated edition of
Watts' hymns, in which God was represented as a great piercing eye in
the midst of a great black thunder cloud. The idea which that picture
gave to my young imagination was that of God as a great detective,
playing the spy upon my actions, as the hymn says:
"Writing now the story of what little children do."
That was a very mistaken and harmful idea which it has taken me years
to obliterate. We think of God as "up there," or as one who made the
world six thousand years ago and then retired. We must learn that He
is not confined either to time or space. God is not to be thought of
as merely back there in time, or up there in space.
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