Jn. 2:24 But Jesus, on His part, was not entrusting Himself to them, because He knew all people, 25 and because He did not need anyone to testify about mankind, for He Himself knew what was in mankind.
Rev. 2:23 And … all the churches will know that I am He who searches the minds and hearts; and I will give to each one of you according to your deeds.
“If God knows everything, why does He have to search to find anything out?”
This question is among the greatest questions we humans have about God. It is so great because it underlies the entirety of the human/divine drama. On one hand, the Creator must know everything, for that is the only way He could both design and maintain control of the universal story. As it is written, “I make known the end from the beginning” (Isa. 46:10).
Yet the universal story only has an enduring plot because, to interface with the generations, the Creator operates from an otherwise unfathomable position of Self-withheld knowledge. In and from that position, God does not know everything about men or what is in them. He functions from a stance of inquiry, searching and discovery. He has to ask men questions, and then make determinations based on the unknown forthcoming responses.
This searching element starts from the beginning when God, as if a man, asks the first man, “Where are you?” It proceeds throughout the script to the Flood when God has to “decide” that enough is enough to destroy all mankind— thence to Sodom to personally “find out” if their sin is really as bad as the heavenly report—and so on through Jesus’ dealings with Israel to “see if” the nation will bear fruit after one more year, and finally to discover what is in the churches in order to give to every one of us according to our doings.
Complicating the scenario is that God holds forth from both these mental positions at the same time. As the omniscient One He knows what is going to happen in every situation, while as the searching One He does not know until it does happen. And we see this in the very Son of God per our opening verses. We observe a patchwork of encounters where Jesus already knows the lay of a thing for what it is and will be (“before this night is out you will deny me three times”), yet elsewise He doesn’t know and has to ask probing questions (“how long has this been happening to him?”).
Quite a challenge to grasp, given that we ourselves have been exhorted to “have the Mind of Christ”! So then, we ask, how is such a divine dual-mindedness possible? And then, how should it become possible for us?
How Can God Know and Not Know All Things?
The first question is, how can such duality exist in the mind of God? How can He know everything, yet not?
One joke about old age is that you no longer need anyone else to “hide your Easter eggs” for you. You can hide them on yourself and then never find them! That is the case with senility, no?
But senility is not the case with God. In the same way as Paul tells us that what is foolish to man is wisdom with God, likewise, what is senility with man is actually multi-dimensional mental capability with God. He can sovereignly hide what He cannot sovereignly find.
Man only has a single dimensional mind. He either knows something or He doesn’t. He can’t be knowledgeable and ignorant of the same thing at the same time. Further, he can only think in one direction at a time, not more. And if he tries to operate out of a two-directional mind, he is called double-minded, even schizoid!
Not so with God. God is not strapped to a single-dimensional mind. The eternal divine Mind functions from unlimited dimensionality. Where our mind is single-chambered, His is multi-chambered (perhaps not unlike how a giraffe has “four stomachs”!).
God thus has capacity to know and not know the same thing at the same time, without contradiction. He has the ability to remember and forget the same thing at the same time. (This is why He can truly put our sins into the sea of permanent forgetfulness, yet if we fail to forgive others, He has the power at the judgment to resurrect their memory against us from that “dead sea.”)
Perhaps the greatest evidence of God’s multi-dimensional Mentality is in the inexhaustible layers of meaning our spirits receive from the scriptures. We come to them again and again which, though old to us, always produce yet another new dimension of revealed meaning. This is especially true of the multiple meanings, applications and fulfilments of the same prophetic scriptures across the ages.
Why Would God Submit Himself to Knowing and Not Knowing All Things?
The next question from all this becomes, to what purpose is this arrangement? Why would God sovereignly make a universe in which He knows the end from the beginning at every turn, and yet to sustain a relationship to that creation through a universal story, He must Self-limit His own knowledge, so as to function out of limited and unlimited knowledge at the same time?
There are deeper answers to this question than this article is designed to cover. But there is one overarching answer in principle that must nevertheless be given. It is that the Omniscient Godhead’s willingness to extend and exercise Their simultaneous capacity for Self-limited knowledge through an ages-long process of inquiry, searching and probing of a finite mankind is not centered in humanity. It is centered in Themself—more specifically, it is centered in Christ.
We once again state as we already have elsewhere that Christ, not man, or redeemed man, is the center of all divine Purpose. We are specifically told that Christ was “made perfect” as a result of His sufferings through subjection to the restricted conditions of mankind. There was a reason from eternity to bring forth Jesus Christ in time to display the fullness of the Godhead through a perfectional process to be accomplished through six millenniums of interface with a fallen uni-dimensional human mentality.
That fullness included the Christ’s capacity to simultaneously display both Omniscience and Self-limited knowledge subject to growth through search and discovery over the human fate. Happily, we learn that Jesus indeed succeeded at fulfilling that eternal challenge set up from before the foundation of the world!
How Does Christ’s Transcendent Mental Capacity Apply to Me?
As pertains to us, the more important question is not, how was this possible with God or why would Christ do this? It is rather, how does Christ’s display of the multi-chambered eternal mind apply to our call to display the Mind of Christ?
To be sure, as sons adopted in part from creation, though reborn of the Father’s eternal seed, we can and never will share in possessing divine omniscience. It is heresy to believe otherwise. We are not and never will be “God.”
But at the same time, in having the perfected Mind of Christ increasingly woven into us, the Father wills to impart more and more of His capacity for knowing “all things” to us from His side of the veil. That impartation can only come by means of our own motivation to probe and search out the things of God.
What that means is that, in subjecting Himself to the Self-limited knowing that required Him to search out our hearts, Jesus set for us a pattern for reciprocally searching out the eternal things of the Father. In surrendering all-omniscience to become a Searcher of men, Christ re-birthed us to become searchers of God so that we might enter evermore into revelation associated with His omniscience. He wants to make us partakers of the divine nature in this way, moving us from uni-dimensional to multi-dimension mentality after Christ’s image.
The Father has more keys than we could ever count to unlocking the secrets of the kingdom—keys to impart to us descended from His omniscience. There are more and more spheres of understanding pertaining to which He wants us to “know all things” beyond our present single-track capacity. That very pattern was exemplified in Jesus’ ministry to His disciples:
“To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God—I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.” Lk. 8:10—Jn. 15:15
These mysteries are not about spiritual knowledge, per se, but about Life itself. They are revelation birthed from Life. They do not reinforce our uni-track perceptions about God as to build our pride, but they bring us directly into Him so as to conform us to His eternal knowledge capacity. They prepare us for our translation when we shall interface with angels and the saints gone before us. They are released only to the humble of heart. And they only continue to develop as we prove faithful in coming further into Him alone as a result.
Among these keys are those that increasingly resolve the disparities between the way our minds read scripture under mortality and the way God presents Himself through scripture, especially in regard to our responsiveness in the face of His sovereignty. The Father wants to lift us out of our present grasp to see more and more of His ways from His eternal reality. Again, this requires unquenchable thirst for seeking out the reconciliations of His truth and doggedness in overcoming scriptural offense to our minds.
The keys that unlock these mysteries await us now. Let us continue growing up into Him as we let Him transform our frail “knowledge base” regarding spiritual things into His multi-capacity for apprehending the knowledge that connects us directly to His heavenly Nature outside of this creation.
Chris Anderson
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org09/23
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Page created February 27, 2024
