The Knowledge of the Holy: The Divine Omniscience
[Editor’s Note: This is a 23-Day Series exploring different aspects of God’s nature and personality, using Tozer’s “The Knowledge of the Holy” as a discussion starter. You can read the introduction of the series here.]
Imagine that you are being asked to pledge your allegiance to a leader. This leader will be responsible, not just to help you succeed at your job, but he will also be responsible for your marriage, your health, your safety, not to mention whether you have food to eat and the condition of your soul. In that scenario, what kind of leader would you want? I don’t know about you, but I would want the most capable leader possible, one that can understand every scenario and understand the best one for me to take. Even in that scenario, I would still worry about him making mistakes. This is the question that lies at the center of today’s Tozer reading. God’s omniscience, His ability to know everything, is at the heart of whether we follow Him whole-heartedly or not.
Tozer argues that God’s knowledge is vast. It’s so vast, in fact, that it is perfect. It doesn’t grow. God doesn’t learn. He knows everything without having to be taught. And because God is in fact the source of every created thing, God knows and understands every created thing and how it will behave, better than the created being itself. In many ways, God’s omniscience is tied to His omnipresence (His ability to be everywhere at once), and so when we really begin to think about what God knows, we cry out with David, “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:7).
This has two implications for us mortals who have a limited ability to know things. First, for those who are clinging to sin and hoping they can keep it hidden, we have to realize that God sees all and knows all. “Everything is naked and exposed before his eyes, and he is the one to whom we are accountable,” (Hebrews 4:13). But for the believer who has taken refuge in Jesus, we can have confidence that though everything we’ve ever done or will do is known by God, He has still desired us, called us, and set His love upon us with full knowledge of who we are.
This for me is the major takeaway for this chapter. Many acknowledge God knows everything. Sometimes we fear the fact that God knows everything. The benefit to the believer is understanding God has chosen us and reconciled us knowing all of our failures in advance. God is not surprised by your sin. He’s not sitting in Heaven reconsidering your salvation based on your latest slip up. Yet, so much of the time, we relate to God like He somehow feels differently about us based on our latest slip up (or success). In this way we treat God like a man and not the God He really is.
Friends, God has chosen us having already known everything there is to know about us. He is not surprised. This should motivate us to trust Him and love Him more. When I was dead in my sin and an enemy of God, He chose me. When I was being transformed by Jesus, but still struggling with old patterns of sin, He already knew it would happen. He doesn’t have to reconsider, He already knew. And He chose you anyway. And it’s this confidence in His ability to already know us and still choose us that gives us confidence to come before His throne of grace boldly. That is where we find grace and help in the times we need it most.
And lastly, we can trust God to lead us into the future. If He knows everything, He already knows the outcome of any situation He will lead me into. And because He’s good, I know that He will lead me into situations that are guaranteed to be for my good, even if they don’t seem like it at the time. Understanding this at a heart level makes God an easy person to trust. He knows the future. He will lead us through it well. He will make good choices that will benefit us. And not only does He have our good in mind, because He knows everything, He has the power to make that good happen. And He is worthy to trust with my life and yours.
That’s my take away. What’s yours? Leave a comment in the comment section so we can all grow together.
It’s not to late for you to join in with us. You can catch up in the posts below:
The Knowledge of the Holy Series
Day 1: Why We Must Think Rightly About God
Day 3: A Divine Attribute: Something True About God
Day 5: The Self Existence of God
Day 6: The Self Sufficiency of God
Day 9: The Immutability of God
Day 10: The Divine Omniscience
Day 11: The Wisdom of God
Day 12: The Omnipotence of God
Day 13: The Divine Transcendence
Day 14: God’s Omnipresence
Day 15: The Faithfulness of God
Day 16: The Goodness of God
Day 17: The Justice of God
Day 18: The Mercy of God
Day 19: The Grace of God
Day 20: The Love of God
Day 21: The Holiness of God
Day 22: The Sovereignty of God
Day 23: The Open Secret
The Knowledge of the Holy: God’s Immutability
[Editor’s Note: This is a 23-Day Series exploring different aspects of God’s nature and personality, using Tozer’s “The Knowledge of the Holy” as a discussion starter. You can read the introduction of the series here.]
Today’s chapter features another one of those attributes of God that seems to bleed over from some of the others. God’s immutability simply means that God doesn’t mutate or change. Because God is eternal, however He appears to us now is how He will appear to us throughout history, forever. Not only does God appear to us unchanged throughout history, though, He never changes. God tells the prophet Malachi this very clearly: “I am the Lord, and I do not change…” (Malachi 3:6).
That God is immutable, Tozer tells us, means that God cannot differ from Himself. To change would mean to admit some kind of defect in the Godhead. If God went from bad to better, it would mean God was at one point bad. If God went from better to worse, that would mean God would decrease in His glory. And God certainly is not now more mature than he was thousands of years ago. There is no maturing God described in Scripture.
We come to value and understand God’s immutability when we compare him to man who is always changing. Man is constantly changing, sometimes from worse to better, sometimes from better to worse, and sometimes just maturing. But the old saying is true for man: “Change is the only constant in life.” In this there is hope. God, in His perfection, never changes, nor does He need to. But God uses change for man to offer the hope of a different life, centered around His Son. That change is possible in man and impossible with God is the hope of the Christian life.
As I thought about this reality, I remembered how the writer of Hebrews tells us that Jesus Christ is the same, “yesterday, today, and forever,” (Hebrews 13:8). What we can take away from this, though, is that Jesus (and by extension the whole of God) feels the same way about us and our circumstances that He felt about things when He was here on Earth. He’s not capricious, talking one way and acting another. Instead, He is faithful and true. We can always count on Him to be a sympathetic high priest towards us. And that is what can give us confidence and boldness to approach Him in our time of need.
Most of us know people who we couldn’t trust to remain the same. They would act one way in front of us and another when we were gone. Or we know people who act reliably aweful. But God is always the same and because He is good and full of love, we can draw near to Him, trust Him, in a way that is difficult for us to do with another here on Earth.
So spend some time today, enjoying Him for who He is, knowing He will never change. He is always constant and His love for you will never wane.
Those are my thoughts. Let us know yours in the comment section.
It’s not to late for you to join in with us. You can catch up in the posts below:
The Knowledge of the Holy Series
Day 1: Why We Must Think Rightly About God
Day 3: A Divine Attribute: Something True About God
Day 5: The Self Existence of God
Day 6: The Self Sufficiency of God
Day 9: The Immutability of God
Day 10: The Divine Omniscience
Day 11: The Wisdom of God
Day 12: The Omnipotence of God
Day 13: The Divine Transcendence
Day 14: God’s Omnipresence
Day 15: The Faithfulness of God
Day 16: The Goodness of God
Day 17: The Justice of God
Day 18: The Mercy of God
Day 19: The Grace of God
Day 20: The Love of God
Day 21: The Holiness of God
Day 22: The Sovereignty of God
Day 23: The Open Secret
The Knowledge of the Holy: The Eternity of God
[Editor’s Note: This is a 23-Day Series exploring different aspects of God’s nature and personality, using Tozer’s “The Knowledge of the Holy” as a discussion starter. You can read the introduction of the series here.]
Sometimes when you start talking about God and His nature it starts to sound more like a Sci-Fi story than the God that you’ve always thought you knew. This is certainly the case as Tozer begins to dissect God’s relationship with time. Instead of being someone who experiences time like we do, Tozer declares God stands outside of time. This doesn’t just make Him timeless or ageless, but alien to time. One of my favorite quotes from this chapter is this: “God dwells in eternity but time dwells in God.” This allows God to exist as the same God at every point in history. God is unbound by time.
According to Tozer, this should have two results in our life: It should cause us to seek refuge in Him and cry out to Him for Him to teach us His perspective of life on Earth. Finally, Tozer points out that the image of God inside of humanity longs for eternity, yet our fallen nature rages against the shortness of life. These two opposite desires meet resolution in the saving message of Jesus, who frees us to join God in eternity.
This chapter was an absolute thrill for me. I all too often forget how conscious I am of the day I live in, the constraints of time and scheduling, and the perspective of other time-bound humans. Reading about God’s eternal nature reminded me again how God is like the ultimate historian, who understands more from a big picture perspective than we do. He values heart attitudes and actions that are eternally good, not just the ones that are pronounced good by our ever shifting cultures.
Instead of causing us to believe that we have all the time in the world and there is no rush, the message of God’s eternal nature causes Moses to cry out to God for help to use his days wisely. “Teach us to realize the brevity of life, so that we may grow in wisdom,” (Psalm 90:12). When we see how limited our lives are compared to God’s eternal nature, it provokes in us a desire to use the limited time we have wisely. It frees us from the rat race and the trappings of our short-sighted cultures.
This message is so necessary in the body of Christ today! So often we are so bound by what is culturally appropriate, even though our culture has only existed a short time. Instead, we can be freed to serve a God who has eternal values that He backs up with eternal rewards. Giving your life to serve and witness to a remote village with little fanfare will make you neither rich nor famous. It can look like a waste of a life. But when we understand that we serve a God intent on drawing as many people as He can to His son Jesus and He rewards those who serve the least with places of honor in the age to come, then we can look at that life and call it wisdom. We can gladly surrender ourselves because we serve a God who isn’t bound by our shortness of life. And that is freedom.
My encouragement for you today is to take some time thinking about God and His eternal nature. And as you do, pray the prayer of Moses: “God, teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”
That’s my take. Please share with us yours in the comment section!
It’s not to late for you to join in with us. You can catch up in the posts below:
The Knowledge of the Holy Series
Day 1: Why We Must Think Rightly About God
Day 3: A Divine Attribute: Something True About God
Day 5: The Self Existence of God
Day 6: The Self Sufficiency of God
Day 7: The Eternity of God
Day 8: God’s Infinitude
Day 9: The Immutability of God
Day 10: The Divine Omniscience
Day 11: The Wisdom of God
Day 12: The Omnipotence of God
Day 13: The Divine Transcendence
Day 14: God’s Omnipresence
Day 15: The Faithfulness of God
Day 16: The Goodness of God
Day 17: The Justice of God
Day 18: The Mercy of God
Day 19: The Grace of God
Day 20: The Love of God
Day 21: The Holiness of God
Day 22: The Sovereignty of God
Day 23: The Open Secret
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 