Genesis 28

Genesis 28:16:
“And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.”

AW Tozer

 Why then do we feel Him in the distance? It’s the dissimilarity in our natures; it’s the unlikeness. We’ve got enough likeness that God can commune with us and call us His children and we can say, “Abba, Father.” But in the practical working out of it, we sense our dissimilarity, and that is why God seems remote. What I’m trying to get across is simply this: nearness to God is not a geographical or an astronomical thing. It is not a spatial thing. It is a spiritual thing, having to do with nature. And so when we pray “God, draw me nearer,” or “God, come nearer,” we’re not praying (if we’re good theologians) for God to come down from some remote distance. We know God’s here now. Jesus said, “Lo, I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20). The Lord is here. Jacob said, “God is in this place and I didn’t know it” (see Genesis 28:16). He didn’t say, “God came to this place”; he said, “God is in this place.” What are we praying for, then? We are praying for a manifestation of the presence of God. Not the presence, but the manifestation of the presence. Why don’t we have the manifestation? Because we allow unlikenesses. We allow moral dissimilarity. That “sense” of absence is the result of the remaining unlikeness within us. This desire, this yearning to be near to God is, in fact, a yearning to be like Him. It’s the yearning of the ransomed heart to be like God so there can be perfect communion, so the heart and God can come together in a fellowship that is divine.    ------AW Tozer, The Attributes of God Volume 1, 123

---