The Omniscience (Knowledge) Of God

Human Knowledge Is Only a Fraction of the Knowable 1:20

Think about this room. Here we are. We're all gathered in this room. Someone tell me, how many people are here?

Anyone know? Probably not. Look at the light bulbs above us. What's the wattage of any one of these bulbs?

What's the wattage combined? Do we know that? No. Some of you have been here for years. How many hymnals do we have in the pews before you?

How many hairs are on your own head? If you start to look at how many things can be known and can be counted and can be ascertained even in your own immediate environment, and ask yourself, how much of it do I actually know? You'd recognize that our knowledge is a fraction of the available data, and that's just in this room.

That's nothing to say about the world around us or in the greater cosmos. The amount of which you know about the created realm is the smallest fraction of a fraction of that which knowledge exists.

Defining Omniscience: God Knows Everything Exhaustively 2:11

“Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!”

— Romans 11:33 (NKJV)

Now, by contrast, by contrast, God knows it all. As Scripture says, God knows when the sparrow hits the ground. God knows how many hairs are on your head. God knows the denomination of every coin.

God knows everything. That's what omniscience is. It's the knowledge of everything. Not just some things, not just a little more than you and I, not just a little more than all the people cumulatively, but the knowledge of everything that is and everything that could be.

You see? Psalm 147, a different psalm, eight chapters later, says that God's knowledge, it's comprehensive. Comprehensive. It says, great is our Lord, abundant in power.

His understanding is beyond measure, cannot be calibrated. Romans 11 describes God's knowledge in just infinite terms. It says, oh, the depth of the riches of both the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out.

Finally, Isaiah 55, which we read earlier, it's the icing on the cake. It says, in God's words, it says, My thoughts, they're not your thoughts. My ways are not your ways.

God's Ways and Thoughts Are Higher Than Ours 3:22

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

— Isaiah 55:9 (NKJV)

God says, as far as the heavens are above the earth, which is a sign of infinitude, as far as the heavens are above the earth, so high are My ways above your ways and My thoughts above your thoughts. See, these verses and countless others, they portray God's wisdom and knowledge as something infinite, as something boundless, something that could not be measured.

So when we say this morning, as we start this sermon, when we say God's omniscient, we're saying that He knows everything.

God Knows Reality and Every Possibility 3:52

He knows every event, every fact, every detail, every circumstance, every outcome. Now let me add something else. God not only knows every fact, every circumstance, every event, every outcome, he not only has a full map, a blueprint of reality, but He also has a full map and blueprint of possibility. Do you understand the distinction?

Yesterday you got up at a certain time. Do you remember what down to the minute what it was? Probably not, but God knows. God knows what time you got out of bed yesterday, but here's the thing.

He also knows how your day would have panned out if you had gotten up an hour earlier or an hour later. God knows how your day would have panned out if you turned left instead of right on any number of choices in your walk yesterday. He not only knows reality as it is, He knows reality as it could be.

He knows all the possibilities. He knows every rabbit trail of every possible decision or hypothetical that you could ever have taken upon yourself or chosen. He knows all the alternate endings. With that said, if He knows all the alternate endings, I want you to be comforted by this.

God knows all the alternate endings to all the choices you could ever have made, and yet this, this reality is the one that He's determined. You and I, sometimes we second-guess ourselves and we go back and we look at all the decisions of our life and we wonder how we got right here.

Sometimes we're encouraged by that, sometimes we're conflicted by that. Whatever the case is, God knows all the possibilities that exist for all decisions you've ever made, and He has lined everything up so you will be right here right now. Be comforted by what He's doing in your life that stems from His knowledge.

Psalm 139:1-3: The God Who Searches and Knows You 5:22

“O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.”

— Psalm 139:1-3 (NKJV)

All right, let's go back to today's text as we usually do and look at verses 1 through 3, and we'll work our way through the balance of this short passage. Okay, verse 1. O Lord, Lord, You have searched me, You have known me. You know my sitting down, You know my rising up.

You understand my thoughts are far off. You comprehend my path and my lying down.

Unlike the Pagan Gods, God Cannot Be Deceived or Escaped 5:44

You're acquainted with all of my ways. You know, there is an old Greek story, you know, one of the myths that you might read in high school of the Greek gods, lowercase g. Well, one of the Greek gods was a bit of a prankster. His name was Prometheus, and he determined to trick Zeus, to trick Zeus.

Now, I'm not going to go into all the details because honestly they're sort of crass, but with that said, it was not unusual for one god in Greek mythology to attempt to deceive or work around or scheme or plot against the other gods. Now, here's the takeaway. In Greek mythology, no one god was omniscient.

In fact, if you look at the gods of Egypt or the Canaanites or the Philistines or what have you, what you'll realize is this. They had a lot of gods, and no one of these gods is omnipotent or all-knowing. They could be deceived. They had limited jurisdictions.

You could travel outside of the range of their authority and their knowledge. The Greek gods, Canaanite gods, Philistine gods, Egyptian gods, gods of even the eastern cultures in our present day, these gods, they're powerful, theoretically they have different abilities, but almost to a fault, none of them are described as being omniscient. Study pagan deities and you realize this, that the people whittled and fashioned these things out of wood and bamboo and rock and marble, when they assigned these deities qualities, they didn't assign the quality of omniscience.

I think there's probably some reasons for that. One is because fallen sinful man really doesn't want an omniscient God, because an omniscient God is one who knows everything you're doing, and it's hard to flee or run or hide anything from Him. So interestingly, when people made pagan gods, they never ascribed that attribute to them because it made it harder to avoid that god or hide from that god.

With that said, verses 1 through 3, they describe a God who's entirely different. They describe a God who knows you intimately, whether you like that or not. Verses 1 through 3 describe a God who is intimately familiar with your ways, with your ways, your actions, your thoughts. Verses 1 through 3 describe a God who knows everything there is to know about you And here's something that's encouraging.

He Knows Everything About You and Loves You Still 8:00

He knows everything that there is to know about you, and yet He still loves you. There are people in your life, in your job, in your employment, maybe in your own family, if they knew everything about you, they would have trouble loving you. God knows everything, and yet He loves you still.

David: Known in His Sin, Yet Loved by God 8:15

Now, Psalm 139, let's go back for a moment. Who wrote Psalm 139? What's a safe choice? David, you're right, that's a safe choice.

And it's also the right choice. King David wrote Psalm 139. Now, I don't know, King David, did he ever do anything wrong or embarrassing? Yes, I'm hearing affirmations.

Did he ever do anything wrong? Yes. Ask Uriah the Hittite. Say, Uriah, tell me, did King David ever, I don't know, do anything wrong?

Uriah would say, yes, absolutely. David did things wrong. His sins are on display in Scripture, some of them terrible. With that said, God not only knew David's deeds, but He knew something that we don't know.

He knew every one of David's thoughts, and some of David's thoughts were bad, salacious, terrible. And yet, despite all that God knew about David, and despite things David had done that you would think might have made him almost unlovable, David was still loved. God loved him still. God loved David in spite of knowing his deepest, darkest secrets.

And again, that's different from the way we love one another. It's different than the way we love one another. If the deepest, darkest secrets of everyone in this room was laid bare this moment, there's not enough doors in this room to hold the exodus that might happen if everyone knew everything about one another around us.

Well, God knows all of that, and yet He loves us still.

God's Knowledge Is Intrinsic, Not Acquired by Observation 9:38

“For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, You know it altogether.”

— Psalm 139:4 (NKJV)

Let's see how the psalmist builds on this as we look at verse 4. Verse 4. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, You know it altogether. Let me ask you, has anyone been married more than 50 years in the room here?

I see a few hands, all right. Well, I'm not quite there. My wife and I aren't quite there. But I've learned something in a shorter amount of time.

I've learned this. When you've been married for a while, sometimes your spouse understands what you're thinking just by looking at your face. Sometimes you don't even have to say anything and your spouse understands completely the words that are about to be formed on your tongue. In my own case, I guess the mix of my very expressive face and my very intelligent wife means that she knows a lot of times just what I'm thinking just by looking at me.

Well, in a limited sense, very limited sense, that's what verse 4 is saying. God knows. God knows. God knows what we're thinking, the words that are about to form on our mouth before they're even given breath.

But here's the distinction. That knowledge, the knowledge God has, doesn't come through observation. See, if your wife understands you or your husband understands you, it's largely because of experiences and observation. Your spouse has studied you.

Your spouse knows your habits, knows your ways, knows the way you talk, the way you interact, and the like. So your spouse understands you based on observations. That's not the basis of which God understands you. See, God's knowledge is not what you call successive.

Your knowledge is. You have grown in your knowledge. You've gone from one point, to another point, to another point, successively. God understands everything simultaneously, and that is a significant difference.

Our knowledge is acquired, sometimes the hard way. I'll give you a personal example. Some of you know that when we first moved to Mississippi several years ago at this point, I came in and I shared with the church, and I shared with the commission, the session that interviewed me, I shared that one of the things I enjoyed about the South was I appreciated the humidity.

So I said, I appreciate the humidity. Of course, they just about laughed me out of the room when I said that. Well, here's the thing. Since I first said those words, I've now lived here.

Since I now said those words, I have now lived and breathed in and worked out in the sort of humidity that we have. And now, having more information than I once did, I might draw different conclusions than I once did. So those of you who laughed at me then were right to laugh because I have certainly changed my view of this.

So that's the way we learn. We think one thing one moment, we have an observation one moment, and then more data is added. And as the data is added, we can change our mind or become even more firm in our presupposition.

God Does Not Change, Grow, or Learn 12:25

But it's usually based on this knowledge and experience. We grow. God doesn't. If you walk away with nothing else, know this.

God does not change. He does not grow. God is not learning. God is not going to become a better God tomorrow on the basis of what He observes or learns today.

God's knowledge is intrinsic to His nature. He knows it all. He knows it all simultaneously. There will never be a fact added to that which He knows.

So how does He apply that? If we say that that's true, okay, so He knows, He knows, He knows. All right, so how does that impact you, though? How does that impact us?

The Hedge of Protection: God's Knowledge Applied to His People 13:03

“You have hedged me behind and before, and laid Your hand upon me.”

— Psalm 139:5 (NKJV)

Well, let's look at verse 5 to see how that knowledge is utilized in God's ministry to His people. Verse 5, You have hedged me behind and before, and You have laid Your hand upon me. You know, if you were to take, after church, take your child to the playground, or take your child to any playground during the course of the week.

If your child is small enough, if your child is small enough, something you'll notice as you sit on a bench and rest and watch your child exert their energy, as you watch that, something you'll notice if your child is small enough, you'll notice that they oftentimes will look over to you. And the reason they look is they want to make sure you're still there.

Your presence provides some comfort. The knowledge that mom or dad or grandma or grandpa, Mimi or papa are still in the building, so to speak, provides comfort to the child. They like to be safeguarded at that age. Well, in verse 5, the psalmist is saying this should be true of all of us.

There should be a desire for God to be close, for Him to be knowledgeable, for Him to be powerful, for Him to abide, for us just to reach out and grab His hand and know that it will be there. He puts a hedge around us. Before me, behind me, He puts a hedge around us.

He protects us and insulates us, and that's something we should want. That's something we should want. However, the irony is that sometimes we really don't want that. You see, while a four-year-old or a three-year-old or what have you wants their parents' presence and guidance even, and while a four-year-old will seek out the parent's face in a crowd, the same you can't necessarily say of the teenager.

The teenager doesn't necessarily have the same view. If you say, hey, good news to your teenage child. Good news, teenage child. We are going to go to the mall.

You can bring your friends. And here's the extra good news. As we go to the mall, I will always be there, 10, 15 feet away. I'll just be looking above each of the racks.

I'll keep an eye on things and make sure you're safe. Now, how is the teenage child going to react to that? It's not well. Why?

Because the teenage child doesn't want your presence there. They like the idea of being out on their own. Well, here's the thing. Even in our own spiritual walk, we can be like that.

Even in our own spiritual walk, we can say, yeah, I mean, I want to be kept safe. I mean, I don't want an anvil to fall on my head. I want to be kept safe, but, you know, on my terms. I want you to hedge me, sure.

You know, keep me protected from monsters and scary things and car wrecks and the like. But, again, on my terms, let me kind of find my own way. You know, as parents, when we're protective of our children, it's because we know the sort of dangers that are out there. Experientially, we do know more than our kids.

And some of us have the scar tissue, perhaps from making bad life choices in the past, that we want to protect our children from. And oftentimes, that's why we do the things that we do. We try to protect and insulate our children based on our knowledge of what they might face. Well, if it's true of us, then how much more is it true of God?

God knows your inclinations. He knows the things you think, the things you do. And He knows that which is good for you, and He knows that which is bad for you. And if He loves you, if you're a child, a son or daughter of the Most High God, then you can rightfully expect Him to look out for you because you're a child.

Whether you want that at all times is a different story. But He will do it either way because He's not a parent who abdicates His responsibilities.

God Hedges Us Through His Spirit and His Word 16:28

Now, one of the ways He hedges us is He uses His Spirit. Sometimes we call it our conscience, but He uses His Spirit to kind of nudge us or direct us. And He also uses His word. In this book, there's a hedge.

There's laws. They're not here because God is a cosmic killjoy. They're here because He loves us, and He knows that if we do what He has said, then things will go well for us. Just like when we give our kids input.

We say, eat your broccoli. I know you don't like the broccoli, but eat it because it's good for you. God knows that in every walk of our life. He knows where the lion prowls.

He knows alleys that we should not walk down, and He's happy to give us some principles and direction in His book if we'll take the time to learn. However, we can be like perpetual teenagers, and we can say to our parent, We can say, I think I know, Dad. So I've got this figured out.

You know, a teenager knows everything, right? I mean, we're all there, so I'm not just castigating teenagers in our midst. As teenagers, we know that at that age, you think you know everything. And as a parent, you look at a teenager and say, no, you don't.

Well, God, in the same way, He looks down at us and He goes, I know you don't know everything. And if you will but turn to me, maybe crack open the book for change. If you turn to Me, I will teach you and guide you and protect you and lead you in ways that will cause you far less difficulty than if you were left to your own devices.

God provides safe lanes to travel in if we take the time to follow.

Such Knowledge Is Too Wonderful: The Limits of Human Understanding 17:55

“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.”

— Psalm 139:6 (NKJV)

All right, let's look at our final verse, verse 6. Verse 6, such knowledge, such knowledge, it's too wonderful for me. It's high, I cannot attain it. All right, this is the crux of the entire sermon.

You know, way back in the first chapter of the book of Ezekiel, the prophet had an encounter with God right from the start that is very difficult to understand, very difficult to parse. The prophet had an encounter with God that, if you remember it, involved wheels and wheels and side wheels, and there was cherub and angels and chariots and other things.

Let me read a small snippet of Ezekiel 1 so you can get a sense of what this prophet saw. Ezekiel 1, we read this. It came to pass in the 30th year when I was among the captives by the river that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind was coming out of the north, a great cloud with raging fire engulfing itself.

Brightness was all around it, radiating out of its midst like the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Now, within it came the likeness of four creatures. And as I looked at the living creatures, behold, a wheel was on the earth beside each living creature with its four faces. And the appearance of the wheels and the workings was like the color of beryl, and all four had the same likeness.

And the appearance of their workings was, as it were, a wheel within a wheel. Now, when they moved, they went forward any one of four directions. They did not turn aside anywhere they went. Let me stop there for a moment.

Raise your hand if you can explain all that for us this morning. How about the book of Daniel or Revelation? Raise your hand if you can teach all of Revelation completely and accurately. There's certain things that we can't know or understand.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. Even described to us, even written down so that we can read it, doesn't necessarily mean that we can fully understand. Even the psalmist, even King David says, there's things above my pay grade. Even David, one of the most central figures in the entire book, he says, there's things I don't know.

If it was true of David, newsflash, it's true of us this morning. Now, there are certain things that we can know and that we can reasonably, rationally discuss. There are certain things we can study and apprehend. For example, we have visitors in our midst this morning.

I see several. If you want to know, as you've come down to the Gulf Coast, where you can get out of the tastiest shrimp po' boy on all the coast, well, I'll tell you, I have done significant research in this area. I have a doctorate in po' boy studies. I think I've got a handle on these things.

So there's certain things that we can know. There's certain things we can apprehend. We can subject certain things to trial and testing. We can review and consider all manners of things, including things in this book.

And yet there's going to be things in this book that you're never going to fully understand on this side of the veil. Can you live with that? I hope so. Because even David understood that this was the case.

That's what the psalmist is declaring in verse 6.

No One Taught God: The Creator Comprehends All 21:00

In Isaiah 40, the prophet Isaiah described this imbalance between God's knowledge and wisdom and understanding and ours this way. He said, Who has measured the waters in the hollow of God's hand? Who has measured heaven with a span, calculated the dust on the earth in a measure? Who has weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?

Who directs the Spirit of the Lord as a counselor who has taught Him? With whom did He take counsel, who instructed Him, taught Him the path of justice? Who taught God knowledge and showed Him the way of understanding? What's the answer to that question?

No one. See, in Isaiah 40, Isaiah is asking this question. He says, all right, who made the mountains, the stars, the clovers, all these different things? Who did that?

By the way, who not only did that, but knows the exact molecular composition of everything in the galaxies and cosmos around us? Tell me, who knows that? And if it's God, then who taught Him? No one.

He knows because He knows because He knows. The creator comprehends everything by virtue of being the creator. The created is always going to look up, always going to be looking up, and because of that, we should always look to Him for revelation. The idea that we, as a society or as a people, as a community, that we can calibrate scientifically and measure everything in the world around us and be right on every encounter, that's silly.

What does a wise man do? A wise man, if he wants to get wiser, he looks to a source of greater wisdom. He looks to a source of revelation to teach and instruct him. This is the primary tool by which God has done that.

Avoid it at your own peril. Leave it growing moss and dust on your bookshelf at your own risk. God has given us a tool and a means by which we might not still understand everything, but by which we can come to understand many things.

When God's Knowledge Is Hard: Answering Open Theism 22:59

All right, with our remaining time, I want to broach one final subject. You know, I think if I say in a group of Reformed Presbyterians that God's all-knowing, I don't think anyone's going to say no. I think we knew that this was true just when we walked into the room. We know that God is all-knowing just like we know that God is all-powerful.

It's sort of in the job description of being God. However, there's times when we don't understand or like what He does with His knowledge. There are hardships that you've encountered and I've encountered in our own life. And one of the most difficult, challenging things that can happen to us is we can say, God, You knew, and yet You still allowed this to happen.

God, You knew what would happen to me, to my child, to my spouse. You knew these things. And furthermore, You had the power to do something about it. And yet You didn't.

When we talk about God's power and His knowledge, just theologically, just at arm's length, we can all nod our heads to propositional truth. The problem is when we look at some hardship that has come upon us and we have trouble understanding how did God apply those attributes that He has to this circumstance or to this loss that we have encountered.

You know, there's times when it might even be easier for us to believe that God doesn't know. There's times when it might be easier to believe that God doesn't know the future rather than to try to reconcile the fact that He knows but still allowed hardship to enter into our lives. Some people, they try to explain away kind of the questions that come from that by saying, well, maybe God doesn't know.

That's the premise of a theology called open theism. It's the idea that God's just as shocked at bad news as we are. But it's not the case. God is never shocked.

God is never surprised. Today's text, any of the number of readings we've quoted from, any number of other readings we haven't quoted from, say the same thing. God's not out of the loop with regards to anything that happens in the world around us. So why then?

Why? Do bad things happen with an all-knowing and all-powerful God on the throne? Well, that's the topic that's launched a thousand sermons. We're not going to try to answer all that this morning, but I will say this.

The Cross: God Appoints Hard Things for Overwhelming Good 25:20

The Bible's answer to these things is pretty direct. You know, for a very short season, a really short season, the time we spend on this globe is but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of eternity. So for a very, very short season, God does allow what we would call bad things, because those bad things are the means for overwhelmingly good outcomes, even if we can't see it.

Now let me explain by way of a very important example. If you had gone to the disciples in about 32 A.D. If you had gone to the disciples and told them that Jesus needed to die, in fact He had to die, what sort of response would the disciples give prior to His death?

They would have said, no way. In fact, when Jesus Himself told His own disciples that His death was imminent, they said, uh-uh. They said it can't be. Perish the thought.

Why? Because that would be a bad outcome, right? That would be a bad thing. That would be the worst thing.

If you were a disciple of Jesus Christ, the idea that this one who was raising the dead and healing the blind, the idea that this one would be taken from you and nailed to a cross, that was the worst possible thing that could ever happen. And yet it's the exact thing that God appointed.

Jesus knew that His own death was the means for a far greater good, for the salvation of the very people He was talking to. That's one example, but it's a pivotal example that demonstrates this. In a short season, God can and does appoint things you'll never like and you'll never understand to accomplish a greater goal.

You might not understand what that good is on the here and now. You might go to your own demise. You might go into your own grave not knowing why God did X, Y, Z in your past.

Faith Rests Not in What We Know, but in What God Knows 27:08

And yet, our confidence is not what we know. Our confidence is that He knows. Faith is reaching up your hand, knowing that God grabs it and leads you. Faith is not based on you understanding every direction He might take you, but trusting His character that He'll lead you in the right way.

This holds true in good seasons of our life and bad seasons. The trials and tribulations you're facing this week or may have faced in weeks previous, they're no fun. Jesus wept when He came alongside those who were hurting, as many of us may be. But know this, in the scales of eternity, they're for a very short season.

And if you examine these things closely, especially through the lens, the eyes of retrospect, you may find that God uses the hardest things, the hardest things, to draw us closer to Himself. To grow our faith. To make us more like Christ. This week, trust.

Father knows best. Trust in his wisdom. Trust that all things do work together for good. Even if you cannot see that good right now.

Trust that God knows and in His time, our omniscient, omnipotent God will validate every ounce of faith that you place in Him this week. Let's pray.