(upbeat music) - Michaela writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, in episode number 19, "you said God sometimes withdraws his presence from us. "How does that not contradict God's new covenant promise "to never leave us or forsake us?" In Hebrews 13, verse five. - I love that kind of question because to me, the best questions are how things fit together.

What's helped me most, I think, in my study of the Bible is seeing when things seem not to fit together, seem contradictory, and then instead of walking away from the Bible and assuming, well, it's a bunch of double talk, digging down to the root so they come together and then you realize, oh, these two plants are not opposites.

They have the same roots. So I think that's what we're dealing with here. So we need to think about kinds of presence of the Lord. The Bible talks about different kinds of his presence. So for example, most of us would agree that God is omnipresent. There's no place where he's not.

Paul said, "In him we live and move and have our being." He's just quoting a pagan poet there to agree that yes, everybody is in God, held in being by God. And Jeremiah in 23, 24 says, "Can a man hide himself "in secret places so that I cannot see him?" God is talking.

"Do I not fill heaven and earth?" declares the Lord. So I think the first and most basic sense that we need to talk about is he's everywhere. God is omnipresent, including in the lives of believers and unbelievers, holding them in being, knowing all that they do firsthand. And then Michaela points to, and she's absolutely right, there is this special presence.

She calls it the new covenant promise of God's presence in Hebrews 13, five, which says, "Keep your life free from the love of money "and be content with what you have, "for he has said, 'I will never leave you or forsake you.'" Or we could go to Matthew 28, "Behold, I am with you always to the end of the age." Or we could go to 2 Corinthians 4, "I am persecuted but not forsaken." So you've got these New Testament, new covenant promises.

God is never, ever going to abandon or leave his people. The one I love most is Jeremiah 32, 40, where it goes over the top and says, "I will make with them an everlasting covenant," this is now the new covenant, "that I will not turn away from doing good to them." And then he adds, "And I will put the fear of me "in their hearts so they may not turn from me." So this new covenant promise is not only that God won't walk away from us, he won't let us walk away from him.

So I wanna say to Michaela, yes, yes, yes, yes. She's right that there is a presence of God, a keeping, a staying with, that will never fail for God's elect, for those who are in Christ. But, now here's what she picked up on. There is another way in the Bible that it talks about the presence of God.

So Psalm 69, 17, "Hide not your face from your servant, "for I am in distress. "Make haste to answer me." So his sense is God is distant, God is hiding from him. Or Psalm 143, 7, "Answer me quickly, O Lord. "My spirit fails. "Hide not your face from me, "lest I be like those who go down to the pit." Or Isaiah 64, 7, "There is no one who calls upon your name, "who rouses himself to take hold of you, "for you have hidden your face from us," us, your covenant people, "and have made us melt in the hand of your iniquities." Now, what occurs to me when I read these is that Michaela might say, others might say, "Wait a minute, those are Old Testament prayers.

"Maybe the saints had to pray like that in the Old Testament. "Don't hide your face from me, don't go away from me. "But we're new covenant people. "Would we ever pray like that?" And there are a couple of problems with that objection. One is that in the very text that Michaela quoted, from Hebrews 13, 5, where it says, "The Lord has said, I will be with you, "I will not leave you," that's a quote from Joshua 1, 5.

So he's quoting an Old Covenant promise and applying it to New Testament believers. And the other problem is that the Old Testament abounds with promises to God's people that he won't forsake them. First Samuel 12, 22, "The Lord will not forsake his people "for his great namesake." Psalm 37, 28, "The Lord loves justice.

"He will not forsake his saints." Psalm 23, 4, we all love Psalm 23, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow "of death, I fear no evil 'cause you're with me." In other words, even in the worst of horrible, dark times, "My shepherd is with me." Those are Old Testament statements.

So here's my answer to her question. The old Puritans put it all together by talking about the manifest presence of God. And they were using that phrase manifest, experienced, known, tasted presence of God to distinguish it from the omnipresence of God and from the covenant keeping of God, which may or may not be experienced intensely from time to time.

And I think this is really, really helpful. In other words, sometimes God withdraws his presence from us. That's the phrase, that's the statement I made that Michaela stumbled over. She said, "How can that be?" When I say that, sometimes God withdraws his presence from us. I don't mean that we are forsaken by our covenant God.

I mean that the manifestations of his presence are limited. He doesn't withdraw his covenant commitment to us or his sustaining grace from us. What he withdraws is the sweetness of his fellowship from time to time or the conscious sense of his power. And he has his reasons for doing this.

And I think maybe that would be another time for us to talk about that. But surely one of them is to make us feel our desperate need from him so that we fly to Christ and to the cross where we hear the covenant promise afresh. - Yes, amen. Thank you, Pastor John.

And thank you, Michaela, for your question. She was asking a follow-up question to episode number 19, does God ever withdraw his presence from his children? You can find that episode in the Ask Pastor John archive. And if you have a question on the brain that you'd like to ask Pastor John, please email it to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.

Monday, we return to address a question from a single man who is sick of his singleness and wants to be satisfied in Christ while he waits for his bride. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Have a wonderful weekend. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)