Sermon Tone Analysis

We have been talking about God.

Well, just this point from our statement of faith about God:

/We believe in the one true and living God, eternally existing in three distinct persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

That the triune God is the Creator, the Sustainer, and Ruler of all Creation, but it is prior to, and distinct from the Creation/.

We dealt with the existence of God and the mystery of the Trinity last week.

Today I want to look the second sentence.

How does God reveal Himself to us? We’ve been talking the last two weeks about having an accurate view of God.

Pastor Joshua Harris in his book /Dug Down Deep/ writes the following observation about why we need to see God clearly for who He is:

I knew a girl who used to think the stars were tiny specks of light just over her head.

I'm not kidding.

And she wasn't in grade school when she believed this.

She was in college.

She was a really sweet, kind, redhead who spoke almost perfect Spanish.

She was intelligent in many ways.

But one day in a conversation she mentioned that she had just learned that stars in the night sky were actually really far away.

I asked her what she meant.

She said, "You know, they're not just right up there.

They're not just tiny dots.

They're really far away."

I was incredulous.

“What did you think they were before?"

I asked.

"I thought they were, you know, just right up above us.”

If you were to ask me why it matters that we study the doctrine of God, I'd say for the same reason that it's worth knowing that stars are not tiny pinpricks of light just above our heads.

When we know the truth about God, it fills us with wonder.

If we fail to understand his true character, we'll never be amazed by him.

We'll never feel small as we stare up at him.

We'll never worship him as we ought.

We'll never run to him for refuge or realize the great love he's shown in the measureless distance he bridged to rescue us.[1]

What amazes you?

Someone once said, “Life is what makes you come alive.”

What makes you come alive?

I mean, what really makes you stand in awe?

Is it a celebrity?

Is it the latest gadget?

Is it a person?

Is it your sports team?

Is it traveling to exotic locations?

What really takes your breath away?

David in Psalm 139 is blown away.

He is amazed at some things he has come to know about God.

So I want to go over three truths about God from Psalm 139 that should leave us with what I shall call, “holy wonder.”

Take note of this:

*I.   **God is OMNISCIENT: He knows me (vv.1-6)*

The word “omniscient” means all-knowing.

God fully knows Himself (1 Cor.

2:10-11).

He knows all things that exist and all things that happen.

He knows all things past, present and future.

He also knows all things that are possible.

Wayne Grudem writes, “If God fully knows himself, he knows everything he is able to do, which includes all things that are possible.

This fact is indeed amazing.

God has made an incredibly complex and varied universe.

But there are thousands upon thousands of other variations or kinds of things that God could have created but did not.

God’s infinite knowledge includes detailed knowledge of what each of those other possible creations would have been like and what would have happened in each of them!”[2]

Now it is one thing to know this truth, but another for it to wash over us in fresh power.

God simply does not want us to analyze Him, but to adore Him.

Here David seems to come to the Temple, in front of God to vindicate him.

People have charged him with unjust things.

He wants God to be God and act justly.

First David acknowledges that God knows him.

The knowledge of God is relational.

Look at how David personalizes this truth in the first six verses.

Notice the words “know” or “known” or “knowledge” just in these initial verses.

He says in Ps. 139:1 essentially that “God knows me so well, He knows /everything I do/.”

Notice how personal David is.

He doesn’t just say, “LORD you have searched all things and know all things.”

Or even, “LORD, you know /about/ me.”

He says, “You know me!”

So the word “know” here is not a theoretical knowledge, but an intimate, relational knowledge (like Adam “knew” Eve (Gen.

4:1)).

The word “searched” was used for “digging, excavating, spying out and exploring a land.”[3]

It can mean to “to examine with pain and care.”[4]

Roy Clements says that David’s description of God is like some “master-detective who snoops … into every detail of his existence, armed with x-ray cameras and laser probes.[5]

God, like a careful detective, has carefully examined me and knows me inside and out.

Now it is not that God is ignorant of us and so has to search us, but as Spurgeon says, “…the Lord knows us as thoroughly as if he had examined us minutely.”[6]

In fact, we get more detail on how well God knows him.

David says, “You know when I sit down and when I rise up.”

In other words, this includes all of life’s activities, including my sitting and my standing.

So all activity and inactivity is known by God; whether I am sitting down to relax or standing up to engage in life’s activities.

As Sam Storms translates, "My most common and casual acts, my most necessary and trivial movements, are all seen by thee.

Nothing escapes thine eye!"[7] God knows everything I do.

Then he says, “God knows me so well, He knows /everything I think.”/

Storms adds, “Indeed, God knows every mental impulse that governs and regulates such outward behavior…Every emotion, feeling, idea, thought, conception, resolve, aim, doubt, motive, perplexity, and anxious moment is exposed before God like an open book.”[8]

When he says God discerns my thoughts from afar, it doesn’t mean God, though He is high above in Heaven, can still see my thoughts.

Rather, as Ray Ortlund says, “Long before any impulse wells up from within David's psyche, long before David himself knows what his next mood or feeling will be, long before he knows where his train of thought will eventually lead, God perceives it all.”[9]

Sometimes we might cherish sinful thoughts, which we never end up saying.

But even if we never end up saying it, God has heard it already.

God knows everything I think.

God knows everything I do.

Next he says, “God knows me so well, /He/ knows /everywhere I go./”

Again David says here that the path that he takes from the moment he gets up to the moment he lies down at night and everything in between, God knows “all my ways.”

Matthew Henry adds, “He knows what rule we walk by, what end we walk towards, what company we walk with.”[10]

Not only does God know everything I do, every though I thin and every place I go, David says in Ps. 139:4, “God knows me so well, He knows /everything I say/.”

Actually the text says, even before I say it!

Notice the word “altogether.”

This means God has “exhaustive and comprehensive knowledge of our words.”[11]

As we hear this about God’s omniscience, we might be uneasy.

No human knows us like this.

In fact, we try hard to make sure people do not know everything about us by creating an image of us that people can know and love.

Asians are really good at this.

We try hard to make sure people don’t know us as we truly are.