Where is God?

When someone says they are praising and worshipping God, where exactly is this God at the time? Sometimes it seems to me that people are escaping themselves when they defer to a higher being outside themselves. It takes the pressure off, but it doesn’t deal with what caused the pressure.

We live in a society of people that thrives on placing things outside themselves. If we trip on a step and break our leg the first thing we do is look for the fault in the step. Each time we experience misfortune our instinct is to place blame elsewhere. Doesn’t worshipping God fall into this same category? Certainly in the face of misfortune many people question the presence of God.

What if God is actually within us? St Pauls seems to think so. “For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will live in them and move in them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” 2 Cor 6:16

Paul is the one who opposed Jesus Christ until he had a firsthand experience of the presence of Christ which caused him to fall to the ground and become blind -we could say that he fell off his under-stand-ing and he could no longer look outside himself. See Acts 9:1-5

How amazing that we should be the temple of the living God! What does this really mean? Naos, the Greek word for temple, refers to the inner shrine or sanctuary of the temple, the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies. A more accurate translation would be, “We are a holy place of a living God”. So we should then ask, what is a living God? The word ‘living’ zao, has a connection to the resurrection. It was the resurrected Jesus Christ that Paul experienced.  He spoke of this in Colossians “the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Col 1:27 The living God could be Christ and Christ is IN us, we are his temple. So instead of placing our issues at the feet of an external God perhaps we should be dealing with our issues within us to make our temple, our inner shrine, the perfect dwelling place for Christ, the living God.