I’ve been reading The Explicit Gospel by Matt Chandler, the Pastor of The Village Church in the Dallas, TX area, with Jared Wilson who blogs at The Gospel Coalition. To be accurate I picked it up awhile ago – started to read it and then put it down for awhile. I’ve taken it back up today and I was struck with this passage about the knowledge of God or the theological term for it – the omniscience of God.
It is unfathomable and Chandler paints a good picture of how much we can’t possibly know about what God knows.
God knows everything. He knows everything at the macro level. He knows the temperature at which certain stars burn. He knows the orbital lines of planets. He knows every mountain in every mountain range on this planet and others. He knows the depths of every ocean. He knows it at the macro level.
But he also knows it at the micro level. He knows every atom and ever molecule. He knows their positions, their locations, their functions. He sees and governs every instance of mitosis, which, in case you’ve been out of school for a while, is one cell becoming two cells. We have a God who knows everything at the macro level, but he also knows everything at the micro level.
In addition to the exhaustive depth of his knowledge is the exhaustive breadth of his knowledge. God is aware of every event that has ever occurred and will ever occur, and he knows completely how each event affects other events that create still more events that roll into other events and so on and so forth ad infinitum. From the velocity of every butterfly’s flapping wings at every second to the exact amount of magma to the microgram flowing out of every volcano above and under sea level, he spans it all simultaneously and precisely. If a tree falls in the woods when nobody’s there, does it make a sound? I don’t know, but God does.
He knows it all without any sticky notes or strings on his finger. He is holding all things together, seeing all things and knowing all things, all purely from the reality of his wanting it to be so. This is, at the very least, what it means to be God, (pg. 26-27).
We can’t even come close to totally grasping the depth and the breath of His knowledge and yet how many question Him?