Our Awesome God: God Knows EVERYTHING! (Psalm 147:1-5)
Our Awesome God
He Knows Everything
Psalm 147:1-5
INTRODUCTION:
The Bible teaches that the God who created the heavens and the earth knows everything. And when we say “everything,” we mean everything - past, present, and future. Everything that actually happens and everything that could possibly happen.
THE OT TEACHES THAT GOD KNOWS EVERYTHING:
Take a look at Genesis 6:5 - “
God’s “omniscience” is emphasized especially in the books of poetry like Job and Psalms…
Job 21:22 -
Psalm 147:4-5 -
THE NT TEACHES THAT GOD KNOWS EVERYTHING:
Listen to Jesus tell us about His Father: Matthew 6:8 -
Matthew 10:29-30 -
There are estimated to be about 10,000 species of birds in the world! I don’t think God is partial to sparrows. In fact, I don’t think God is partial to birds; there are 8.7 million species of animals in the world! And God knows everything about every one of them.
But greater than that, God knows everything about every one of us - He knows our past, our present, and our future. Romans 11:33 -
Ephesians 1:11 -
Hebrews 4:13 -
HIS OMNISCIENCE IN CONTEXT OF HIS NATURE:
If God is unlimited in His nature (He is infinite), then He follows that His knowledge must also be infinite. There is no “nook or cranny” of anyone’s life, past, present, or future, which God does not know.
If God is the Cause of everything that is, then everything has existed in the mind of God before He ever created anything. That means that before anything can happen in your life, God must know already how to works things out for the better for you (Rom. 8:29) so He can cause good to come from bad. God knows everything.
If God is eternal, if He is not regulated by “time,” then it must follow that God knows everything. His knowledge is not limited by time; He does not have to wait for someone to make a decision before God knows what that decision is. He is eternal and so is His knowledge.
If God is perfect, then it follows that His knowledge is perfect. There can’t be anything outside of God’s knowledge or God would not be perfect and He would not be trustworthy.
We mentioned last month when He studied God’s omnipotence that He cannot lie (Titus 1:2). If God cannot lie and if God is the source of the Bible (2 Tim. 3:16), then it follows that God knows everything - everything that men and women need to know, both from the past, in the present, and in the future - so that God can tell man how to live properly in order to be pleasing to Him.
GOD’S OMNISCIENCE AND HIS SOVEREIGNTY:
John Calvin was a theologian who lived in the early 16th century. He was extremely influential, mainly through two books he wrote called The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Many, many modern-day Protestant churches are influenced by John Calvin.
Calvin pushed the sovereignty of God to an extreme, unbiblical limit. He claimed that because God is sovereign, everything that happens, happens from His will, His cause. To word this another way, in reference to His knowledge… if God knows something is going to happen, then it cannot not happen. Therefore, whatever happens, God has caused it to happen.
Well, it is not difficult to see that this position absolutely destroys free choice. So some theologians, going all the way back to John Calvin’s day, responded to this position by saying that God only knows the things that can be known. Man’s free choices, since they haven’t been made yet, cannot be known. The idea that God doesn’t know the “free choices” of man is called “Open Theism.” If you heard the name “Alan Dershowitz,” he is a professor of law at Harvard and is a commentator on the news from time to time. Dershowitz wrote a book in 2000 called The Genesis of Justice, which I have in my library. His position is that the Law of Moses grew out of God learning (please observe the idea that God can and does “learn” new things) how many behaves during the book of Genesis and so that’s why God gave those certain laws to Moses. God saw how man behaved and He said, “Oh, wow, I need to make a law against that.”
At least one passage I will share with you that they use to support their idea of God’s nature is from Jeremiah 32:35. You see, if it “never entered God’s mind,” then He must not have known that they would do such a thing.
The problem with that is that God predicted that Israel would do this all the way back in the Law of Moses about 900 years before Jeremiah lived! Leviticus 18:21 and 20:2-5. So when God said it “never entered His mind,” He is speaking figuratively, stating that their behavior was so ungodly, it was completely outside of God’s expectations of His people.
But, I don’t want to spend more time on this except to direction your attention to a text which shows that God knows all things - including the decisions that we might make but choose not to make! In other words, this one text shows that the idea of “open theism” is wrong…
1 Samuel 23… King Saul is chasing David to kill him, motivated out of jealousy and envy. David flees to a village named Keilah. It was under attack by the Philistines so David delivered the people from the Philistines. But then King Saul heard that David was in the village of Keilah and that it was a city that was heavily strengthened. Then David found out that King Saul had sent men to capture David (ver. 9).
So, David inquired of Jehovah in verse 10-11. Please observe that David asks God: “Will the men of Keilah surrender me into Saul’s hand?” God said, “Yes, they will surrender you” (ver. 12). In other words, God knew the free choice of the men of Keilah and He knew that they would turn David over to King Saul.
But, observe in verse 13 that David then fled from Keilah (ver. 13). What we learn here is that: God knows everything; He knows the choices that we will make, and He knows the choices that we might make. Our freedom to make choices does not destroy God’s knowledge of our future.
That’s why we need to trust God. The verb “to believe” or “to trust” is used 96 times in the Hebrew OT. The English verb “to trust” is used 78 times in the whole Bible in the NASV, “to believe” is used 150 times in the whole Bible. “To believe” or “to trust” is used 241 times in the Greek NT. Clearly God wants us to trust Him.
In fact, we cannot be saved from our sins if we do not trust God. The writer of Hebrews said, “without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him” (Heb. 11:6).
Take home message: We can trust God’s word because God knows everything!