“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. “

– Col. 3:1-4

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder.

But not when it comes to God.

I think of David crying out to God: “Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help” (Ps. 22:11). I think of the woman Jesus meets at the well. Jesus knows her story without her telling it. She is desperately lonely—so lonely she has had five husbands. She is looking for something, but frankly not God. She figures you may find God in Jerusalem, but God is absent from this place, from her life. Even Jesus himself on the cross feels the burden of what seems to be God’s absence. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

God’s absence does not make the heart grow fonder. But is God really absent?

In these three examples, when God felt far it turned out God wasn’t. David has an affair and commits murder, but God doesn’t give up on him. This woman thinks God is only in Jerusalem, and instead she finds God right in front of her at a well in Samaria. And Jesus feels God’s distance on the cross, but God raises him from the dead. That’s what Colossians 3 says. Jesus was raised, and because of that—because God was not absent—Jesus will return and appear in glory.

But the story of God and God’s people—of you and me—is not the story of an absentee father. Yet we feed into that version of the story in our own language. We talk about the distance between us and God caused by our sin. We use words like separation, which is a loaded word. That word is biblical (Eph. 4:18), but the way we use that word seems to widen the gap.

Our language of separation comes from the earliest story in Scripture, when Adam and Eve sinned and were sent out from the Garden of Eden. Yes, there was a consequence for their disobedience. Yes, they had to leave the garden. But God didn’t stay behind in that garden. That’s what our telling of the story implies. But the opposite is true. God goes with Adam and Eve. God is right there with them, outside the garden, in the very next stories.

I’m also reminded of Acts 17, where Paul speaks to non-believers in Athens. And he describes that majestic work of God, beginning with creation and orchestrated through the ages for the sake of the people he formed. And Paul says, “God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27-28).

He is saying no one is ever truly far from God. They may feel that God is absent—even Jesus did at one moment—but in truth God is not far from any one of us.

In Col. 3:1-4, Paul takes it a step farther. Not only is God nearby, but those who belong to God are hidden with Christ in God.

A.W. Tozer said that when we talk about being filled with God, we imagine ourselves as a bucket filled with water. But that doesn’t quite get at the truth, he says. Rather, we are more like a bucket submerged in the deepest part of the ocean, filled with water but also surrounded and consumed by it. Our lives are hidden with Christ in God, like a bucket submerged in the cool waters of an all-consuming ocean.

God is not absent. We are not alone.

Thanks be to God.