Creator, Father, King #14

Do you know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of him who is perfect in knowledge?

THINK OF HISTORY’S SMARTEST people.

There’s Nicolaus Copernicus, the sixteenth-century astronomer whose ideas about a heliocentric universe were so radical for his era that one of his related books was banned by the Catholic church for centuries after his death. There’s George Washington Carver, whose inventions and brilliance in agriculture helped revolutionize the industry in the early 1900s. There’s Katherine Johnson, whose mathematical genius helped NASA achieve America’s first human spaceflight in 1961. And who can forget Albert Einstein, the eccentric-looking physicist who is most famous for his equation E = mc2 and his theory of relativity?

Yet, relatively speaking (no pun intended, Big Al), all these brainiacs look like preschoolers with counting blocks compared to God. That’s because God is omniscient.

What’s It Mean?

Omniscient means “all-knowing.” God knows everything. Let that sink in for a moment.

God . . . knows . . . everything.

EVERYTHING.

The Lord God Almighty created the universe, so there’s nothing in the entire cosmos that is beyond his knowledge or understanding. Whatever knowledge humans have acquired—all the great discoveries of mathematics, physics, medicine, technology, and so on over the centuries—God has always known and ordained.

Unlike humans, God doesn’t have to attain knowledge. He has eternally known all things. And his memory doesn’t fade over time.

But here’s a critical point to understand: God is not simply a repository of endless facts, like a gigantic computer or an endless encyclopedia. There are some really smart people out there who are human and make terrible mistakes.

But God—in his infinite, holy knowledge and wisdom—always does what is best according to his perfect will. It’s why the apostle Paul exclaims with delight in Romans 11:33, “Oh, how great are God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways!”

Now What?

The next time you excel in school, praise the omniscient God who owns all knowledge and wisdom!

Did You Know?

No one fully knows God, right? Well, no—except for God himself. Because we are finite, we cannot know everything about ourselves, let alone God. But he possesses an eternal self-knowledge. This is what 1 Corinthians 2:10-11 alludes to. Mind-boggling!