I recently watched one of the old Andy Griffith episodes about a stranger that came into town who had never been to Mayberry before but was addressing all the citizens by name and telling them things about themselves as if he knew everything about them. For example, the first time he met Andy and Barney, without introduction, he called them by name. He then told Floyd the barber that he needed to take care of his rheumatism. When he ran into Mrs. Buntley on the street, he correctly identified her twin infant sons, calling them by name. He even identified a girl in town he claimed to be in love with and told her all kinds of things about herself.
As would be expected, a total stranger knowing so much about them made the citizens very uncomfortable, even afraid. Mrs. Buntley surmised that he may not even be human, but something from the supernatural; and Deputy Fife was convinced he was a foreign spy. Eventually it became known that his knowledge of the people came through subscribing to the hometown newspaper for 5 years and the mystery was solved. ut it was the reaction of the people to someone they had never met knowing so much about them that made that episode so fun to watch.
But the truth is, there is someone, just like this stranger, that exist in the universe, God. One of His attributes is that He is ‘omniscient’. To say God is omniscient means that there is not anything that He doesn’t know, that His intellect and knowledge are infinite and that there are no mysteries with Him. He knows the end from the beginning. He also knows every decision we will ever make, whether right or wrong. In Isaiah’s prophecy about the Messiah in Isaiah 11:3-4, he noted that ‘He (Messiah) would not judge by the sight of His eyes, nor decide by the hearing of the ears, but with righteousness shall he judge… This meant that he could judge accurately because He would know us as well as we know ourselves. We see this fulfilled in John 2:23-24. There it says, ‘Jesus did not commit himself to those who believed in Him because of the signs He did, because He knew all men and had no need that anyone should testify of man, for He knew what was in man.’ This is confirmed in I SAMUEL 16:7: ‘The Lord sees not as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.’
God is also omnipresent, which means that there is nowhere we can go to hide where God doesn’t see us. David speaks of this fact in Psalms 139:7-8. There it says, ‘Where shall I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.’
Because of God’s omniscient and omnipresent, He knows everything we think and everything we do. Nothing is hidden from Him. These truths, if rightly understood, should help us in our prayer life. First, it should cause us to confess our sins daily (I John 1:9) because He already knows them. Second, we should pray earnestly for God to fulfill in us His promise to daily make us more and more conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29).
For God’s glory and God’s alone,
Pastor Terry.
