Together with the problem of the divine omniscience arises the difficulty of reconciling this with our freedom of will and our moral responsibility. Would not His foreknowledge of our actions in effect determine them? This difficulty can only be solved by a proper conception of the freedom of the will, and will be discussed in that connection in chapter XXXVII. Altogether, we must guard against applying our human type of knowledge to God. Man, limited by space and time, obtains his knowledge of things and events by his senses, becoming aware of them separately as they exist either beside each other or in succession. With God all knowledge is complete; there is no growth of knowledge from yesterday to to-day, no knowledge of only a part instead of the whole of the world. His omniscience and omnipotence are bound up with His omnipresence and eternity. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”(239) Chapter XV. God’s Omnipresence and Eternity 1. As soon as man awakens to a higher consciousness of God, he realizes the vast distance between his own finite being limited by space and time, and the Infinite Being which rules everywhere and unceasingly in lofty grandeur and unlimited power. His very sense of being hedged in by the bounds and imperfections of a finite existence makes him long for the infinite God, unlimited in might, and brings to him the feeling of awe before His greatness. But this conception of God as the omnipresent and everlasting Spirit, as distinct from any created being, is likewise the result of many stages of growing thought. 2. The primitive mind imagines God as dwelling in a lofty place, whence He rules the earth beneath, descending at times to take part in the affairs of men, to tarry among them, or to walk with them.(240) The people adhered largely to this conception during the Biblical period, as they considered as the original seat of the Deity, first Paradise, later on Sinai or Zion, and finally the far-off heavens. It required prophetic vision to discern that “the heavens and the heavens’ heavens do not encompass God’s majesty,” expressed also in poetic imagery that “the heaven is My throne and the earth My footstool.”(241) The classic form of this idea of the divine omnipresence is found in the oft-quoted passage from Psalm CXXXIX.(242)