At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
The hand of the diligent shall bear rule:
Proverbs 15:3
But the slothful shall be under tribute.
The doctrine of God’s omniscience is not a dry theological abstraction. Rightly understood, the doctrine is a consuming fire. As many acknowledge, the God of Calvinistic theology is an “in-your-face” kind of God, but what many do not acknowledge is that this is also true of every form of Christian orthodoxy—provided we think about it for more than a moment. No orthodox understanding of God can be fitted into a box.
God’s omniscience, His knowledge of all things, is not mediated knowledge. He doesn’t find out things because angels tell Him, but before that “He didn’t know.” He doesn’t discover things, as though He were a learner. No, the knowledge that God has of all things in heaven and on earth, and of all things past, present, and future, is a knowledge that He simply possesses immediately.
And we have to be careful that we don’t think of the omni-doctrines in pie dough terms—as though the farther we spread God’s knowledge, the thinner it gets. No, as all of God is present anywhere that God is present, and as God’s knowledge of what we are doing this moment is not a fraction of His knowledge, it follows that God is in no way distant from us. God knows all, and all of God knows all.
This is something we ought to think about more with regard to what we are doing when we sin. Our proverb says that the eyes of the Lord are in “every place,” and that those eyes behold “the evil and the good.” In order to sin at all, we must actively suppress our knowledge that God is in the room with us, that God is not sleeping, that God is considering every one of the back-and-forth thoughts we entertain in the course of temptation, and that He knows absolutely everything about it.
Further, this knowledge that God has is not that of a passive spectator.
“Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Heb. 4:13).
The Word of Scripture cuts us up as though we were a sacrificial animal being arranged on an altar of fire (Heb. 4:11-12). And when it says in v. 13 that we are “opened” unto the eyes of God, the verb used is trachelizo—meaning “laid bare.” It is related to the word for neck or throat, and creates the image of an animal’s throat being pulled back just before it is slit. God’s knowledge is not distant and removed. We are not Deists, serving a god who resides on the other side of the galaxies, and who can only dimly make out what we are doing.
No. The eyes of the Lord are everywhere present. The eyes of the Lord behold all the evil, and all of the good.
