Editorial: "Thou God seest me"

Continuing our theme that basic Bible doctrine is important because it leads to a radically transformed life in practice, I want to think about the implications of the fact that God sees and knows all things.

No Secret Sins
Job knew this, and therefore, he commented, it was impossible that, e.g., he would lust after a woman, if he really believed (as he claimed he did) that God was omniscient (knowing everything). "Why then should I think upon a maid [as the friends implied he had done]?... doth not he [God] see my ways, and count all my steps?" (Job 31:4). Proverbs 5:20,21 make the same warning against being “ravished with a strange woman”, “For the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, and he pondereth all his goings”. Also in the context of sexual sin, David could say that his awareness of his sin was ‘ever before him’ (Ps. 51:3); and also that he sensed God ‘ever before him’ (Ps. 16:8). A sense of the real presence of God leads us to an awareness of our sins. In our struggles to achieve realistic self-examination, this sense of God’s presence can powerfully help us.

God had to remind Israel: "Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth?" (Jer. 23:24). The context is appealing to the people to quit their sins. We should labour to enter the Kingdom, because God knows absolutely every thought and action of ours and will ultimately judge them (Heb. 4:11-13). The Sermon on the Mount is really based around translating the knowledge that God sees and knows all things into practice. Our thoughts are equivalent to our actions; but often we think that the fact we are clever enough not to express them in action is somehow a lesser failure. And yet God understands our thought afar off. Realizing this will help us avoid the greatest danger in the religious life: to have an outward form of spirituality, when within we are dead. Brother Fred Barling commented: "What God loves is the man who is genuine through and through; in whom the " without" and the " within" are really one; whose dominant persuasion is, "Thou God seest me" ". Note how the Lord Jesus begins each of His letters to the ecclesias with the rubric: "I know…"; His omniscience of His people ought to motivate to appropriate behaviour. His criticisms of those ecclesias imply that they didn't appreciate the fact that He knew them and their ways. Hannah had reflected upon God's omniscience; and on this basis she tells Peninah not to be proud and not to use hard words against her, exactly because of this: "Talk no more so exceeding proudly; let not hardness [AVmg.] come out of your mouth: for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed" here and now, because He sees and knows all things (1 Sam. 2:3). This ought to chase all pride and hard thinking from us.

The Hebrew language reflects certain realities about the nature of God's ways. The common Hebrew word for 'to see', especially when used about God's 'seeing', means also 'to provide'. Abraham comforted Isaac that "God will see for himself [AV 'provide'] the lamb" (Gen. 22:8 RVmg.); and thus the RVmg. interprets 'Jehovah-Jireh' as meaning 'the Lord will see, or provide' (Gen. 22:14). The same word is used when Saul asks his servants to "provide" him a man (1 Sam. 16:17). When Hagar said "Thou God seest me" (Gen. 16:13) she was expressing her gratitude for His provision for her. What this means in practice is that the fact God sees and knows all things means that He can and will therefore and thereby provide for us in the circumstances of life. Note that Prov. 28:27 and 29:7 RV speak of ‘hiding the eyes’ in the sense of not making provision for the need of others. God’s eyes are not hidden, and therefore He makes provision. Dt. 2:7 speaks of how God ‘knew’ Israel’s journey through the wilderness, and therefore they “lacked nothing”. Struggling against materialism, the fear of tomorrow, the desire to hoard wealth, to deal with all the “What if…?” questions in our own strength… will be greatly empowered by believing that “Thou God seest me”, with all that requires of us.

Motivation For Repentance
We may wonder why a chapter like Ezekiel 27 is full of such minute descriptions of Tyre, all leading up to God’s pronunciation of judgment upon her. Surely the connection is in the fact that God’s detailed knowledge of our lives, surroundings, interactions etc. should lead us to repentance. Not only our knowledge of God, but also His knowledge of us, makes us responsible to His judgment. The fact God sees and knows all means that we might as well open our lives up before Him in prayer and meditation. Jeremiah "revealed my cause" before the Lord because he knew that God "triest the reins and the heart" (Jer. 11:20). This may be why men like Jeremiah were somewhat 'rough' with God; whatever they felt about God, they told Him. They so realized that God knew their thoughts....there was and is no point in saying fine words to God in prayer, whilst feeling harder about Him in ones heart. The Psalmists talk to God in a far 'rougher' way than we do. They pour out their feelings, their anger and frustration with their enemies, their inability to understand how God is working… and they let it all hang down, told it as it was. They seem to have no reserve with God; they talk to Him as if He is their friend and acquaintance. David pleads with God to 'avenge my cause' (Ps. 35:23), he protests how he is in the right and how he longs for God to judge him. And so do the prophets, in the interjections they sometimes make in commentary on the prophecy they have just uttered. The emotion which David often seems to have felt was "Damn these people!", but he pours this out to God and asks Him to damn them. We need to take these feelings, absolutely as they are, with no rough edges smoothed off them…to God Himself. Pour them all out in prayer and leave Him to resolve the matter. In passing, this fits in with the conclusions of modern psychiatry- that we can't eliminate our feelings, so we must express them in an appropriate way. This latter option is how I understand the imprecatory Psalms.

We must ask whether our prayers are of this quality, or whether we have slipped into the mire of mediocrity, the same standard phrases, the same old words and themes… and even worse, could it be that we perceive that God only sees and hears the words we say to Him in formal prayer, and disregards our other feelings and thoughts? As He sees and knows all things, let us therefore pour out all that is within us before Him. And we will find it wonderfully therapeutic when struggling against anger and hurt. If God really does see and know all things, then He surely hears prayer. We raise our eyebrows when we read David’s desperate prayer: “Be not thou deaf unto me” (Ps. 28:1 RV). He who made the ear shall surely hear. God of course isn’t deaf - and just as surely and obviously, He will likewise hear prayer.

Our Words
Paul twice assures his readers that he speaks the truth because he is speaking in the sight / presence of God (2 Cor. 2:17; 12:19). The fact God is everywhere present through His Spirit, that He exists, should lead us at the very least to be truthful. In the day of judgment, a condemned Israel will know that God heard their every word; but if we accept that fact now then we will be influenced in our words now. And by our words we will be justified (Ez. 35:12). Reflection upon the omniscience of God leads us to marvel at His sensitivity to human behaviour - not just our words. He noticed even the body language of the women in Is. 3:16 - and condemned them for the way they walked. This is how closely He observes human behaviour.

Because God sees and knows absolutely all, we must recognize that He realizes the unspoken implications of our words. Job's words of repentance of Job 40:5 are seen by God as Job effectively condemning God, because presumably they were said merely as a mask over Job's inner feelings that God had been unjust with him (Job 40:8). But when Job uses effectively the same words in Job 42:6, God accepts them. God's ability to see to the core should therefore not only affect our words but elicit in us an honesty of heart behind the words which we use. The culture of “nice speak” in which we live is so dangerous - so long as one says the right words and types a politically correct form of them in emails and letters, everything’s OK. But God sees to the core that lies behind them, and reviews all our unspoken [or more secretly spoken] words. To act as if God doesn't see all our ways is to effectively deny His existence. Babylon acted as she did because she reasoned that " None seeth me...I am, and there is none else beside me" (Is. 47:10 RV). They appropriated the language of God to themselves, they played God in that they thought their ways were unseen by any higher power. And we all have a terrible, frightening tendency to do this.

Trusting God's Judgment
In Zech. 3 we have a picture of Yahweh's court. God Himself weighs up human situations and gives a verdict. A figure called 'the devil', the accuser, is there. Now I've reasoned elsewhere that there is actually no personal being called 'the devil'. Rather I suggest this figure is a vehicle for showing us that God is aware of all counter arguments against any of His decisions about us, and He takes them into account in making His judgments. His Angelic "eyes" range or [Heb.] "scour" through the whole world to gather information (Zech. 4:10). They “ponder” our hearts, right now, as we read this (Prov. 5:21). Now of course God could simply decree what is right and be as it were automatically just. But He wishes us to understand that He does actually process each case, considering human objections to what He does and how He judges. Being God, He judges with the full knowledge of every possible reason and nuance and background factor. He considers the counter case. And so if e.g. someone is smitten with cancer, or your car won’t start, or you lose your job - He has considered all the counter arguments in that case. It’s not that God somehow forgot and left us to the whim of fortune; quite the opposite. We trust that God is the very essence of love, and means only our ultimate salvation in our latter end. He judges according to what I would call the ultimate algorithm, taking absolutely all possible futures and possible human moves into account. When you play chess against a computer, the program simply races ahead to consider all the millions of possible future outcomes of any move made, either by you or by the computer. God is infinitely above that, but it's perhaps a helpful analogy. Accepting this empowers us to accept God's decisions- even though in His love, some of those decisions are open to amendment by human prayer. It all leads us to reflect how we simply cannot ultimately judge- for we know and perceive so little of the myriad factors behind the behaviour of other humans. And yet the Zechariah 3 vision shows us Joshua the High Priest admitted to that Divine Council, as if God in His grace is willing to enter into a kind of power-sharing with His people, considering their viewpoints and situations, just as He was willing to listen to men like Abraham and Moses in amending His decisions e.g. about Sodom and Israel.

God In Search Of Man
There is a mutuality between God and ourselves when it comes to His ‘seeing’ of us. Hagar called God the One who saw her because she had seen the back parts of God (Gen. 16:13 - “looked after Him who sees me” s.w. Ex. 33:23 about Moses seeing the back parts of the Angel). Hagar understood that our ‘seeing’ of God is His ‘seeing’ of us. She coined a Name for God: “You, the God who sees [Heb. ‘stares at’] me”, exactly because “I have even here [in the remote desert] seen the back parts of Him who sees me” (Gen. 16:13). She knew God saw her, because she saw Him staring at her. This may sound very laboured and obvious- but insofar as we have sensed God looking at our lives, perceiving that life is lived in His presence, we ‘see’ God. And our seeing / perception of God is also in a way how He ‘sees’ / perceives us.

Especially in our reflection upon the cross of Jesus, the thoughts of our hearts are “revealed”. As Simeon held the baby Jesus in his arms, he saw in that beautiful little boy something terrible; for he looked ahead to how His soul would one day be pierced in crucifixion, “that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed" (Lk. 2:35). In the piercing of the Son of God, the thoughts of hearts would be revealed. But the question arises: revealed to whom? Could it not be that the cross is used by the Father and Son to know the minds of men? They see in our response to it the real you and the real me. “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts" (Prov. 20:27); our self-examination is what reveals us to the Lord. What we think about at the memorial meeting, as we are faced with the memory of the crucified Saviour, is therefore an epitome of what we really are. If all we are thinking of is the taste of the wine, the cover over the bread, the music, what we didn’t agree with in the exhortation, all the external things of our Christianity; or if we are sitting there taking bread and wine as a conscience salver, doing our little religious ritual to make us feel psychologically safe - then we simply don’t know Him. We are surface level believers only. And this is the message we give Him. Our spirit / attitude is the candle of the Lord, with which He searches us. Our thoughts when confronted by the cross reveal us to Him who died on it. Likewise Joseph (one of the most detailed types of the Lord) knew / discerned his brethren by his cup (Gen. 44:5). 1 Cor. 11:31,32 further suggest that our self-judgment at the breaking of bread is in fact the Lord’s judgment of us: “If we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord". We expect Paul to say: ‘But when we judged ourselves, we are chastened...’. But he doesn’t; our judgment is what reveals us to the Lord, and is therefore the basis of His judgment of us. Even if we flunk conscious self-examination from an underlying disbelief that we will attain the Kingdom, then this of itself reveals our hearts to Him.
This connection between the breaking of bread and God’s judgment of us is in fact a continuation of an Old Testament theme. Three times a year, the Israelite had to ‘go up’ to present himself before the Lord at the feasts (Dt. 16:16). He was to ‘appear’ there - a Hebrew word elsewhere translated approve, discern, gaze upon, take heed, look upon oneself, perceive, shew oneself. His very presence before the Lord would have this effect: he would be revealed openly to God, and he would see himself as he was. This was the intention; and yet Yahweh went on to warn them not to appear before Him “empty", vainly, ‘to no effect’. Behold the intense relevance to our appearing before the Lord at our Passover: we can so easily present ourselves there ‘to no effect’, when the intention is that we should be manifesting ourselves to ourselves and to God. The familiar order of service, the well known hymns, the presence of familiar and often family faces...these factors (not wrong in themselves) can all tempt us to ‘appear’ there to no effect.

Joseph’s cup of divination pointed forward to how the Lord Jesus would use His cup to know us. The Hebrew for “divineth" means literally ‘to make trial’; the brothers’ taking of the cup was their trial / judgment. Thus we drink either blessing or condemnation to ourselves by taking the cup. The word used by the Septuagint for “divineth" in Gen. 44:2,5 occurs in the N.T. account of the breaking of bread service: ‘everyone should examine himself, and then eat the bread and drink from the cup’ (1 Cor. 11:28). The Lord examines us, as we examine ourselves. He searches us through our own self-examination. He knows all things, but there may still be methods that He uses to gather that information. Our hearts are revealed to God through our own self-examination. What is He seeing in us?

Duncan Heaster