Existing beyond the natural.
If there is a God, why don’t we see, hear or touch Him? This takes us back to Moses a religious center, but very human! His temper –
Moses had to flee Egypt, because he took it on himself to punish an Egyptian who beat a Hebrew. The Bible doesn’t say that Moses did this in anger. Perhaps he didn’t. It also doesn’t say that God told Moses to do this. It seems that Moses’s first encounter with God took place later. (Exodus 3)
Exodus 11:8 says that Moses left Pharaoh’s presence in anger. This was near the end of the plagues that God sent on Egypt, and there was reason for the anger–Pharaoh had promised to let the Israelites go over and over, and had recanted every time. God himself was angry with Pharaoh.
In Numbers 20:10-13, the Bible describes Moses striking the rock at Meribah, to bring out water for the Israelites. He may have been angry at this time. He didn’t give God glory, according to this passage, and didn’t believe in God’s power.
Having a temper isn’t necessarily sinful — Jesus got angry at the people having a flea market at the temple, for example. But a selfish anger is sinful, and even Moses got caught by that.
We live in a physical world with its four known space-time dimensions of length, width, height (or depth) and time. The God of the Bible, however, dwells in a different dimension—the spirit realm—beyond the natural perception of our physical senses. It’s not that God isn’t real; it’s a matter of Him not being limited by the physical laws and dimensions that govern our world (Isaiah 57:15). He is spirit (John 4:24).
Notice what the Scriptures reveal about this God who is not bound by space and time.
Jesus Christ as a human being had a physical body. Like ours, His was subject to injury, pain and death. The four Gospels record that He was scourged and crucified. Several of His followers took His brutalized body, wrapped it in strips of linen and sealed it in a tomb. There was no doubt Jesus was dead. His body lay in the tomb for three days and three nights, watched over by a detachment of guards.
But it was not to remain so. A minor uproar ensued at the end of the three days when some of His followers came to the tomb—only to find it empty. They would be in for an even greater surprise!
That evening His disciples gathered in a room, with the doors firmly shut because they feared for their lives, when “Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, ‘Peace be with you’” (John 20:19). Their beloved teacher, whom they had seen killed and entombed, suddenly materialized inside a locked room and greeted them! Lest they think He was an impostor, He showed them the nail punctures from His crucifixion and the spear wound in His side.
The resurrected Jesus was no longer bound by physical factors. He effortlessly entered a closed room and revealed Himself to His disciples. They recognized the physical impossibility of a fleshly body passing through walls. Eight days later He repeated the miracle for the benefit of the disciple Thomas, who hadn’t witnessed the earlier appearance (John 20:26). Days later, in another miracle, He defied gravity, ascending into the sky in the sight of all His disciples (Acts 1:9).
Scripture reveals that God lives outside the bounds of time as we know it (Isaiah 57:15). We read that our awesome destiny was planned “before time began” (2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 1:2) and “before the creation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4; 1 Peter 1:20, NIV).
