Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): God is both Immanent and Transcendent

In the fourth sermon on Numbers by Dr. Rayburn, we have this excellent summary of the proper dialectic about God's "nearness" and "farness" (if you will); here is the quote:

I cannot stress the importance of our grasping the uniquely Christian view of God that is demonstrated to us in these regulations that we might otherwise take to be boring and irrelevant. Do you see how utterly different this view of God is that we are given here. It is not the view of our culture, to be sure, but it is also not the view of any other religion in the world. In every other worldview God is either immanent, near to us, or he is transcendent, far above us. In Buddhism to the extent there is a god, he is in everything. God is absolute immanence. In Islam God is high above us and cannot be known by us. God is absolute transcendence. In corruptions of Christianity, again it is one or the other. In deistic forms of Christianity God is distant and far above his creatures. In popular forms of secular and sentimental Christianity, now so common in our land, God is a harmless, avuncular figure standing nearby to help but never to provoke fear or even awe.

It is only in biblical Christianity that we get both: the living and true God, the maker of heaven and earth, the judge of all men, whose glory no man has seen or can see, who inhabits eternity and dwells in unapproachable light, on the one hand, and, on the other, the God who draws near to us, to love and care for and concern himself with his people and their small and ordinary lives. Here you have the living God in the camp of his people, right near to them to help them and guide them; but he remains the holy God of infinite glory to whom his people owe great fear and reverence and whose approach they must take care to make only in those ways appropriate to his holiness.

And let me remind you this does not change in the NT. There too God is a God of fearful majesty and faith in him requires that we live in godly fear. It is the transcendence of God that makes his immanence so wonderful and amazing and it is his immanence that makes his transcendence so glorious and so wonderful to behold and admire. We have a God who is worthy both of our fear and our love at one and the same time. And it is because and only because he is worthy of both that he is a God who can save us and deliver us to the Promised Land. It is only because he is a God who made the vast universe and rules the wheeling galaxies with absolute sovereignty that we can utterly rely on his word and his power. And it is because he is a God of love and fatherly affection that we can count on his caring for us no matter that our lives, in so many ways, seem too small to be of any consequence to even other human beings, much less to Almighty God. People are usually either sympathetic or strong, but rarely both. But the living God offers both company and help, sympathy and power, affection and sovereign rule. Our God lives in a high and holy place, we read in Isaiah 57:15, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit. He offers salvation to sinners and promises indescribable joys to those who trust in him, but he threatens the impenitent and the unbelieving with doom. He rules over this world to such an extent that every single thing that happens is in some respect his will, so that no one will finally get away with disobedience to him, but he feelingly and tenderly sympathizes with his children as a loving parent. He pitched his tent in the midst of Israel, but that tent was surrounded by guards, by mystery, and by danger. [Duguid, 61]

That is your God, Christian. Not the sentimental and toothless god of American civic religion and not the distant and unapproachable God of deism and Islam, but the God who must be loved and feared at one and the same time. There is no other God but the true and living God who is also our Savior and father in heaven. “Behold the goodness and the severity of God!”