This year we want to focus on who God is. Each month we will concentrate on a different attribute of God, and we’ll have one of our authors share what the attribute has taught her about Him. Plus you’ll find pretty free art downloads at the end of each post! We pray this series draws us closer to God as we meditate on who He is. Kelly Minter continues the series with some thoughts on what it means that God is omniscient.
The word omniscience means all knowing. Omni meaning all and science meaning knowledge. The word is not found anywhere in the Bible, but the truth of God being omniscient is revealed throughout its pages from Genesis to Revelation. Since the subject matter of God as all knowing is spectacularly broad, I want to focus on a special aspect of His knowledge that has been deeply meaningful to me. That is, His knowledge of our life’s path.
I was recently in the Book of Job looking up a prophecy regarding Christ. While flipping through its pages, I was reminded of a time in Job’s life where the road he’d taken—or the road he hadn’t chosen to take but was somehow plodding—was beyond his reason and understanding. Perhaps you can relate. I remember that overwhelmingly helpless feeling while in my mid-twenties and early thirties. I’d moved to Nashville after having signed a record deal. Tick the dreams-coming-true box. I’d no sooner unpacked my belongings from my 1987 Jeep Cherokee, which incidentally held pretty much all I owned, when my record company was bought and sold. I’d been dropped.
This day marked an approximate seven-year journey through a city called Nothing Here Makes Any Sense. My friends where I’d grown up in Virginia were getting married and running companies and having children and living in brick homes. I on the other hand was stringing odd jobs together to make my rent. I kept going down the music path, and I also wrote a book, but not much was turning over. I was lonely. Perhaps my worst angst was that because I couldn’t understand my path, I wasn’t sure where God was in my life. Was He even there?
In other words, something as familiar as my own life, and God’s place in it, was beyond my knowledge.
In the midst of Job’s unspeakable suffering, not only could he not make sense of things, but for a time God seemed to have fled. Whether Job traveled east or changed course west or decided to try a different approach altogether and seek Him in the north or throw his hands up and venture south, it seemed that God was nowhere to be found. But then Job utters some of the most beautiful and relieving words for anyone who can’t make sense of life’s trajectory. “Yet he knows the way I have taken” (Job 23:10).
He knows our way. He knows our way. The omniscient God is wholly and completely familiar with the way we take.
This might be terrifying if the God who held this all-surpassing knowledge was not a God of love. But we know from John’s writing in particular that God is love. Since God’s very essence is love, and since He sent His Son Jesus to save us, when we don’t know our own way we can rest in the immutable truth that our path is not a mystery to Him. No bend has surprised Him. When the lantern you’ve lit is only shining mere feet ahead of you, when your reason for why what is happening is crumbling, when the fog is thick and you’re not even sure if the steps you’re taking are pointed toward the original destination, He is not confused. His perfect knowledge is leading you even where your knowledge fails. Above all, God’s omniscience of our way means we are never lost from Him.
Kelly Minter is an author, speaker, songwriter, and singer. She is passionate about women discovering Jesus Christ through the pages of Scripture. So whether it’s through a song, study, or spoken word, Kelly’s desire is to authentically express Christ to the women of this generation. In a culture where so many are hurting and broken, she loves to share about the healing and strength of Christ through the Bible’s truth. Kelly writes extensively and speaks and leads worship at women’s conferences, retreats, and events.
We have provided free art for you to help you keep God’s omniscience in your focus this month. Just click on the links below to download. We’d love to know what God is teaching you this year—share on social media with the hashtag #GodIs2017.
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