Compelled to Worship: Omniscience Pt. 2

Part 2 (of 2)

In part 1 of this post we covered the first four characteristics of the omniscience of God. We covered how God has perfect self-knowledge, perfect knowledge outside of Himself, that His knowledge is eternal, and that His knowledge is immediate and instantaneous.

Today, we'll cover four more aspects of this amazing attribute of God.

5) His knowledge is exhaustive. He numbers and names all of the stars (which are incalculable). Not even a sparrow falls without His knowledge. He numbers every hair on your head. These are excerpted from verses which all use this language to help the reader grasp how complete His knowledge is.

A sparrow was worthless in that day – yet God does not allow even one to fall to the ground without His complete knowledge. He has numbered the hair follicles on your head – which isn’t a particularly useful thing to know.  So if He perfectly knows these things which are not valuable, then He definitely knows what going on with and in you.

AW Tozer said, “God knows all that can be known. God knows all causes, all thoughts, all mysteries, all enigmas, all feelings, all desires, every un-uttered secret. God knows all things perfectly. He knows no thing better than any other thing; but all things equally well. He never discovers anything. He is never surprised. He is never amazed by what He learns because He does not learn.”

Psalm 33:13-15, “The LORD looks down from heaven; he sees all the children of man; from where he sits enthroned he looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth, he who fashions the hearts of them all and observes all their deeds.”

Psalm 147:4-5, “He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names. Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.”

That’s impossible apart from God. How exhaustive is His knowledge?
(Et al) Proverbs 5:21, Psalm 15:3

Many times I am misunderstood.  I tell a joke that gets taken the wrong way. I conduct a lecture where a student does not comprehend the terminology I use. I speak a word in a context that offends someone, even though I meant it another way.  Even when others misunderstand you, God knows the truth. It is He who justifies us. He sees every good work done in secret. But he also knows your motives which should be convicting at the same time.

You may remember the episode from Friends a decade or more ago when the characters in the show desperately try to accomplish one single good deed done without selfish motives. It’s a hilarious episode because it speaks to the motives of man and how impossible it is for us to truly be altruistic. Praise God though because Christ’s good works and righteousness were given to us as though it were our own righteousness.

6) His knowledge is penetrating. God sees what no man can see. He sees through the shrouds of smiles and fake attitudes. He knows the aforementioned motives and hearts of men.

1 Samuel 16:7, “Man looks at the outward appearance but God looks at the heart.”

Psalm 139, “O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.”

This is comforting because our great God knows our hidden thoughts, actions, and motives, but yet still chooses and loves us.  What a great God who knows the darkest parts of my heart and yet still chose to set His love upon me.

That is a God worth worshiping.

7) His knowledge is Intimate:
“O LORD, you have searched me and known me... and are acquainted with all my ways.” This is a loaded word because it is not referring to knowing things ABOUT you, but KNOWING you intimately.  It’s a word used for intimacy between a husband and a wife. In Genesis it says, “Adam knew Eve.”  Same word. This does not mean that Adam knew stuff about Eve, or what Eve was ‘like’, or what he thought about Eve.  It means that he physically communed with her in an intimate way.

This is how God knows you. He knows you intimately from your innermost. Every time scripture refers to God knowing someone, it always denotes a relationship not a collection of information He’s accumulated.

Many brothers, whom I love dearly, interpret Romans 8:29 in a context that describes God knowing things about you.

“For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son…”

A good friend of mine describes it this way, “God knows the future. Knowing the future, He knew that I would choose Him. He responded by choosing me back.” But of course that relegates God’s knowledge here as mere information that He has to react to.  I won’t explain the logical ramifications of that – maybe another time.

This text is giving us a very different understanding of God’s knowledge. God never needed to look through the corridors of time to learn what was going to happen and devise a response to deal with it. There may be other texts to use for that assertion, but this word, in this context, refers to relational-knowing.

This is an intimate, experiential knowledge, referring directly to the Father setting His love upon us, in advance, so that we might become His people.  It’s part of the insight into God’s desire for relational restoration, His decision, and the actions He undertook for His people’s redemption, “so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.” It’s the same word used in Acts 2:22-23 to denote God’s plan of salvation through Jesus.

“… this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.”

Other texts call it God’s “predetermined plan.” So we have an identical pattern of foreknowledge and predestination – which are intimately connected to this idea of God’s knowledge.

God determined, in advance of the event, to fulfill His plan of redemption necessitating the death of His own Son.  But that through His Son, His great love both in Christ Jesus and for His people would be demonstrated. All this was for the glory of God and for our good.

God is never described as looking through the corridors of time, determined to send His Son, and then learning the shocking news that sinful men were going to kill Jesus. Rather, it was His foreknowledge, or predetermined intimacy with us and His Son, that He ordained it to occur exactly as it did.

Hebrews 12:2 “For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” God’s intimate foreknowledge didn’t make salvation possible, it made salvation a certainty.

8) God has all possible knowledge. 
Matthew 11:21, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.”
The key is that those things were not, in fact, done in Tyre and Sidon and therefore did not result in repentance.  However, God knows that if they had been done, they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes.

In the debate surrounding salvation by God’s election or man’s free-will one must wrestle with the reality of God’s omniscience.

If God does not know all things, then He is not the God of the Bible. If God had to learn things, then He was at one point, not omniscient, and needed to accumulate more knowledge to reach His potential. These are logical fallacies of what is called open-theism.

Open-theism states that God does not know all things that will occur because He intentionally limits His knowledge so that He is only cognizant of the past and present. He does not know the future.  In other words, He’s just as shocked as we are when bad events occur and scrambles the angels in heaven to respond so that His will can still take place.

That’s a crude way of describing it but helpful in revealing that the open theist believes God to be primarily reactive instead of proactive in His creation. This also falls solidly in line with the Greek mythology of the day.  Here’s a great message delivered by the late R.C. Sproul on the topic:

https://www.ligonier.org/learn/sermons/israels-rejection-not-final-part-3/

The other form of possible knowledge is called Molinism or ‘middle-knowledge’. This is mainly a Roman Catholic doctrine that originated in the 1500s in an attempt to reconcile God’s sovereignty with man’s will.

This teaches one of two things depending on the person  you talk to: That God knows every possible eventuality and therefore orchestrates events to take advantage of the path that results in His original desire – or – That God makes these decisions but they can be freely resisted by man and thus thwart the plan and will of God who is apparently powerless or unwilling to resist the will of sinful man.

The former just kicks the can down the road essentially agreeing with God’s absolute sovereignty in His creation because the end result is the same. The latter makes God passive to His creation and manipulated by the wills of sinful men which is antithetical to the meta-narrative in scripture.
From the article below,

“Not only is middle knowledge unnecessary to an all-knowing, all-decreeing God, but the Molinists’ conception of free will makes it impossible for God to exercise providential control over his creation. Why? Because men and women would be free to resist His decree. God can only bring to pass the actions of free agents via his middle knowledge of what they would freely do if…”
https://www.ligonier.org/blog/molinism-101/

Let’s land the plane.  God sees all, knows all, and does not struggle to comprehend anything or anyone in this world.

We see in part, but God sees in whole.  The part that we DO see is extremely small, myopic, and incomplete.

The doctrine of God’s omniscience should intensely comfort the believer to rest in the capable hands of a God who knows all of their worries, concerns, fear, ailments, failures, past, present, and future.
That same God has set His perfect love upon the believer so that a relationship with Him will be restored completely through the work of His Son.

God’s intimate relationship with the Son predetermined to send Him on the greatest rescue mission of all time for His glory and our redemption.

We can find our rest knowing that nothing occurs without His perfect understanding or without His perfect perception of reality.  Nothing happens outside of His will or control - otherwise we would all have a lot to fear.  But He has assured us that He has declared the ends from the beginning so that we may take comfort in His perfect will.

We can pursue and find rest because the Lord tells us through Paul that, “He who began a good work in you, will be faithful to complete it,” he is declaring this because God already knows it to be true. If He has granted you repentance (2 Timothy 2:25) then He will ensure that you make it to the very end.

Your salvation is ultimately for His glory and your own good. Isaiah confirms that He will not share that glory with another (Isaiah 42:8) who wants to snatch it away (John 10:28).

I leave you with this incredible verse.  "And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28).

RC Sproul gave a truly phenomenal message on 2 Samuel where he talked about God's sovereignty which is inextricably linked to his omniscience.  You can enjoy it here: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/series/classic_collection/nothing-left-to-chance/

In it he declares, "“If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God’s sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.” But the reality is that He holds everything together by the word of His power. Nothing happens by chance.

If you are in His hand then you have every reason to find comfort in the fact that whatever you are experiencing, God is being caught unaware, is not just learning of it, or does not have a perfect order in which He is bringing about His plan and glory.  Rest assured little one, He is completely loves you and has got all of this easily within His capable hands.


For more resources consider the following:
https://www.ligonier.org/learn/conferences/orlando_2004_national_conference/omniscience-of-god/
Knowledge of the Holy – by AW Tozer
Attributes of God – Omniscience – Steven J Lawson
Systematic Theology: God’s Immutable Characteristics – Wayne Grudem