Suffering in the Light of the Omniscience of God
God knows everything.
These are true words, supported by scripture. God is omniscient.
These are comforting words for the one who is
suffering. Suffering comes into our life
in two ways. It may be a sickness or
hardship that God has allowed to test our endurance and faithfulness to Him, in
order to conform us to His image. Or, it
may be in the form of tribulation caused by our enemy. Perhaps someone has done something to us, and
has caused us pain.
How does understanding that God is all-knowing help us to
remain faithful while suffering?
There are two aspects of God’s omniscience that I want you to
consider.
#1 - God is
intimately acquainted with every detail of your life!
Can we imagine the infinite knowledge of God, with our
finite minds? Because He knows the concept
of “all knowledge” is too lofty for us to grasp, God gave us some specific
examples in scripture to help us understand and to give us perspective.
Psalm 50:11 tells us, I
know every bird of the mountains, and everything that moves in the field is
Mine.
Matthew 10:29-31 – Are
not two sparrows sold for a cent? And
yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all
numbered. So do not fear; you are more
valuable than many sparrows.
Matthew 6:26 - Look at
the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and
yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?
I looked up a few facts on birds. According to one website, the number of species
of birds is estimated at 10,000, but the actual number is unknown. The total number of birds in the world at any
given time ranges from 100 billion to 400 billion.
100 to 400 billion birds, and our heavenly Father feeds them…every
single one.
100 to 400 billion birds, and not one falls to the ground without God
knowing it!
God is so intimately acquainted with all His creation that
He knows when the smallest sparrow falls!
And Jesus tells us that we are more valuable to God than many
sparrows. So much more valuable, that He
knows the number of hairs on our head!
Psalm 139 gives us a perspective on how well God knows us.
·
Every action or move I make – when I get up, sit
down, lay down, every path I take, all my ways
·
Every thought I think
·
Every word I say, and every word I will say
(before it comes out of my mouth!)
·
Every place I go (I cannot be hidden from Him or
go where He is not already there)
·
Every part of my physical body – how it is woven
together, because He created it
·
Every moment of my life – my days are ordained;
He knows when I was born and when I will die
·
Every anxiety or painful thing that dwells in me
There are approximately 7.4 billion people in the world
today – all thinking thoughts and performing actions and speaking words that do
not go unnoticed by their Creator! God
exists outside of creation, because He created it. Yet He is so intimately acquainted with His
creation that the slightest movement does not occur without His knowledge.
God’s intimate knowledge of us extends to our suffering.
Psalm 56:8 – You have
taken account of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book?
Psalm 142:3 – When my
spirit was overwhelmed within me, You knew my path. In the way where I walk they have hidden a
trap for me.
Amazingly, God takes notice of our tears, and actually keeps
record of them! God knows when we are
overwhelmed in our inner spirit, even when no one else can see it! To be overwhelmed is to be feeble, faint, or
grow weak. God knows when we are
weak. He sees the tears we cry when we
are alone.
Hebrews 4:15 tells us that we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses,
but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Christ knows just how you feel, because He
experienced it.
Your suffering does not go unnoticed! God has all knowledge, and He knows every
intimate detail.
#2 - Because God has
all knowledge, you can trust His judgment in every situation!
Knowing God is righteous and good, we can trust His judgment
in allowing suffering into our life. We
can question why we must experience hardship, but ultimately it is surrendering
to the fact that God knows best, because He knows all, that gets us through by
faith. James tells us that suffering and
trials come in order to make us perfect and complete, lacking in nothing (James
1:2-4). Who better to know exactly what
kind of suffering will do this perfect work, than the God who created us – the One
who wove us together in our mother’s womb?
He knows exactly how much suffering you are able to endure,
because He Himself knows our frame; He is
mindful that we are but dust. (Psalm 103:14)
Let’s consider suffering that comes because of
tribulation. Do we ever get angry or
confused as to why wickedness is allowed to continue? There is so much injustice in the world, so
many innocent people hurting, so much hunger, so much pain and suffering. It makes one wonder, “Does God know or care
about what is going on in this world?”
Knowing the character of God gives us proper perspective!
The omniscience and goodness of God enables Him to make
judgments that are always righteous because He knows all the facts and aspects
involved, and He always does good. God
is able to judge righteously because He knows our feelings and the heart; He
sees right into our thoughts, our motivations, our intentions. Outward actions
can be false, but the heart always reveals the truth.
Jeremiah 11:20 – But,
O LORD of hosts, who judges righteously, who tries the feelings and the heart,
let me see Your vengeance on them, for to You have I committed my cause.
God’s judgment, the outcome of His determined will, is
always and completely righteous. He is
the referee or umpire that never misses a call!
He sees every play, and not only the “play” but the heart of the player.
Psalm 19:9 - The fear
of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; The judgments of the Lord are true; they are righteous altogether.
God does not forget – He has all knowledge of sinful
hearts. If a person rejects Christ’s
payment for sin they will stand before God to answer for it, and He will not
overlook any detail of our sinful actions, sinful attitudes, or sinful
thoughts. Because God is all-knowing, we
may live a life of good deeds, but those will not “cover” our stubborn heart
that refused to repent and bow before our Creator.
We may think that the wicked are “getting away with” their
sin. But the Bible tells us differently.
Romans 2:5 - But
because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for
yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.
God, being
all-knowing, sees all sin, even the ones we believe are secret!
Psalm 90:8 – You have
placed our iniquities before You, our secret sins in the light of Your
presence.
Thankfully, for those who repent, God says He will not
remember our sins!
Psalm 103:10-12 – He
has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our
iniquities. For as high as the heavens
are above the earth, so great is His lovingkindness toward those who fear
Him. As far as the east is from the
west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.
Isaiah 43:25 – I, even
I, am the one who wipes out your transgressions for My own sake, and I will not
remember your sins.
How do these two
facts, that God knows every detail of our life, and that His judgments are
always righteous because He has all knowledge, encourage us?
We can trust God’s activity and leading in our own life, because
God knows all.
We can persevere in a broken and fallen world, even when we suffer,
because
God knows all.
We can be secure in God’s love for us, because God knows all –
He will never learn something new about us that would cause Him to abandon us!
We can be confident that justice will prevail, and that
wrong-doing will be punished, because God knows all.
We can be thankful for God’s restraining hand of mercy that
gives time for repentance, because God knows all.
Our faithfulness does not go unnoticed. God knows of our obedience and
endurance. (2 Thessalonians 1) Since God
sees into the heart, those who will enter heaven are truly those who have repented
and are forgiven in Christ – no imitators will pass the test of God’s
penetrating judgment of the heart. And
we will be rewarded if we are faithful.
In this life, even though it appears that those who treat
others unjustly and cause suffering are not punished, there will be a day when
righteous judgment will be executed on all who have rejected Him.
Only God is able to judge, because only He knows all the
details. He alone knows the complete
truth of any situation, of any heart.
Only He knows if a heart is truly wicked and will never repent. We do not have the
right to condemn and judge, because we do not have all knowledge.
A true believer can never use the phrase “it’s not fair,” because
we are recipients of God’s mercy – certainly we did not get what was “fair” for
us! We received grace! To the one who has been forgiven and shown
mercy, the fact that an unrighteous person is allowed to continue in causing
suffering for others, should call us to be more urgent about sharing the
gospel…because the withholding of God’s judgment is His kindness, offering time
to repent. It is not “letting them get
by with it.”
It is the heart of an all-knowing and loving God that does
not give us what we deserve the moment we deserve it. What if God had judged us before we repented? And it is the heart of an all-knowing and
loving God that allows suffering into our life, to conform us to the image of
Christ. He knows exactly what it will
take to achieve the result!
I encourage you if you are suffering, in whatever way, to
trust that God knows all about it. He
keeps a record of wrongs, and the ungodly will meet His righteous judgment one
day. Trust that God knows how you feel,
and sees the pain in your heart. And not
only does He see your pain, He experiences it with you, because He knows all.
He knows, and He cares.
Because that is who He has revealed Himself to be.
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