God Is

Day 29

God Only Knows

Spotlight Verse:

Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.Hebrews 4:13

Have you seen the Far Side comic captioned “God on Jeopardy”? A bearded man in a white robe has 85 million points, and the other two contestants are looking very peeved as Alex Trebek announces, “And God wins again!”

The attribute of God I want to focus on now: God is omniscient.

That word is a combination of omni which means everything, and scient, from the same root as our word science. God knows everything.

When I try to imagine the omniscience of God, I tend to think something like the image in that comic: “God has the biggest brain in the universe.” He knows all the trivia about the galaxies: The circumference of the sun. The speed of each comet. The light years from earth to each star system. He knows it all!

Is that all God’s omniscience amounts to?

In the classic 17^th-century work The Existence and Attributes of God, Stephen Charnock has a great meditation called, “What Does God Know?” His first point is the one that really blows my mind. He says the most overlooked implication of God’s omniscience is this:

God knows all about Himself

Complete self-knowledge is only true of God! As H.G. Wells’ angel rightly said, my little box of brains cannot hold the truth about God; it can’t even hold the truth about myself! That’s one reason I have so many problems! Someone said, “I am constantly surprising myself by doing things I thought I’d never do!” Yet God knows Himself fully, the only being with perfect self-knowledge.

God knows all about nature

Genesis 1:21 says that after creation, “God saw everything He had made and said, ‘It is good.’” That’s an amazing statement — God saw everything.

Let your imagination zoom out from smallest to largest: Every atom, every molecule, every pebble, every rock, every tree, every forest, every mountain range, every planet, every star, every galaxy, every universe. He saw everything.

Now zoom in again.

Jesus said every time a sparrow falls to the ground, God notices.

Zoom in closer.

Jesus said God knows the exact number of hairs on your head. (For some of you guys, that’s not hard, because the number is about… five. But for many people, that’s amazing!)

Zoom in even more.

Jesus said God knows the number of every grain of sand.

Do you see a similarity with every illustration Jesus uses? All those things change, all the time. The point: God knows about everything that exists, even as those things are constantly changing.

God knows all about the past, present, and future

Nothing is news to God. He knows every action and every thought that will lead to every action.

All this is stunning. But as you’ll see this week, what amazes David most in Psalm 139 is that God knows all about you.

God Knows All About You

The idea of God seeing and knowing everything about you may not be entirely comfortable for you! So for the next few days let’s explore how God’s omniscience means good things!

To get you started, look at today’s passage from Hebrews. It starts with a head-spinning description of God’s omniscience:

Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. Hebrews 4:13

And then look at the very practical, beautiful application! Because God knows everything, what does that mean about my relationship to Jesus?

…we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses… Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. Hebrews 4:15a, 16

You might think that because God knows everything — your temptations, your weaknesses, your motives, your thoughts — it makes Him more scary. But the Bible says this means He sympathizes.

You can approach God with confidence! Why?

God is… the One who knows!