“Where can I go to escape your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I fly on the wings of the dawn and settle down on the western horizon, even there your hand will lead me; your right hand will hold on to me. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light around me will be night’—even the darkness is not dark to you. The night shines like the day; darkness and light are alike to you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When the apostle Matthew was writing Jesus’ story, he began at the beginning. Writing for a Jewish background audience, he rooted Jesus in Jewish history, showing Him to be the Son of David as every Jew knew the Messiah would be. Then, he told the story of His birth. Narrating through Joseph’s experience, Matthew went out of his way to show that Jesus’ birth was the fulfillment of prophecy. Specifically, He fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy about a child born to a virgin who would be called Immanuel, which means “God is with us.” Jesus made it possible for the God who is everywhere in Spirit to be with us in relationship. Let’s celebrate the goodness of our God with David’s words today.

There was once a day when the idea of a god’s being near us was a terrifying prospect to most people. The gods didn’t care about us beyond what we could do for them. They certainly didn’t love us. If the gods came near, it was almost certainly for the purposes of judgment. Someone had done something wrong, and now there was a price to be paid. No one wanted the gods with them unless they were actively helping them with something, and even then, if you could get it done with simply a talisman imbued with power from the god, that was the preferable option.

Even the ancient Jewish people thought in roughly these terms. Oh, they had the Scriptures assuring them of God’s love and favor, but they took the idea of drawing near to Him extremely seriously. No one entered into God’s presence. No one, that is, but the high priest. And he only did it on a single day of the year. And leading up to that day were several days’ worth of cleansing and preparation rituals to make sure there wasn’t any kind of sin hiding in the priest’s heart that would result in instant and deadly judgment. And even after all of this, the priests waiting nervously in relative safety on the other side of the great curtain tied a rope around the high priest’s ankle just in case they missed something and they had to fish his lifeless body out because they were not about to go in before the presence of God after him.

And yet there were some who understood there was more to God than judgment and fury. They heard all the things God was saying to His people, and didn’t hear them only through the lens of broader cultural assumptions about gods that most everyone held at the time. Not only that, but they took God at His word, trusting that He meant what He said when He talked about the incredible passion and compassion He had for His people. Some, like David, recognized that God’s desire to be near to His people was a very good thing indeed. The idea that we can’t escape God means that we don’t ever have to be without Him. And if God really is for us, then never having to be without Him is exactly what we want.

“Where can I go to escape your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” God is righteous and the source of all that is good. Why would anyone want to flee from His presence? The only reason for that is an embrace of unrighteousness in some form or fashion. Sin causes shame and makes us want to hide. That’s been the case since the very first sin. The man and woman ate the fruit from the tree God told them not to eat from and immediately hid from each other. Soon thereafter, when God came calling, they hid from Him too. They thought they could flee from His presence, but they couldn’t. For them—and all those who have followed in their footsteps—that wasn’t a good thing. But for all those who desire to experience and know the blessings of God’s righteousness, that is exceedingly good news.

“If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I fly on the wings of the dawn and settle down on the western horizon, even there your hand will lead me; your right hand will hold on to me.” Up, down, left, right, it doesn’t matter. God’s presence is everywhere. He is omnipresent. There is not a single place anywhere in His creation that He is not. Trying to hide from Him is silly.

And He doesn’t pursue us in ignorance either. David already established in the first part of the Psalm before where our verses for today picked up that God knows us. He pursues us to have a relationship with us in spite of knowing us perfectly well. He knows all our faults and foibles. He knows our private struggles that we work so diligently to keep from everyone else. And He loves us anyway.

Part of our struggle with all of this is that sometimes we don’t love ourselves. Because of a variety of life experiences, some of which we have control over and some of which we don’t, we learn to hate ourselves. We convince ourselves that we aren’t good enough for God, that we aren’t worth His time. We believe that we only deserve darkness and try to hide from God there. But David tells us that not even this is a winning strategy. God sees us there too. “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light around me will be night’—even the darkness is not dark to you. The night shines like the day; darkness and light are alike to you.”

The light of God’s righteousness is so bright that there is no darkness in His presence. This does not mean that there is no right or wrong with God. Rather, David’s point here is that nothing is hidden from Him. Even in our deepest, darkest holes of sin, God can still see us. He still pursues us. He still enters into the darkness with us, shining with the light of His presence, and offers to lead us out of it and back into the light. That journey won’t often be easy, but He will go with us every step of the way if we will let Him.

And the thing is: He understands the darkness. He really has been in it. This is the point at which the marvel of what David is saying here and the wonder of Christmas intersect. In Jesus, God entered the darkness of humanity in order to shine His light even here. The writer of Hebrews notes that He was fully tempted as we are. He experienced all of the darkness that we do. Yet He remained without sin. His light never stopped shining. He experienced all of the various sources of temptation—hunger and thirst, hurt and betrayal, fear and anger, being a teenage boy. This means that He understands what we face. He is with us when we face them. And because He never gave in, because His light remained steadily shining, He can show us the way out.

Christmas is a reminder of God’s fierce and passionate commitment to be with us no matter what. He loves us just that much…and more. In fact, as Paul wonderfully declares in Romans 8, there is not a single thing in all the world that has the power to separate us from His love. The season of Advent gives us the opportunity to prepare to receive it with all the fullness with which He gives it. Let’s not waste this opportunity. Let us prepare to receive the king who came to live among us as one of us in order to save us because He just couldn’t stand not to be with us. Amen.