Category: theology

God sees and knows everything. The theological term for this is “omniscience”. Whatever your circumstance, God sees you. Not only does He know all knowledge and theory from an academic vantage point, He also knows all events as they occur. He is up to speed on everything, from the hatching of worms into butterflies to the reproduction of protoplasm to the machinations of wicked conspiracies among Mankind.

When a child knows that his mother or father or grandparents are watching, he feels safe. In some sense, the child feels accountable and will guard his behavior for fear of punishment—or, more importantly, fear of disappointing the adults who love him. We have that same comfort in knowing that God sees us and everything in our universe.

From the bad to the good, God is there. He is not limited by distance or spectrums of light. There are no obstacles that can obstruct His omniscient vision. Even your thoughts He knows. If no one in this world understands you, rest assured that God the Omniscient does know and understand you perfectly.

He understands the people you work with and struggle against. He knows all about the people who fight against you—He knows their excuses, their stories, and whatever-in-the-world they may be thinking that drives them to do whatever-in-the-world they do. You don’t know these things, but that’s okay because Someone does and He is Good.

God is not blind or incapable. He doesn’t struggle to read your letters. He doesn’t play favorites because we are each His favorite equally. He sends no one to Eternal Hell without knowing all about them nor does He forgive anyone and welcome them into Eternal Bliss without knowing every bad thing they ever did.

When we don’t know what to do, we can call on Him. Pray for wisdom or insight. Pray for God to help you understand or lead you to the information you so badly need. The tasks of tomorrow and today are much easier to bear when we know that the light of His Vision shines down on us and we can always ask for suggestion and guidance from the God Who sees and knows everything.

God is all-powerful. The theological term for this is “omnipotent”. Nothing is stronger than Him. Not even your rage or anger can dent Him. No insult can provoke His heart snap out of impatience.

Not only does God have more strength than then entire universe, He has infinite emotional self-control. Even the universe itself is no fair measure of His strength; all the galaxies combined are nothing compared to His brute strength. He could whisk them away in an instant. And, that means that whatever obstacle course you face, He can help you through. He is gentle.

His strength is not moderate or intermediate, where He struggles not to crush small things. From His great strength, He can be infinitely tender and gentle. God is the epitome of the Gentle Giant—a virtue that also originated in His imagination.

If you struggle with gentleness, ponder God’s nature. In kung fu training, we learn that we don’t need to try so hard when we have enough strength for the task. Pushing and pushing, forcing and prying—these are for people who lack strength. God does not do these things. He does not pound or smack. God is the Great Thug who never needs to pick a fight. When He walks in the room, everyone behaves themselves.

God also reveals the nature of His omnipotence in the thug at the pub, except God is much gentler and much stronger. His power is not only in brute force, but also electrical. The sun keeps its strength because of Him. Lightning continuously arcs from His Throne. For God, electrical and brute power are one in the same. Just as much is true for His political and social power. Jesus demonstrated remarkable “people power” in his arguments with the Pharisees. Even then, He does not use His power for everything. At times, He uses His Spirit to guide and lead us.

Jesus told his disciples that they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon them after they would wait. God’s power makes its way into our lives when we wait on Him. We cannot muster enough of anything to even compare with the infinite power from God Almighty.

God transcends time. The theological terms for this are “infinite” and “eternal”, that God existed in Eternity Past and will always exist in Eternity Future.

When God tells us about the future, He neither guesses nor grants full disclosure. God’s foretold prophecies never spell out how all events will occur; they prepare us for the time when they will occur—to remind us that God knew it all along from the Beginning.

Time is a thing God looks at like a piece of paper. How specifically the time continuum works is not so important a question as the fact that God even holds Time in His hands.

In some ways, history unfolds so as to explain God’s methods as well as our own choices. Our childhood shows our youth, innocence, and honestly. Our adult years show our maturity, skill, and strength. Our old age shows our wisdom, insight, and experience. From God’s perspective in Eternity, we exist as all the same to Him just as He has all of the same in Himself. Those stages of life express parts of God’s character.

God’s eternal nature is connected to His infinite nature; they are arguably one in the same. When Jesus suffered on the Cross, because he was the Word of God in the flesh, all of God suffered. Because God is eternal, His suffering had eternal qualities, both past and future. Because God is infinite, His suffering was infinite in size and severity. So, because God exists beyond all Time and Space, those few hours on the Cross were more than an Eternity where God is concerned. God’s eternal nature is one more reason why Jesus’s work at the Cross is sufficient to cover all sin for all people for always and always.

The fact of God’s presence throughout all time explains His perspective, why He says many things He says, why He knows many things He knows, and why He does many things He does. But, this also brings us some comfort. Whatever situation we find ourselves in, it didn’t surprise God.  Through joy and sorrow, consider every moment of life through the eyes of the God who already saw everything before the Beginning.

Any of our own wisdom found its origin in God. All wisdom flows from Him—whether the wisdom we gain by seeking or the wisdom we gain with age and hard knocks.

God’s wisdom is not merely a kind of “cheating” based on His knowledge of everything. If God were to take a test He would pass by mere virtue of knowing the answer key. Having all academic knowledge would not necessarily mean that God would pass the test because most of our tests expect the wrong answers because our incomplete knowledge of science is flawed in light of His perfection. But, none of God’s vast knowledge relates to His separate nature of being infinitely and eternally wise.

Even without being the epitome of a living encyclopedia, God would know how to handle any and every situation. God could defeat the devil even without being all powerful or all knowing because He still possesses the wisdom of how to handle situations correctly.

God’s pure wisdom was demonstrated in Jesus’s early life. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. He had to learn to speak and walk, yet through his life he pursued and gained an enormous collection of “nuggets of wisdom” because he was born merely with the infinite, God-sized love for wisdom itself. In this sense, Jesus was the wisest “old soul” there ever was or will be.

Jesus was born with the eternal and perfect essence of wisdom, but the actual “nuggets” of wise thinking he thus gained as he grew up. God demonstrates His wisdom perfectly through His Son, Christ Jesus of Nazareth.

In Jesus’s adulthood, he knew how to answer the Pharisees and scribes because his perfect pursuit of wisdom from childhood had given him the understanding so that he knew what to say, even when he did not have the greater position of authority over the leaders who confronted him.

Jesus shared this wisdom in his teaching, advising us on relationships and confrontation with authority. Likewise, God teaches us wisdom throughout the Bible. Solomon asked God for wisdom and God granted it to him. You too can receive wisdom. All you need to do is ask from the infinitely wise God.

God is more than the Creator of all things; He is the inventor. He imagined everything even before He created it. He is infinitely imaginative.

God’s ideas and methods are even more incomprehensible than the incomprehensible nature that He created us in.

Some things God will not explain to us simply because it’s not possible for us to understand. Other things we would easily understand, but God chooses not to tell us for good reason—and it is those reasons that we are incapable of understanding.

A father on the south side of Chicago told his eight year old son to get out of the street. The son defiantly asked him why. “I’m a forty year old man,” the dad answered. “If you can understand my thinking, what does that say about me?”

While we make our plans, God looks down from His higher viewpoint and sees many more things than we see. Our logistics and limitations are much smaller than the immensely bigger picture that God sees. While we may think we have everything worked out—for how we plan to do a thing or how a thing will happen—God already has a better idea.

Hopefully, with an ongoing prayer life in God, our plans will not attempt to outsmart or conflict with God. We certainly don’t need to consider something He might have overlooked. As we mature in God, our plans should try to align themselves with God’s plans. Most importantly in this, our plans must account for the fact that our plans will always remain incomplete by definition.

“Godly” planning will have enormous gaps that read “this is where God has to do something because I’m clueless”, but then we execute the parts of the plan that fall into our responsibility. The insight to know which parts are which comes with a lot of time, a lot of Bible study, a lot of prayer, and a lot of very exciting journeys with God.

The Bible itself being God’s Word will be above our own understanding and will teach higher ways and methods. Studying the Bible will help us to get less unaccustomed to the God Whose ways are higher than ours.

God is holy, which means that He is “separate”. We could say that “holiness” is a “separate kind of goodness” or “ultra-goodness”. When something “bad” happens, God does not feel threatened like a “good” person would. So, He hovers above the lesser problems of “good” and “evil”, patiently working the course of events according to His infinite wisdom and His higher ways.

God is as patient as He is because He is holy. Albeit, patience is part of the virtue of being holy.

God’s holiness—His “ultra-good, separate” nature—relates to every other attribute of His character. He is Most High because because holy and separate from all other things. Likewise, His wisdom and higher ways are, by definition, separate from our wisdom and ways. The same is true of His omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.

But, God’s holiness makes it a miracle that God is also “with us” as Emmanuel, Jesus Christ. Without being holy, Jesus could not be the Messiah who saves all people anymore than a sinking vessel could rescue drowning passengers. God must be separate and holy in order to save us and He must be ultra-good and holy to be in a position to bring us to after saving us.

Being holy makes God different from all others.

God commanded Israel to be holy just as He is holy. But, we are anything but holy. We are sinful and disobedient, quite inseparable from our fallen world. In some ways we can separate ourselves from the fallen world around us, but we cannot separate ourselves from the fallen nature of our temporary, physical bodies. So, for the remainder of this lifetime, holiness to us is more of a direction than a virtue we could actually obtain. We need to wake up and walk in the direction of holiness every day and we will never arrive.

This takes patience, which God has plenty of. God watches and still loves us. The fact that He is holy and above our problems allows Him to be patient; all the while our unholiness invites our need for Him to demonstrate His patience toward us. We can only ever be redeemed by a patient and holy God.