Psalms 103:13 tells us that God has compassion for us in the same way that a father has compassion for his children. The Hebrew / Aramaic word for compassion means “womb. ” The idea is that God loves us as a mother loves the child inside her own womb.
Picture this. You’re swimming in amniotic fluid inside your mother’s uterus. You know without doubt that you are in her womb. But there’s also something attached to your belly, a cord that’s also attached to your mother. Through that umbilical cord nutrients flow from her body into yours. So, while you are literally inside your mother, she is also in you.
I know this is an unusual illustration and it’s kind of hard to write, as the choice of wording can be tricky. But it does serve as an apt analogy for the oxymoron of two simultaneous realities: we are in Christ and He is in us
Mylon Lefevre’s prayer-song More (of Jesus) has the lyric, You in me and me in You. This is what Jesus came to accomplish for us, that we would find our identity, our provision and protection, our joy, peace, wisdom and eternal life in Him, and that, simultaneously and not unrelated, His Spirit would dwell in us. The New Testament is a treatise on what we have in Christ Jesus.
Back to the 103rd Psalm. One version translates that Hebrew word to the English pity. God pities us, it says, because He knows that we are made from dust. He knows exactly our capacity for trouble and limits our trouble to our capacity. That’s how God can sympathize and empathize with us. Sympathize means to be with us (sym) in our trouble (path); empathy means to be in (em) our trouble with us. This is why we’re in Him, because by our being in Him, He is in us, helping us in a myriad of ways. We could also say that’s why He’s in us – because we are in Him. It’s like the old chicken-or-the-egg mystery.
But either way, to the question as to who is in whom, God in us or us in God, the answer is the same as to many either /or questions: Both! It’s like we’re in the womb of God with an umbilical cord constantly filling us with Him.
