The Bible Study Hour

Dr. James Boice: Our omniscient God knows everything because he's made everything. He's not a God who finished his creation then sat back to see what would happen. And he's not a God who is detached from the people he created.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour. A radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically.

Our omniscient God is a loving God, a God who knows us intimately because he created us. He's a personal God who knit us in our mother's womb and then calls us to a life of fellowship.

Join Dr. Boice as he explores the fruit of a vibrant relationship with a God who knows everything and loves us deeply, in spite of our shortcomings.

When I introduced Psalm 139 last week, which we began to study then, one of the things I said is that it's made up of four perfectly balanced stanzas.

The first of the four stanzas has to do with God's omniscience. I'm not sure I defined some of these theological terms adequately a week ago, but omniscience means that God knows all things. Omni has to do with all or everything, and the latter part of it, like our word science, it has to do with knowledge. So, omniscience means that God knows all things, and that's what the first verses are about, verses 1-6.

Then the second major portion of this psalm has to do with God's omnipresence. That's another compound word, omni meaning all and presence meaning presence. He's everywhere, all places.

Then the third portion of the psalm has to do with omnipotence. Potent means power, so it means that God is all-powerful. Then I pointed out that the last section of this, the fourth of these four major sections of the psalm, indicates the response that the psalmist, in this case David, has to all of the above.

What's he going to do? How's he going to think now that he knows that God is truly all-knowing, all-present, and all-powerful?

I also said last week that there is a sense in which the psalm is really only about the omniscience of God because the other things that are brought in are brought in chiefly because they support that first observation. Why is it that God knows all things? One answer to that is because God is everywhere to see and know it.

So, when David begins to talk about the omnipresence of God, in the second of these sections, it's in order to explain the great quality of God's knowledge that he has introduced at the beginning.

Now, I need to say that he also brings in the third of these doctrines for the same reason, talking about God's power, his omnipotence. The reason he brings that in is because he's saying God knows everything, in my case particularly, because God has made everything. He's made me, and so he has the knowledge of what he has made, in the same way that a person that manufactures an object understands it better than anybody else.

That's the theological subject matter. You have to remember, however, that this is also a worship psalm. We've been talking about that, and what that means is that we're not going to find in this psalm more or less abstract reflections on God's omniscience and omnipresence. In the section that we're dealing with today, his omnipotence. There's a place for that, and we do find it other places in the scripture.

What we're going to find is that from David's perspective, in this psalm at least, all of this is personal. He is thinking here, where he talks about the power of God, not just of that abstract power that obviously enabled God to create the universe, but particularly the power of God that created him, forming him, as he says when he was still in the womb of his mother. No wonder God knows me. He says God made me. That's why he knows me, and moreover, he knew me from the very beginning, from the very first moments of my existence, as I began to form.

These are beautiful words. They're worth reading. Here's what he says: "You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."

We want to look at that personally to see what it has to do with us, but I don't think we can go on to do that without recognizing that this does have great bearing upon what is perhaps the greatest single moral issue of our day. That is the issue of abortion. It's an important issue because it has to do with life and death. Not only that, the life and death of the most helpless individuals in any society, that is the unborn.

David isn't thinking about abortion, of course. Nothing could be further from his mind, but you can't read these verses thoughtfully today without realizing that they do have direct and very important bearing upon the subject.

Let me just take a little bit of time to think about it. What is the major issue, the chief issue in the abortion question today? It's not how we use our tax money. The issue in the abortion battle today is simply this: Is the embryo a human being?

People who want to argue for the woman's right to have abortion are working against that, of course. They want to be able to say, "It's my body, I can do with it whatever I like." And so they want to argue that the fetus, the developing child, is not really a person but something else. They change the language in order to handle that and make it more acceptable. In past ages, every woman understood that she was carrying a baby.

People talked about babies, but it's rather hard to think about killing babies. So we change the language and we talk about embryos and fetuses, and sometimes even tissue. It's not hard to remove tissue. It's even easier than having a gallbladder out or removing an appendix, and so we changed the language to make that kind of acceptable.

Now, the Bible does not use that language. That's not the way the Bible talks about the unborn child. What is more, medical knowledge, as it's developed, disabuses us of that kind of facile language.

Yes, the question, when does the embryo become a human being? Well, people have speculated on that for a long time. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, had some ideas about it. He said the embryo becomes a human being when it first quickens in the womb of the mother. That is, when it begins to move and the mother feels it.

Well, that seems to be an easy answer, except that we know today that the fetus is moving even before that. It's moving from the very beginning. It's almost always moving, and certainly before the mother feels it.

People would say, "Well, it becomes a human being when it's able to survive outside the womb." That seems like a good answer, except that because of medical ability today, we're able to have babies survive which are very, very tiny. Certainly those that are younger than those who are actually aborted.

We say, "Well, it has to do with brain waves." That's the way we tell whether we really have a human being alive today. When the brain waves cease today, it's the way we define death. It must have to do with brain waves. But the developing child has brain waves from the very, very earliest moments, certainly long before the mother even knows she's pregnant.

Not only that, the heart is beating, and there's a circulation of the blood. The difficulty, you see, is that there is no point where it is easy to say, "Before this, the evolving child is not a person, and after this it is." There's an uninterrupted development of the child from the very first moment in which the sperm of the father unites with the ovum of the mother and the cell begins to divide. The father's seed can't multiply by itself. The egg of the mother cannot multiply by itself, but as soon as the two come together, as soon as you have that merging of those two sets of chromosomes, you have a unique individual, and that life begins to develop, unless it is terminated either naturally or by our intent.

That's what David is pointing to, isn't it? He's not talking in our language, and he's certainly not using medical terminology. He's simply describing it as best he knows how in terms of the knowledge of the day, but what he is speaking of is his unique individuality from the very first moments of his existence in the womb. He's saying that from that very first moment, God knew him and had ordained what his life was to be.

"All the days ordained for me were written in your book before even one of them came to be."

I think that has direct bearing on the issue. If that is how God regards the unborn child, how dare we call it only tissue and destroy the unborn, as we are doing in this country at the rate of at least a million and a half abortions every year.

Well, David goes on from this point. In the next two verses, he reflects on the abundance of God's thoughts toward him, and he ends with the words, "When I awake, I am still with you." I think he's simply observing that waking or sleeping, he's always with God because God is everywhere.

However we interpret the verses, they're making the same point that Paul makes in those great verses that close the eighth chapter of Romans. I'm sure you remember them. Many of us have them memorized. Paul wrote, "I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." That's what David is saying. He's saying, "That's my God."

Now, the last stanza begins to move on to how he is going to relate to God's knowledge. He talks about it in two ways. We can all relate in either of two ways. Either we can rebel against God's knowledge, saying, "I don't want a God like that." Else we can ask God to search us out because he knows us anyway and direct us in his own way.

David reflects those in this last portion by repudiating the one and affirming the other. First of all, he says clearly that he wants nothing to do with evil persons. That is, those who don't want anything to do with God. He's on the side of God. So he's turning his back on those who are intent on doing evil.

Then he says, secondly, what he wants to do is continue walking in God's way. These last two verses are so beautiful that many people have memorized them, and I commend them to you. Here's the prayer: "Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me, and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."

The problem that David perceives is that although he wants to keep clear of evil people and their ways, he's nevertheless sure that he has evil in himself. If he's going to overcome that, it has to be by the grace of God. His intention not to hang around evil people is not because he thinks he's better than they are, but because he recognizes that left to himself he's just like them. He can't afford to do it.

So he prays to God and says, "I need you to lead me in the way everlasting." You might notice that he actually prays for four things here. They would be worth a study all by themselves. He prays that God might know him and expose his thoughts, that God would try him or perfect his thoughts, that God would purge away whatever evil remains in him. Then finally, the fourth thing, that God would lead him in the way everlasting.

Isn't it interesting that a psalm that begins with perhaps the best declaration in all the Bible of the perfect pervasive knowledge of God, that God knows all things, should add at its end a prayer that God would nevertheless search out and know the psalmist. He say, "Isn't that unnecessary? Isn't that redundant? How can it be? What is the point of asking God to know what he already knows, or to do what he has already done?"

Well, the point, of course, is what I was pointing out from the beginning, namely that this is a practical psalm. What David wants is this doctrine of the omniscience of God to be practical in his own life. Of course he knows that God knows him and knows him well, but what he's saying is that he wants to benefit from that personally. He's asking God to use his perfect knowledge of David to lead David in a righteous, holy way.

So he prays, "Search me, O God, and know my heart." That's a serious thing to pray. Have you ever prayed that prayer? "Search me, O God, and know my heart." If we pray it with the same object that David has as he prays, namely that God would correct us and lead us in the right way, that's serious.

Arno Gaebelein wrote about that verse: "Happy is the Christian who prays thus every day. Whoever puts himself into the presence of the all-seeing God, who stands in his light and is willing to have anything and everything which is not right brought to light and judged, that's what we should be. This is the true walk in the light. Even the thoughts must be so dealt with." In the New Testament, it's expressed in this way: "Bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ."

If we do that, then there is the willingness to put away anything which is grievous to God in his spirit and to be led in the way everlasting.

Now, in the course of this, we have been looking at omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. We've seen that the major theme is omniscience, that God knows everything. We've also seen that the psalm is practical. So I want to treat it as I close the study in a practical way, saying, what application of this doctrine should you and I actually personally ourselves be making? Let me suggest how it should impact every Christian.

First of all, it should humble us. I think here of a great biblical example. The example is Job. You know the study of Job. What happened? Job had been greatly blessed by God, but then God had allowed Satan to attack him and take away all he had. So in a very short time, the passage of a day, Job lost all his possessions, as well as all his children. Then after that he lost his health. He lost the respect of his friends. Even his wife came and said, "Why don't you just curse God and die?"

Job didn't do it. He triumphed over it. He said in what surely some of the most poignant language in all of scripture, "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, naked will I return. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." But Job still didn't understand what was happening.

So his friends came. We call them Job's counselors, but they had far more compassion than many people that we would use that name for today might have. They sat with him for a whole week, identifying with him in his grief. Only at the end of that time did they begin to reason. I'm sure thinking they were trying to help him work through this, why it was that such a great set of tragedies should come into his life. They said, "Look, this is a moral universe, and we believe in a moral God. Things don't just happen. They all have meaning, and because it's a moral universe and God is in charge, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, there must be some connection between what you're suffering and what you did. You must have somehow brought it on yourself. You have to think about it. How is it that you have sinned against God?"

Job is well aware that he's not a perfect man. He's certainly a sinner, but he said, "I haven't done anything that can match the magnitude of the tragedy." So the debate goes on, chapter after chapter after chapter. Job is defending himself, but he doesn't understand what's happening.

Then finally, in chapter 38, God speaks, and we think, "Ah, now at last we're going to get the explanation." But the fascinating thing is that God does not explain himself to Job. Instead, in what seems to us almost harsh language, God calls Job to account. He says, "Now look, you just pull yourself together and stand there for a minute while I ask you a few questions."

God begins an interrogation that all has to do with his omniscience. He says, "Where were you when I made the world?" It's all out there, I made it, I know it. Where were you? How can you explain any of this to me? How can you do any of this? It goes on chapter after chapter after chapter, 129 verses. Plus five verses that introduce it and a couple that come in along the way to sort of keep the narration going.

At the end of it, as far as the meaning of his suffering is concerned, Job is as ignorant as he was at the beginning. He responds this way. He says, "Surely I spoke things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. Therefore, I despise myself, and I repent in dust and ashes."

You see, if we ever really begin to understand the omniscience of God, the perfect and pervasive knowledge of the Almighty, we will be humbled by it. If we're humbled by it, we will never find ourselves in the position of shaking our fist in God's face and saying, "Why did you ever let this happen?" An accusation, you see. We can ask for understanding.

"God, I don't understand this. Could you explain why this is going on?" The book of Job, for our benefit, does exactly that. It explains it as a cosmic struggle. We must never be angry with God. Instead, we have to be humble before him. The study of omniscience will do that.

Secondly, perfect knowledge of God should comfort us. Not only that we become humble, we also find that God knows all about us and loves us anyway. Have you ever thought of the omniscience of God that way? He knows your heart. He knows every wicked thought that you have had. He knows every sinful desire. He knows every nefarious plan, and yet he loves you anyway. He has sent Jesus Christ to be your savior.

You should find enormous comfort in that. That God knows the worst about you and loves you anyway. Not only that, he knows the best about you even when other people don't. Because sometimes you've been trying to do the right thing and you just can't quite pull it off. Or you do what you think is right, but people misunderstand it, and they attribute all kinds of ulterior evil motives. God knows you. What you're really doing, and he sees what good is in you because he's put it there.

You see, you should be greatly comforted and encouraged by that. Job was, because he says at one place in this book, "He, that is God, knows the way that I take, and when he has tested me, I shall come forth as gold."

Here's the third benefit: it should encourage us to live for God. Because this is what's going on in Psalm 139, isn't it? David has been reflecting on the omniscience of God, and although an unbeliever might be terrified by that, and should be, the fact that God knows the heart and will judge the evil at the final day. David isn't terrified because he knows God is his redeemer. He is instead encouraged to live for God, and so what he does is say something like this: "God, if you have loved me in spite of my sin and have made me for yourself, then help me to live for you, because that's what I really want to do."

He knows that as he does that, as he prays to God, it's the very knowledge of God that will help him do it. Because God knows what he needs. We don't know much about anything. We know very little even about ourselves, but God knows us. He knows our weaknesses and our strengths. He knows our sins, but he also knows our aspirations toward a godly life. He knows when isolation will help us grow strong, but he also knows when we need companionship and encouragement. He knows when we need rebuking and correcting, but also when we need teaching and encouragement. If anyone can lead me in the way everlasting, it is God.

Moreover, since I know that he knows me and wants to help me, I can get on boldly with this task of upright living.

Then here's one final point. Knowledge of the knowledge of God should help us to pray. Jesus taught it. He taught it very clearly. He did it in the Sermon on the Mount. Here's what he said. He said, "When you pray, don't keep on babbling like pagans, because they think they'll be heard because of their many words. Don't be like them, because your father knows what you need before you ask him."

Then this is followed by the Lord's Prayer, that model prayer that tells us how we ought to pray, doing it in just 52 words. Moreover, God's knowledge of what we need is so perfect that we're told in the Bible, he answers us even before we ask him. "Before they call I will answer, while they are still speaking, I will hear," wrote the prophet Isaiah.

Isn't that encouraging? Who can possibly be terrified by a God who knows everything and acts like that?

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