4. God’s Enabling Presence
It is God’s presence that keeps the universe and everything in it functioning in the way that He intends. If God would remove His presence for one millisecond, then that from which He removed His presence would disintegrate.
Because there are those who will be separated from God forever, we think of hell as a place where God is not present. But hell would not exist unless God created it, and He is present in all His creation, sustaining its existence for His purposes and will. He has prepared hell as the place where His enemies will exist forever (by His sustaining will and presence and power) in the torment and dying that only knows His wrath, cut off from Him eternally.
“In Him all things hold together” (Col 1:17).
“He upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb 1:3). Christ is present. upholding every atom and molecule in the universe by the word of His power. The ability of a stone to hold together is not in a power its molecular structure possesses independently; it is because Christ enables it to be.
How much more this is evident in living creatures, which are so vulnerable and so dependent on breath and complex inner physical processes for every second of their existence.
"Thou dost take away their breath, they expire,
And return to their dust.
Thou dost send forth Thy breath, they are created;
And Thou dost renew the face of the ground" (Ps 104:29-30).
“He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; . . . for in Him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:25, 28).
(Spotlight 4, Lesson 6 in Doctrine 101: Learning about God)