“You have searched me, Lord, and You Know Me.
You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.” Psalm 139:1-6)
Perhaps the most frightening attribute of God is that He knows everything about us. Everything! He has “searched” our lives. We are all as an open book to him. There is nothing hidden from his penetrating eyes; day and night, darkness and light are all the same to him. There is no dark side of the moon to God. Because He is both omnipresent and omniscient, it obviously follows that nothing escapes his conscious knowledge about us. He observes even our ordinary activities (v. 2) and our innermost thoughts. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
Verse 3 tells us “Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely.” He actually sees the formation of the words in our tongues before we begin to speak them. That means that we are as transparent to him as an x-ray picture. We cannot deceive him in any way. He knows what we think, what we say at every moment. We cannot hide anything from him. He knows not only what we know about ourselves; but he knows us better than we know ourselves; and what we will not even admit to ourselves.
Furthermore, He is everywhere surrounding, protecting each one of us everyday. Verses 7-10,
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,even there your hand will guide me; your right hand will hold me fast.”
There is nowhere we can go but that God is not already there. He is everywhere present. On the remotest star the astronaut would find Him there ahead of him. God’s center is everywhere and his circumference is nowhere. He has no measure, no boundaries. He fills all inner and outer space. We could not escape him any more than we can escape our own shadow. We cannot hide from God. He is wherever we go. Like a road, he is always there before us.
The Apostle Paul put it this way: “For in Him we live, and move, and have our being“ (Acts 17:28). God’s very intimate and complete knowledge about us is what makes His salvation such a marvelous matter. “For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. BUT GOD commended his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6-8). Such love is as un-measureable as the stars, as immense as time and vaster than outer space itself.
And best of all, God loves us in spite of all our faults and failures. We are all ‘works in progress,’ He knows not only what we are but one day what we will become; “for we shall be like him and see Him as he is.”
“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”
The Best Is Yet To Be:
Pastor Bryant