Knowing the God Who Knows You - Part A

Imagine knowing somebody who knows everything about you. Now imagine somebody who knows everything about you and loves you anyway.

That's what we're dealing with when we deal with the knowledge of God. Some missions can be inspiring rather than intimidating to you. But before we begin, we want to invite you to be a part of a life changing journey. This is Pastor Skip and I want to let you know that our 2022 trip to Israel is full speed ahead. Israel is now open.

The trip is safe and you can still register. We will be touring May 4th through the 15th and this is such a beautiful time of the year to be in Israel. You're going to enjoy the Sea of Galilee where Jesus spent so much of his time.

We'll stop at Mount Carmel and Megiddo. Then I look forward to walking with you through the gorgeous port of Caesarea. We'll baptize people in the Jordan River. We'll tour Masada and we'll even float in the Dead Sea. Then the High Line up to Jerusalem where there is so much to see and do. Finally, we will enjoy a powerful time of worship as we take communion in the Garden Tomb.

Those are just the highlights. There is so much more on this tour and Lenny and I hope you will make plans now to see Israel with us on this trip. Here's more information.

Okay, we're in Psalm 139 as we join Skip Heitzig for today's study. The world's store of knowledge is growing at an increasing rate of speed and we all have access to it. I could say something and you could quickly get your phone out and google it to see if what I am saying is accurate or not. And so it's possible to get knowledge instantaneously so much so that you don't even need to know anything anymore.

All you have to know is where to get the information. There's a funny story told about Albert Einstein that one of his colleagues asked for his telephone number. So Einstein took a telephone directory to look up his telephone number and his colleague said, you're kidding, right?

You don't even remember your own telephone number? To which the genius replied, why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book? You know, why should we know something when we can go to our phone or tablet or computer and instantaneously get the information? It's so readily available. I remember being a kid and in my house my parents had a set of encyclopedias and a couple dictionaries and I was that weird kid who liked to read the dictionary and I'd look up words and find out what they mean or I'd read an entry from the encyclopedia and I remember this little section of bookshelf and I think, man, I have such knowledge at my fingertips.

I can look it up right here. But I noticed that as the years went by that encyclopedia sets and dictionaries grew larger, thicker. There were more entries in them simply because we are learning more and because we learn more we make more at people's disposals. We make knowledge available. Today, we can fit, we can store more on a silicone chip than the entire contents of the famous ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt.

It had two buildings that housed between 200,000 and 700,000 volumes. We can fit more information than that on a single silicone chip. It is estimated that until the year 1900, human knowledge doubled every century. Every 100 years, cumulative human knowledge doubled. By the end of World War II, knowledge was doubling every 25 years. By 2013, knowledge was doubling every 12 months. Today, it is estimated that knowledge, human knowledge doubles every single day.

By the end of this year, by the end of 2020, knowledge will be doubling at the rate of every 12 hours. Now, on an individual level, somebody that has knowledge, a lot of knowledge can be intimidating, even annoying. You know, you're around that person, you bring up a subject and they know a lot about it. You bring up another subject, they know even more. It's like, of course, you're the know-it-all.

You know everything. It can be a little disconcerting to be around people like that. I imagine that for the disciples of Jesus, it felt a little bit like that when they were around Jesus, when they discovered, hey, this guy like knows everything. So, for example, when Philip found Nathanael and said, hey, we have discovered the one that Moses and the prophets said would come, Jesus of Nazareth, to which Nathanael said, Nazareth, can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip said, well, come check it out.

Come and see. So when Nathanael was approaching Jesus, Jesus spotted him and said, there's an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. Nathanael said, how do you know me? And Jesus said, even before you were under the fig tree, I saw you. At which Nathanael said, rabbi, truly, you are the son of God.

You are the king of Israel. Whatever was happening under that little fig tree must have been some private little prayer that he thought only God knows about, Jesus knew about. And he discovered, I'm dealing with somebody that has immense knowledge. Or there was the time when our Lord healed a paralyzed man and he said these words, he said, man, your sins are forgiven.

Be of good cheer. And the enemies of Jesus, the Pharisees, were thinking in their minds, this guy's blaspheming. Nobody can forgive sins except God. They were just thinking that. The Bible says, Jesus turned to them and knowing their thoughts, said, why are you thinking evil in your hearts?

We read that on a couple of occasions. Jesus actually knew what people were thinking. Imagine knowing somebody who knows everything about you.

Now imagine somebody who knows everything about you and loves you anyway. That's what we're dealing with when we deal with the knowledge of God. Sir Francis Bacon was the one who said, knowledge is power.

You probably heard that statement, knowledge is power. If that statement is true, then God is all powerful because God has all knowledge. We look at Psalm 139, we read the first six verses together, but you ought to know that this single Psalm penned by King David highlights not one but four different attributes of God. God's knowledge, God's presence, God's power, and God's holiness. Or as theologians like to rename these attributes, God's omniscience, his omnipresence, his omnipotence, and his impeccability. Leave it to a theologian to complicate things.

Make things harder to say. But Psalm 139 is not a lecture on theology. It's really the personal devotional meditation of a man in love with God and musing on these qualities of this great God. It's what David has come to know about God. And it's important because whatever we think about God governs what we think about everything else. What we know to be true about God, how we view him, determines how we view us, the world, what happens in the world.

As A.W. Tozer put it, what a person thinks about God is the most important thing about that person. So we discover what not only David thinks about God, but what the scripture declares God to be. So in these six verses, what I'm going to do with you is go through them and sort of drill down.

I like to squeeze every drop out of the lemon, get a lot out of it. So I'm going to be emphasizing different words in this text as we go along. Because what I noticed is four attributes or four aspects, four features of God's knowledge. And the first is that his knowledge is immeasurable.

Notice some of these descriptive words that David uses. O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down.

You are acquainted with all my ways. All of these words are used by David to describe a being that is omniscient, all knowing. Omniscient is a Latin term.

It comes from two words, omni, all, and sciencia, knowledge. Simply put, God is unlimited in what he knows. God by nature is without the need to learn anything.

He doesn't have to cram for an exam. He is the ultimate knower. God knows every field of knowledge more than any expert in that field. So God knows more about astronomy than the astronomer, more about biology than the best biologist, more about theology than the most advanced theologian, and more about the coronavirus than Dr. Fauci. God is an expert on everything. I remember a woman telling me, and I've heard this several times since in counseling sessions, women saying, I just don't understand men.

That's a common thing I've heard. I've also heard many men say, I'll never understand a woman. God understands both men and women, and God even understands teenagers. Now compare that with our knowledge, human knowledge, vastly different. Human knowledge is accumulated knowledge. It is the product of tedious learning, painstaking research, long experience. God's knowledge is immediate.

It is comprehensive and without deterioration. God doesn't have to research a subject. God doesn't have to string one logical premise on top of another to come up to a conclusion.

God never had to go to school. God never has to be informed about anything. Isaiah the prophet in chapter 40 said, who has understood the mind of the Lord or instructed him as his counselor? Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten him? Who taught him knowledge or showed him the path of understanding?

The answer is no one has. So that means that there are certain words that God never says. God never says, wow. God doesn't look at him and go, wow, like he's just been enlightened. God never goes, huh, like he's been informed or I never knew that. Elihu in Job chapter 37 called God him who is perfect in knowledge, perfect in knowledge. You can never tell God something he doesn't know.

The initials TMI don't apply to him. He has all the information and God never forgets stuff. Think of all the things we forget. You really pick up on this when you have young children and you send them to school. They could be third or fourth grade and they bring assignments home and they want your help. You are the adult. They're the third grader and you look at their assignment. You go, I don't remember that stuff.

It's been so long. So the first aspect of God's knowledge is it is immeasurable. He is omniscient.

He has total knowledge of everything, past, present and future. Now, the reason I'm underscoring this is because not everybody believes this. Not every so-called Christian believes this. There are many churches or people in churches that do not believe that God is all knowing. There is a doctrine called open theism, open theism or the doctrine of the limited knowledge of God. And it's the belief that God has made a universe in which the future is not entirely knowable even for God. So this particular group will say, God is learning new things every day as he's watching the universe unfolds. It's like, well, I didn't know that.

Well, that's nice to know that. And so God is in the process of growing and expanding and learning. It's called open theism. Well, that's what they say, but that is not a simple and plain reading of the text of Scripture. That would not make God omniscient, would it? That would make God omniscient or microniscient or partniscient when the Bible seems to reveal that God is omniscient. As John the Apostle put it plainly in 1 John 3 verse 20, God knows all things. So first aspect of God's knowledge, God's knowledge is immeasurable.

Second is that God's knowledge is instructional. Now I'm going to read a few of these verses with you and I'm going to emphasize the way it's written in the Hebrew text. In the Hebrew text, there are certain words that are emphasized or put in the emphatic position. And it is the word you, the pronoun for God here. O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

That's how it's written in the Hebrew. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. There's not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, you know it all together.

Now the reason it is emphasized in the Hebrew or put in the emphatic place is because David is saying you and no one else has this particular attribute. You are very unique in the fact that you know what nobody else knows. When I was a little kid, I swore that God was snitching on me because my mom seemed to know stuff that I thought, how could she know that? Like she knew where I was hiding. She just knew right where I was.

Or I would whisper something in the next room. I heard that. How is that possible? God must be telling her. No, only God has this particular attribute of all knowledge. And look at verse six, such knowledge or this unique knowledge that only you have is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain it.

It's unreachable. So in verse six, David is comparing himself to God. He's saying there's no way I could ever know what you know unless you reveal it to me. And that's what I mean by the knowledge of God is instructional because there are certain things known only to God that God has decided to reveal to us. It was Socrates who said knowledge is the only good and ignorance the only evil. Now if that statement were true, then God is supremely good and we're supremely not good. Because in comparison to God, we are very limited in what we know. But this section of scripture tells us about the God that we are dealing with. His knowledge is complete.

His knowledge is unlimited. And because his knowledge and awareness extends to all times, past, present and future as indicated here by David. It means that God knows what will happen just as much as he knows what has happened. I want you to understand that prophecy to God is just as easy as history. So for us, we look back on history because it's already happened. We go, well, that happened, that happened, that happened.

Here's the facts. To God, prophecy is just like history because he is all knowing the future is as clear to him as the past. And by the way, that is the basis of biblical prophecy. One fourth of your Bible is prophetic, speaks about future events. One fourth of it is prophecy. So it is God instructing us on the future. Here's God. He has all knowledge. We have very limited knowledge of God says, I'm going to let you in on what's going to happen in the future. That would never happen unless God instructed us. So for example, and I'll just give you three.

There are hundreds, thousands. God announced that King Cyrus would deliver the Jews and he is named in Isaiah chapter 45, Cyrus. That prediction is made 150 years before Cyrus was ever born. That's God using his unlimited knowledge to instruct us on a future event. Daniel, in chapter two of Daniel and chapter seven of Daniel predicted the rise and fall of subsequent world governing empires from Babylon to Medo-Persia to the Greek empire to the Roman empire.

In Zechariah chapter nine, Zechariah predicts Jesus Christ the Messiah riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. So God is making the future known instructing us with prophecy even before the events occur. Anybody can predict the future. Weathermen do it all the time, but they're not always right. You see anybody can make a prediction, but to have those things fulfilled is quite another category, especially when you add details to your prediction. So if you, if you predict something and then you add detail and detail and detail, you eventually enter the realm of what is called compound probability. And if those things would ever take place, they become exponentially decreased in the probability of that. So for example, let's say I have in my pocket 10 pennies.

This is an example I always like to use. I have 10 pennies in my pocket, I really don't, but let's say I did and I marked them one through 10. And they're in my pocket and I say, I'm not going to look, but I'm going to reach in my pocket and I make the prediction that I'm going to select penny marked number one. Now, what are my odds? One out of 10 because there's 10 pennies, but if I pull it out and you clap and go, oh, it's a good trick.

You did it. One out of 10 chance and you got it, but it was good luck. But then I say, ladies and gentlemen, I'm now going to reach in my pocket and select penny marked number two. Now my odds are not one in 10 or one in nine, they decrease exponentially. Now it's one in 100 that I can do that.

And if I say, now I'm going to do number three, number four, and I say, I'm going to reach in and sequentially pick out all 10 pennies in order, my odds significantly decrease exponentially. So by the end of it, it's one in 10 billion that I could pull that off. Do you know that there are over 300 predictions about Jesus Christ written in the Old Testament? Where you would be born, what tribe you would be from, things about his family, things about his friends, about his accusers, betrayers, death, over 300 predictions in the Old Testament. It is estimated that in 100 billion years, there is no chance that those prophecies that Jesus fulfilled could ever be fulfilled.

There's not enough time without God. See, when you really look at it, you discover that biblical prophecy isn't just a good guess, because it always has multiple contingencies that cannot be known or cannot be controlled. That shows us, gives us proof that this Bible is of divine origin, not human origin. That's Skip Heitzig with his message, Knowing the God Who Knows You from his series 2020.

Now we want to tell you about a resource that will help you discover Jesus' plan for redemption through every page of scripture. Only half of American adults who call themselves Christian identify God as the basis of truth. That's what a recent study by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University found. And if that's the truth about truth among believers, it's more grim for unbelievers. What's your basis of truth?

Here's Skip Heitzig. So the word equals the scriptures equals doctrine equals truth. Truth. We are primarily people of the truth.

Daniel Chapter 10 calls the scripture the scripture of truth, because the scriptures tell us the truth about God, about us, about our condition, about our need. We want to send you to truth affirming resources by Pastor Skip to help you understand the nature of truth, so you can pursue God's truth and apply it in your own life. There's Skip's book, Bloodline, in his booklet, Why Truth Matters. Both resources are our gift to you when you give $35 or more today to help reach more people with this Bible teaching ministry.

Jesus said, everyone who is of the truth hears my voice. Call 800-922-1888 to give today and we'll send you Skip Heitzig's book, Bloodline, plus his booklet, Why Truth Matters, as our way of saying thanks for your support or visit connectwithskip.com slash offer. Now, real quick, we want to invite you to follow Skip on social media to get important updates and biblical encouragement. Just follow Skip on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for all the latest from Skip and from this ministry. That's at Skip Heitzig, at Skip H-E-I-T-Z-I-G. Tune in tomorrow as Skip Heitzig shares how you can be comforted and encouraged by God's infinite knowledge. You don't want to miss that. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the cross and cast all burdens on his word. Make a connection, connection. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.