“O Lord, you have searched me and known me.” — Psalm 139:1
God knows everything.
We don’t mean that He’s just smarter than us. It means His knowledge has no boundary. He knows everything that is, everything that was, and everything that will be. He knows every possibility, every motive, every secret thought. As William Shedd said, “The Creator has infinite knowledge at every instant and neither learns nor forgets.”
As human beings, we struggle to comprehend this because learning is such a big part of who we are. Mark Twain once joked, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” Growing older does lead to more knowledge, but rightly is accompanied by the realization of how little we actually know.
But God is not like us. He does not grow in knowledge. He never learns because there is nothing for Him to learn.
To say that God is omniscient means He possesses perfect, exhaustive, unchanging knowledge of all things. As Stephen Charnock put it, “He is all eye.” And an unsleepy eye at that. He never wonders, never guesses, never gathers information. He does not merely know what is; He knows why it is. He knows every atom, every angel, every intention.
The God Who Knows All
This should humble us such that we never question God.
Isaiah asks, “Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord, or what man shows him his counsel?” (Isa. 40:13). Paul echoes the same in Romans 11: “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” (v. 34).
God’s judgments are perfect. He can judge not only actions but motives. “You who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God!” (Ps. 7:9). He discerns “the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). He can never misjudge, never misunderstand, never make a mistake.
The God Who Knows Me
God’s omniscience should also terrufy us.
“That God knows each person through and through,” wrote A.W. Tozer, “can be a cause of shaking fear to the man that has something to hide.” Psalm 90:8 says, “You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.”
We cannot flee from God’s searchign gaze. “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?” (Ps. 139:7). Every thought, every desire, every hidden motive lies open before Him.
Yet for those in Christ, this same truth becomes a deep comfort. God’s knowledge of us is not only penetrating — it is personal, fatherly, and redeeming. He knows our weakness and still loves us. As James Thornwell wrote, “God understands our wants, appreciates our weaknesses, and can accommodate His grace precisely to our case.”
He knows the sins we try to forget and the struggles we can’t put into words — and still He calls us His own.
Omniscience and Our Anxiety
If God knows all things, why do we live as though everything depends on what we know? Much of our anxiety comes from a sinful desire to control what is beyond us. We fret over the future because we think knowing more would mean worrying less.
But Jesus says the opposite. In Matthew 6, He commands, “Do not be anxious.” Why? Because “your heavenly Father knows that you need them all” (v. 32). Our peace is not found in knowing more, but in trusting the One who already knows everything.
We were not made to be omniscience. (To seek to be so is a sin.) We were made to trust in God’s omniscience.
The God Who Never Forgets
God knows our whole story — the public and the private, the visible and the unseen. He will never forget us or His promises to us. “Can a woman forget her nursing child?” He asks in Isaiah 49:15. “Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”
What He knows, He knows eternally. That means He will never discover something about you that changes His love. Tozer put it beautifully:
“No talebearer can inform on us, no enemy can make an accusation stick, no forgotten skeleton can come tumbling out of some hidden closet to abash us and expose our past… since He knew us utterly before we knew Him and called us to Himself in the full knowledge of everything that was against us.”
He knew our rebellion before we were born, and yet He chose to save us. “For I knew that you would surely deal treacherously,” God says in Isaiah 48:8, “but for my name’s sake I defer my anger.”
Known and Loved
To be fully known is what we most fear and what we most long for. In Christ, both are true: we are known completely, and we are loved completely.
The One who knows all things has set His love upon you, not because of what He discovered in you, but because of who He is. His knowledge does not change, and neither does His love.
So rest, Christian. You are never misunderstood, never unseen, never forgotten. You are known and you are safe in the knowledge of God.