Knowing an Omniscient, Sovereign, Holy, and Good God

My understanding about God is miniscule compared with His Holy, infinite nature, but how very little I knew until I read the entire Word of God and got a better grasp of the context for many things. Reading the whole Bible gives you a better perception of both the rest of the Bible as well as the state of our current world.  Of course, you also have to be prayerful and honestly seeking the Lord as you read so that your own misconceptions don’t cloud your mind.

One of my absolute favorite Psalms is Psalm 139. Go read it because it’s awesome and you’ll know what I’m talking about in the rest of this post!  : )  Psalm 139 is a beautiful picture of how intimately God know you, every crevasse of your heart and mind, every thought and word – spoken and unspoken. He is perfectly omniscient – He knows more about you than you do!  The best part about it is that He is also Sovereign, Holy, and GOOD!  Because He is omniscient, He knows ALL things in the past, present and future; because He is Sovereign, He has power over every single thing in the past, present, and future; and because He is Holy and Good, we can have faith that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).  How awesome is that!?!

I struggled intensely for a long time in my life with severe depression, anger, bitterness, negativity, and many doubts about God’s love for me. I clung to Psalm 139 and memorized it and repeated it to remind myself that God does love me and He does know me.  I needed to hear that He “knit me together in my mother’s womb,” that His “works are wonderful” (meaning I was a wonderful work), and that “all the days ordained for me were written in [His] book.”  Verse 17 says “How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!  How vast is the sum of them!” Back when I first memorized Psalm 139, this was one of the verses in it that I both loved and felt uncomfortable by it. I certainly don’t feel like I know God well enough to know His thoughts, though I sure wish I did know what He thinks sometimes, I thought. Even though His Scriptures say exactly what God thinks about me, I guess I never knew His Truth well enough to feel secure about what God thought about me.

When you see the words:  God is _______, what word comes to your mind when you fill that blank with God’s number 1 attribute?  Like many people, I thought that God’s foremost attribute was Love; so, when I read things in the Bible and heard things in sermons and saw things happening in the world that made me question God’s love, my stomach lurched and my heart reeled out of hand. These things made me question my understanding of God, and rightly so!  I was failing to understand God’s number 1 attribute and God was trying to show me as I read the Bible throughout last year. : )    “God is Love” people chant and sing, but I wonder:  do they understand that God is first and foremost HOLY?  Yes, God is Love, but He is first and foremost HOLY!  We can’t enter into eternal life with God by simply “living a pretty good life,” and certainly not by living for ourselves instead of living for God.

“Well if God really loves me, then He should accept me as I am,” some people say as an excuse for some behavior or lifestyle that they don’t want to give up. 

No, that is an imperfect human perception of love; God MADE you, so He loves you for who you are (a beloved creation of God) but the problem is that we allow our pride and sinful nature keep us from becoming the servant of God that we were intended to be!  God doesn’t “accept” sinful behavior; rather, He loves you by giving you avenues (people, events and situations in your life) by which to turn to Him away from your sinful nature.  We can either choose to follow His guidance or not, but if we do set aside our pride and choose Him, we will be able to understand His Love on His terms, not on our imperfect terms.  It’s when we do this that we start to recognize all the ways He works to delight our hearts!

Now, after much more study of the Scriptures and of my Heavenly Father, I cherish His Word. I don’t use the word “cherish” very often because when I do use it, I want to maintain the full strength of the meaning. I cherish knowing God, and I feel incredibly honored that He is intent on revealing Himself to me in perfect, delightful ways that speak specifically to my heart! He Knows my heart (a thought which I used to cling to) and He wants ME to know HIS heart!  I knew the latter part in my head, but not in my heart. Now that I understand better, it is the most delightful thing in the world to be delighted in by my Creator!  It brings tears to my eyes every time I think about it. : )  How honored I am to hear some of the thoughts of God, and how precious they are to me!  It awes me and behooves me to remember how vast are the thoughts of God because I’m always hungry to continue being delighted by God’s thoughts! It helps keep my pride in check to remember how vast are the thoughts of God because He is Omniscient and Sovereign and Holy and Good, not me!

The way by which I eventually came to understand the above mentioned things was not by Psalm 139, however.  That was my encouragement Psalm – very important and much needed. : )   The way I came to understand was by reading Beth Moore’s book Discovering God’s Purpose for Your Life and by reading tons of verses and passages from His Living Word over the past year that pointed specifically to knowing God and understanding His Holiness.  These verses are among my favorites in the Bible, and they are about knowing our awesome God!  Be sure to read the context of these verses if you don’t already know it because it’s easier to understand if you have the whole picture!  I’ll start with my focus verse from my last post:

“What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ  and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” – Phil. 3:8-11

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”  -- Romans 12:2 

“We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.”
– 1 John 4:6-7

“You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.” – Jeremiah 29:13

“Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” – Psalm 46:10

“Then I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the LORD; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God, for they shall return to Me with their whole heart.” – Jeremiah 24:7

“Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the LORD: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.” – Hosea 6:3 (KJV)

“I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.  I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” – Ephesians 1:17-21

His Holiness, I came to better understand, is separate from my sin; if I am living in sin and not repenting of it, then I will not be able to discern His voice very well, if at all. For awhile, I viewed God like I would a difficult boss or a disciplinarian father:  sure, I knew He loved me, but He was strict, difficult to please, always disappointed in me, never really proud of me, and whose Holiness kept Him distant and aloof from me. [Tell me more about His love, please, because I just don’t see it much.] Oh, how little I understood!  How I wish I could remember every thought that brought me from that point to where I am now so that I could record it here, but I think some of the thought/heart changes occurred sub-consciously.

Now I know that God is not sitting up on His throne always shaking His head at everything I do wrong and never encouraging me; rather, He is intimately involved with every detail of my life, constantly moving in ways that will specifically reach my heart. Me…Letisha. And it gives me joy to know He does this with everyone else too.  It is sad to realize that we miss this beautiful relationship if we do not truly seek Him. I know now that He does not separate Himself from my sin out of arrogance or aloofness, but because of Holiness. And I certainly wouldn’t want God to not be Holy because that would mean I would not be able to rest or rely on the security of His perfection and goodness!  He never makes mistakes!  Ever. God said Moses in Exodus 3:14, “I Am Who I Am.” He is Light; light cannot be in the presence of darkness, or else darkness doesn’t fully exist anymore.  He cannot BE contrary to His nature!   

His Holiness must be separate from our sinfulness; praise God that He sent Jesus to save us from our sinful nature so that we can be With God!  When we acknowledge our sinful nature in our hearts, repent of our sinful nature and accept Jesus into our hearts by surrendering our lives to the Lord’s leading, we become empowered to resist temptation (though we still struggle) and have the promise of eternal life with Christ! 

I love the image of light and darkness. Before, it was like I was trying to live in mostly darkness with little bit of light shinning through. But I stayed in the darkness by choice; sometimes I would move a little further toward the light and other times I would back away from the light…all by choice. My ability to see wasn’t consistent because I wasn’t consistent with seeking the Lord. As I read more of God’s Word and truly allowed God to speak to my heart through His Word, the light got brighter and brighter so that other things around me became so much clearer!  However, it’s bittersweet being able to see more because it means that I see more things that grieve me; rather, I see things that grieve the Holy Spirit inside me, which I can assure you is the deepest kind of grief and the source of all grief. The Lord is constantly working on my heart in this area because He wants to show me the Hope that is in Him and that All things work toward His Glory! 

The man who did premarital counseling for Tom and me explained to me that my nature is melancholy, so I will have to struggle against that my whole life, but my nature is also very compassionate, so I can’t stand to see others in pain – emotional, physical, psychologically, or especially spiritually. Usually, people can tell and admit when they’re having hardships of the first three kinds, but so many cannot see that they’re also struggling spiritually. If you question them, they say defensively, “No, I believe in God and I have a relationship with Jesus…I’m a Christian,” but their lives and actions illustrate the opposite. (I used to be in this boat, so it’s easier to recognize now when I start walking away from God or when I see others not truly living what they claim to believe. But if I were to walk too far and too long away from the Lord, there would be a point where I’d become more blind to my sin.) Christianity is not just about saying your belief (or opinions) or going to church or singing in the choir or whatever. It’s about a living relationship – the BEST relationship you’ll ever have!

The Truth Project video series that we’ve been watching with our young adult Bible study group posed the perfect question in the first video to speak to the depths of my heart:   “Do you really believe that what you believe is really real?”  If I answered this question truthfully, oftentimes, my answer would have to be “no.”  If I did really believe that what I believe is really real, then I wouldn’t fear and doubt so much, I wouldn’t worry.  Instead, I would have real faith in God who Is Sovereign!  I pray that as I seek the Lord and come to know Him more and more through His Word, my faith will grow so that I become the servant of God that He intended me to be.  This is my purpose and my joy!  : )