When you say: God lives here - but not here; we've stepped outside of spirit, and you're going against the grain. You may as well be trying to squeeze yourself into skinny jeans. You're going way against the grain.
Exodus 33:18. Once again we're asking the question: where is God; and how big is He? One of the great leaders of all time is having an encounter with God, and this is what happens between Moses and God. It says:
“and he said: I beseech you, let me see Your glory”. So Moses says: God - let me see all of You.
“And He said: I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you. I will be gracious to whom I'll be gracious, and I'll have mercy on whom I'll have mercy”. In other words: you can't possibly understand Me.
He said: “you cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live. And the Lord said: behold, there's a place by Me, and you shall stand upon a rock, and it will be while My glory passes by, I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and cover you with My hand. And I will take away My hand and I will show you my back side, but My face cannot be seen”.
There's a lot going on here, let me give you a couple of thoughts:
1) Form versus Function.
Hebrew people see function; Greek people see form. It says: “and God hid Moses in the crevasse of the rock with His hand” - so us white people from Europe we all picture a giant hand - God's hand.
But a Hebrew person thinks function. He thinks: what does a hand do? A hand holds, comforts, hides, protects, touches. It's all about what a hand does. The ‘strong arm of the Lord’, the ‘hand of God’ - these sorts of things are all function. Why?
God does not have a hand, God is spirit. As a matter of fact, to try to put a form on God, is exactly what this command is trying to get us not to do - so you're thinking: function, not form. “and God hid Moses in the crevasse of the rock with His hand” - He's hiding him, He's a shield - it's a cover, it's a cloud; because the very next sentence doesn't work...
If you're picturing a giant hand, then when it says: “and God showed Moses his back side”... I mean, if God's hand is big, God's butt would be huge! It would just be: WHOA! It's covering the sky! We wouldn't think that way, right?
So it's not God's “hand” - it's what God's hand “is doing”; and it's not God's “back-side” - it's about the function of the back-side of God. So what is the function of the back-side of God?
The Bible says: “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all”.
Psalms says: “Blessed is the man who walks into the presence of the Most High, for he's dwelling in the shadow of the Almighty” - which leads a question that: if God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all - then how does a being of ‘pure light’ cast a shadow? In order to cast a shadow, something else has to be brighter.
But it says: “Blessed is the man who walks into the presence of the Most High, for he's dwelling in the shadow of the Almighty”; and so the picture is that: there's a man in the presence of pure light. There is a shadow being cast, but who's shadow is it? The man's; and so what its saying is that, when you're in the presence of God - the shadow of the Almighty is you. It's you!
You see this come into play in the New Testament. The Bible says that Peter was so ‘in the presence of God’, that his very shadow carried the power of God - and raised somebody from the dead; so you see this kind of stuff, where you're ‘in the presence of God’, all the time.
It says: “God is light, in Him is no darkness at all”. We know from science that light is travelling away from us at 186,282 miles a second (speed of light). We know that the universe is expanding (at the speed of light); and we know (from the Bible) that God is holding the universe together - so doesn't it stand to reason that the universe would expand, at the same speed, of the substance of which God is? So the universe is expanding at the speed of light; God is light; and God is holding the universe together.