Closing the Distance
Closing the Distance: What If God Was Never Meant to Be Far Away?
There are things we can do today from a distance that would have seemed impossible not long ago. You can work alongside someone every day and never share a room. You can watch a grandchild play ball from another state. You can attend a meeting, see a doctor, order groceries, or even watch a church service happening hundreds of miles away, all without leaving your couch. Technology has gotten remarkably good at making distance feel like presence. But it still cannot reproduce the real thing. Watching someone is not the same as being with them. You can follow a person online for ten years, know where they vacation, what they eat, what they believe, and still have never once sat across a table from them. You know about them. You don't actually know them.
It's worth asking whether we've learned to relate to God the same way. Many of us know the songs, the Scripture references, the Christian language. Some of us have been in church long enough to know where the sermon is going before the preacher gets there. We can accumulate an enormous amount of knowledge about God while something inside quietly admits, "I haven't actually been close to Him in a long time." That's not usually rebellion. It rarely announces itself. It just grows.
A Long-Distance Relationship Nobody Wants
No one stands at an altar and hopes for a marriage where they spend as little time together as possible. Relationship naturally desires presence, because when you love someone, you want to be with them. And yet a strange version of this has become normal in modern Christianity: believing in God, singing about God, occasionally asking something from God, while living most of life at a comfortable distance from Him. We worship on Sunday and compartmentalize by Monday.
This isn't just a "your problem." It's a shared one. It's possible to be surrounded by the things of God, studying Scripture to teach it, praying because someone else needs it, leading worship and counseling people, while never actually stopping to commune with God Himself. Over time, we get used to the distance. We learn to function without intimacy, substituting activity for presence, information for relationship, and ministry for communion.
And this distance rarely looks like walking away. It usually looks respectable. It looks like someone who hasn't prayed honestly in months but never misses a service. It looks like someone who reads Scripture for information but has forgotten what it feels like to open the Bible because they actually want to hear God's voice.
Salvation Was Never Just About a Destination
We often say Jesus came so we could go to heaven, and He did. We say He died so our sins could be forgiven, and He did. But what if forgiveness was necessary because something stood between us and God? What if salvation isn't only about changing where we go when we die, but about restoring the relationship humanity was created for in the first place? We've spent a lot of energy celebrating that Jesus changed our destination. Maybe we haven't spent enough celebrating that He changed our proximity. The Gospel isn't just that one day you can go where God is. It's that through Jesus, God made a way for you to come near now.
The Story Begins With Presence
To understand the distance between humanity and God, you have to go back further than the cross, further than Moses or Abraham, all the way to a garden. Genesis 3:8 describes the man and his wife hearing the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the evening. There's no temple here, no priesthood, no sacrificial system, no veil. Humanity was created to live in ordinary fellowship with its Creator. The greatest gift of Eden wasn't the environment. It was God Himself. That's why nothing else, success, money, relationships, achievement, entertainment, can ever fully satisfy us. We were created for something greater than everything God made. We were created for God Himself.
Then humanity rebels, and Adam and Eve hide among the trees. God calls out, "Where are you?" He wasn't asking for their location. He was asking about the relationship. Sin doesn't just create guilt, it ruptures communion. And everything that follows in Scripture is God's answer to the distance created in that moment.
God Refused to Abandon His Desire to Dwell With Us
In Exodus 25:8, God tells Moses to build a sanctuary so that He may dwell among His people. Sin damaged communion, but it didn't change God's desire to be near. Israel builds the Tabernacle, later the Temple, and God's presence dwells among them, but something still stands in the way. A veil hangs deep inside the sanctuary. Every day it preached a sermon: God is here, but sinful humanity cannot simply walk in. You could see the place where His glory dwelt. You could worship, bring your sacrifice, and still not cross that threshold. Imagine being close enough to know He's there but never close enough to enter.
Much of the Church today still lives on the other side of that veil. We believe God is real. We watch others encounter Him. And somewhere inside, we've concluded that closeness must be for someone else. But the veil was never God's final plan.
Jesus Stepped Into the Distance
Matthew gives Jesus a name that explains the whole Gospel: Immanuel, God with us. The answer to our distance was never humanity climbing high enough to reach God. It was God coming down to us. John writes that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is always moving toward the people everyone else avoided. He touches lepers, sits with sinners, speaks to the woman at the well, welcomes the broken. When sin said stay back, Jesus stepped forward. When shame said hide, He came looking. When religion said you don't belong, He moved toward the outcast. Where humanity couldn't cross the distance to God, God crossed it Himself.
When Jesus died, Matthew records that the curtain of the sanctuary was torn in two, from top to bottom. The veil that had said "you cannot enter" for generations was torn, and torn by God, not by human effort or religious achievement. Hebrews tells us we now have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus, and are invited to draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith. The veil is torn. The blood has been shed. The way is open. You don't have to keep standing outside a door that's already been opened for you.
Jesus Didn't Just Open a Door. He Prepared a Table.
Before the cross, Jesus gathers His disciples and takes bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and says, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." Then He takes the cup and calls it the new covenant in His blood. Consider the arc of the whole story: humanity begins in a garden with God, sins, and hides. God pursues them. God dwells among Israel behind a veil. God takes on flesh and comes to where we are. The cross is raised. The veil is torn. And Jesus sets a table. The story that began with humanity hiding from God becomes God looking at humanity and saying, come and eat.
Paul later calls this table koinōnia, fellowship, participation, communion. Different traditions describe what happens at the Table in different ways, but Scripture treats this moment with real weight. It is sacred.
The Church Never Forgot the Table
This practice didn't begin with a denomination. Around AD 30 to 33, Jesus gives the bread and cup to His disciples. By the AD 50s, Paul tells established churches that what he received from the Lord, he passed on to them. Acts describes the earliest Christians devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching, fellowship, prayer, and the breaking of bread. The Didache, one of the earliest surviving Christian writings outside Scripture, gives instructions concerning it. Ignatius of Antioch writes seriously about it in the early second century. By the middle of that century, Justin Martyr describes Christians gathering on Sunday to read the apostles and prophets, hear instruction, pray, give thanks, and receive the bread and the cup.
Centuries later, John Chrysostom didn't invent the Table. By the time the liturgy that carries his name was prayed, Christians had already been gathering around it for more than three hundred years. Before microphones, screens, denominations, conferences, or livestreams, Christians opened Scripture, prayed, worshiped, and gathered around this Table. Nearly two thousand years later, the Table is still set.
Why It Matters
First Peter 3:18 puts the Gospel in a single sentence: Christ suffered, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God. Forgiveness isn't the finish line. Reconciliation is. The cross isn't only about what Jesus took away, it's about where He brought us. Most of us genuinely love God but have quietly learned to live with distance. Prayer becomes optional. Scripture becomes information. Worship becomes mechanical. Nobody wakes up and decides to leave God. They simply stop drawing near. And today, God isn't condemning that distance, He's inviting you out of it. If you've drifted, grown cold, pulled away from disappointment, or hidden in shame, the invitation is the same: come closer. The way is open.
Application: Draw Near
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:28 that a person should examine themselves, and in that way eat the bread and drink from the cup. He doesn't say examine yourself, discover you're imperfect, and stay away. He says examine yourself, and then eat. If there's sin, confess it. If there's bitterness, surrender it. If there's unforgiveness, deal with it. If there's distance, acknowledge it. This Table isn't a reward for people who have it all together. It's a proclamation that Jesus is enough.
The Bible begins with God dwelling with humanity, and it ends the same way. Revelation 21:3 promises that God's dwelling will be with people, that He will live among them as their God. Everything in between, the Garden, the Tabernacle, the incarnation, the cross, the torn veil, the poured-out Spirit, is the story of what God was willing to do to close the distance between us. The only remaining question is whether we will come near to Him.
It's worth asking whether we've learned to relate to God the same way. Many of us know the songs, the Scripture references, the Christian language. Some of us have been in church long enough to know where the sermon is going before the preacher gets there. We can accumulate an enormous amount of knowledge about God while something inside quietly admits, "I haven't actually been close to Him in a long time." That's not usually rebellion. It rarely announces itself. It just grows.
A Long-Distance Relationship Nobody Wants
No one stands at an altar and hopes for a marriage where they spend as little time together as possible. Relationship naturally desires presence, because when you love someone, you want to be with them. And yet a strange version of this has become normal in modern Christianity: believing in God, singing about God, occasionally asking something from God, while living most of life at a comfortable distance from Him. We worship on Sunday and compartmentalize by Monday.
This isn't just a "your problem." It's a shared one. It's possible to be surrounded by the things of God, studying Scripture to teach it, praying because someone else needs it, leading worship and counseling people, while never actually stopping to commune with God Himself. Over time, we get used to the distance. We learn to function without intimacy, substituting activity for presence, information for relationship, and ministry for communion.
And this distance rarely looks like walking away. It usually looks respectable. It looks like someone who hasn't prayed honestly in months but never misses a service. It looks like someone who reads Scripture for information but has forgotten what it feels like to open the Bible because they actually want to hear God's voice.
Salvation Was Never Just About a Destination
We often say Jesus came so we could go to heaven, and He did. We say He died so our sins could be forgiven, and He did. But what if forgiveness was necessary because something stood between us and God? What if salvation isn't only about changing where we go when we die, but about restoring the relationship humanity was created for in the first place? We've spent a lot of energy celebrating that Jesus changed our destination. Maybe we haven't spent enough celebrating that He changed our proximity. The Gospel isn't just that one day you can go where God is. It's that through Jesus, God made a way for you to come near now.
The Story Begins With Presence
To understand the distance between humanity and God, you have to go back further than the cross, further than Moses or Abraham, all the way to a garden. Genesis 3:8 describes the man and his wife hearing the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the evening. There's no temple here, no priesthood, no sacrificial system, no veil. Humanity was created to live in ordinary fellowship with its Creator. The greatest gift of Eden wasn't the environment. It was God Himself. That's why nothing else, success, money, relationships, achievement, entertainment, can ever fully satisfy us. We were created for something greater than everything God made. We were created for God Himself.
Then humanity rebels, and Adam and Eve hide among the trees. God calls out, "Where are you?" He wasn't asking for their location. He was asking about the relationship. Sin doesn't just create guilt, it ruptures communion. And everything that follows in Scripture is God's answer to the distance created in that moment.
God Refused to Abandon His Desire to Dwell With Us
In Exodus 25:8, God tells Moses to build a sanctuary so that He may dwell among His people. Sin damaged communion, but it didn't change God's desire to be near. Israel builds the Tabernacle, later the Temple, and God's presence dwells among them, but something still stands in the way. A veil hangs deep inside the sanctuary. Every day it preached a sermon: God is here, but sinful humanity cannot simply walk in. You could see the place where His glory dwelt. You could worship, bring your sacrifice, and still not cross that threshold. Imagine being close enough to know He's there but never close enough to enter.
Much of the Church today still lives on the other side of that veil. We believe God is real. We watch others encounter Him. And somewhere inside, we've concluded that closeness must be for someone else. But the veil was never God's final plan.
Jesus Stepped Into the Distance
Matthew gives Jesus a name that explains the whole Gospel: Immanuel, God with us. The answer to our distance was never humanity climbing high enough to reach God. It was God coming down to us. John writes that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is always moving toward the people everyone else avoided. He touches lepers, sits with sinners, speaks to the woman at the well, welcomes the broken. When sin said stay back, Jesus stepped forward. When shame said hide, He came looking. When religion said you don't belong, He moved toward the outcast. Where humanity couldn't cross the distance to God, God crossed it Himself.
When Jesus died, Matthew records that the curtain of the sanctuary was torn in two, from top to bottom. The veil that had said "you cannot enter" for generations was torn, and torn by God, not by human effort or religious achievement. Hebrews tells us we now have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus, and are invited to draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith. The veil is torn. The blood has been shed. The way is open. You don't have to keep standing outside a door that's already been opened for you.
Jesus Didn't Just Open a Door. He Prepared a Table.
Before the cross, Jesus gathers His disciples and takes bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and says, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." Then He takes the cup and calls it the new covenant in His blood. Consider the arc of the whole story: humanity begins in a garden with God, sins, and hides. God pursues them. God dwells among Israel behind a veil. God takes on flesh and comes to where we are. The cross is raised. The veil is torn. And Jesus sets a table. The story that began with humanity hiding from God becomes God looking at humanity and saying, come and eat.
Paul later calls this table koinōnia, fellowship, participation, communion. Different traditions describe what happens at the Table in different ways, but Scripture treats this moment with real weight. It is sacred.
The Church Never Forgot the Table
This practice didn't begin with a denomination. Around AD 30 to 33, Jesus gives the bread and cup to His disciples. By the AD 50s, Paul tells established churches that what he received from the Lord, he passed on to them. Acts describes the earliest Christians devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching, fellowship, prayer, and the breaking of bread. The Didache, one of the earliest surviving Christian writings outside Scripture, gives instructions concerning it. Ignatius of Antioch writes seriously about it in the early second century. By the middle of that century, Justin Martyr describes Christians gathering on Sunday to read the apostles and prophets, hear instruction, pray, give thanks, and receive the bread and the cup.
Centuries later, John Chrysostom didn't invent the Table. By the time the liturgy that carries his name was prayed, Christians had already been gathering around it for more than three hundred years. Before microphones, screens, denominations, conferences, or livestreams, Christians opened Scripture, prayed, worshiped, and gathered around this Table. Nearly two thousand years later, the Table is still set.
Why It Matters
First Peter 3:18 puts the Gospel in a single sentence: Christ suffered, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God. Forgiveness isn't the finish line. Reconciliation is. The cross isn't only about what Jesus took away, it's about where He brought us. Most of us genuinely love God but have quietly learned to live with distance. Prayer becomes optional. Scripture becomes information. Worship becomes mechanical. Nobody wakes up and decides to leave God. They simply stop drawing near. And today, God isn't condemning that distance, He's inviting you out of it. If you've drifted, grown cold, pulled away from disappointment, or hidden in shame, the invitation is the same: come closer. The way is open.
Application: Draw Near
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:28 that a person should examine themselves, and in that way eat the bread and drink from the cup. He doesn't say examine yourself, discover you're imperfect, and stay away. He says examine yourself, and then eat. If there's sin, confess it. If there's bitterness, surrender it. If there's unforgiveness, deal with it. If there's distance, acknowledge it. This Table isn't a reward for people who have it all together. It's a proclamation that Jesus is enough.
The Bible begins with God dwelling with humanity, and it ends the same way. Revelation 21:3 promises that God's dwelling will be with people, that He will live among them as their God. Everything in between, the Garden, the Tabernacle, the incarnation, the cross, the torn veil, the poured-out Spirit, is the story of what God was willing to do to close the distance between us. The only remaining question is whether we will come near to Him.
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