God Knows Everything About You

As a psychologist I'm fascinated how deeply Jesus Christ knows us. This knowledge can be unnerving, though, since God's knowledge includes our thoughts and feelings, perceptions and sensations, and goals and dreams. No other person or no institution has this capability to instantaneously know what we are thinking and feeling as we think and feel it.

This could make me a little paranoid, to realize that God knows why I am typing this now. And how everything in my life has led to this sentence I am now constructing. Not only that, but God has foreknowledge of you coming to this site today and knows how you are interacting with it.

This is an extraordinary attribute of the living God -- the God of spirit and truth Jesus spoke about to the Samaritan woman at the well, when he revealed divine knowledge about her five husbands.

We wouldn't even know that God sees through us like we see through a windowpane, unless God revealed this to us in the Bible. But reveal it he does!

• "Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts" (Mk 2:8). 
• "Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account" (Heb 4:13). 
• The Bible itself, inspired and illuminated by the Holy Spirit, also reveals this penetrating knowledge of people: "For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart" (Heb 4:12).

Why is this important? Because modern psychology shows that only in deepest confidence, like the confidentiality of a psychotherapy session, do people disclose their innermost thoughts, feelings, and motives.

Human beings have both the free choice to "come clean" with what's going on within, and a defensive urge to conceal it behind a false front. We often hide our true intent from others and sometimes even from ourselves. But God sees and knows what's in us.

So won't this make us self-conscious? To know that nothing is hidden from God? Our selfishness, our sexuality, our rationalizations, our hidden agendas -- all laid bare before his eyes, so to speak.

Actually, yes. And this self-consciousness is called cognitive dissonance in psychotherapy and conviction of sin in Scripture. A major role of the Holy Spirit in the world today is to convict us that Christ alone is righteous and whole, and we ourselves are unrighteous and fragmented.

"My dear children," says the apostle John, "I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world" (1 Jn 2:1-2).

Christ went to the Cross to pay the price for our secret lives of self-will and self-concealment. We are now free to come out of hiding, into the light of his grace, because his intention isn't to accuse and punish us, but to reconcile and love us, and guide us along the wisest pathway of our life.

Compass psychotheology helps us follow this pathway, because it reveals our behavioral psychology, whether we are pleasing and placating, withdrawn and aloof, grandiose and condescending, or aggressive and exploiting.

Whatever way we've gotten along without God riddles us with personality deficiencies that we cannot get rid of on our own. But God can and does help make progress toward human wholeness, as we surrender in trust to his light, his truth, and his love.

And the message of this post is simply this: Why not confess what God already knows? Why not find relief in his omniscience, and comfort in his forgiveness. And why not enjoy growing mature in Christ, rather than going it on our own without him.

Knowing the Trinity Through Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ’s public ministry spans a short three years, during which he relentlessly shatters the shibboleths of the religious pundits of his day. Jesus challenges persons to surrender everything they hold dear -- including their own families -- to follow him. He is bent on changing their mind-sets, their beliefs about God’s purposes, God’s nature.   

What does Jesus want us to understand and find delight in, opening our deepest being to discover?

With consistent passion, a passion for which he is ultimately sentenced to death, Jesus witnesses that this present world finds its origin and fulfillment in a Triune Creator whom Jesus calls the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who love human beings and desire to be loved by them, these three Persons who exist as one God. And as Jesus reveals his own divine identity, he says, so he reveals the Father and the Holy Spirit.

How does Jesus witness to these mysteries?

Jesus startles the Samaritan woman at the well. He tells her things about her life that she is trying to hide. And startles her into saying, “Sir, I can see you are a prophet.”

A response that is startling in its own right, for Samaritans accepted no prophet after Moses but the one they viewed as the Messiah (Deut 18:18).

Jesus goes deeper. He reveals to her that God is the Father who seeks worship in spirit and in truth.

She responds tentatively: “I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

His answer? Surely astounding. “I that speak to you, I am” (Jn 4:26; Morris, NICNT, italics ours), his use of “I am” asserting identification with the name for deity that God revealed to Moses (Ex 3:14; Jn 8:58).

Here is Jesus, pointing to his eternal pre-existence before his incarnation as Christ. His declaration of “I am” confirms deity as well as personhood, revealing that through Jesus, God is experienced as the divine Thou, who possesses identity, thought, will, and personality, and with whom it is possible to have a conversation, even at a Samaritan well.

And the Samaritan woman believes in him. So taken with Jesus’ person, his mission, and his interaction with her, this Gentile woman at the well becomes his first evangelist.

Peter is given more opportunity than the Samaritan woman to see Jesus Christ in action, hearing him preach the Gospel of repentance from sin, heal those afflicted with physical diseases or demonic possession, and work miracles like feeding five thousand people after teaching them about the kingdom of God.

So when Jesus turns to Peter one day and asks, “Who do you say I am?” Peter practically shouts, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus gives an unexpected response. He does not say, “That’s good, Peter, I’m glad you finally get it.” Or, “Well said, my good and faithful servant.” Instead, Jesus replies, “Blessed are you, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven” (Mt 16:17).

Peter only knows this truth because the Father revealed it to him, Jesus is saying, providing witness to the Godhead itself, the inner, intimate workings of the Trinity, and the importance the Triune God places on being understood by their created, by individual human beings. 

Jesus and His Father

Jesus talks about his Father in heaven all the time, often to the annoyance of his listeners, particularly the Pharisees who don’t want to hear that Jesus models his behavior on his Father, the Lord God Almighty; his Father to whom Jesus prays constantly, with loving respect, certainly, but also with a strong sense of his individual identity as the Son of Man. “Father,” he says, “glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began” (Jn 17:5).

So tangible, reciprocal, and intimate is the relationship between the Father and the Son, and so revelatory of God’s identity, that Jesus says, “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt 11:27); “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6); and “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10:30).

Jesus and the Holy Spirit

What a difficult concept to get across, since the disciples must have been bewildered, and Jesus hard-pressed to explain in terms they might comprehend. When I leave you, (surely the most painful thought ever for them), Jesus says, “the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” (Jn 14:26 NKJV).

Certainly this makes more sense now, with the advantage of the New Testament as a clear explication of the Trinity in action, but even today the concept of the Holy Spirit is difficult to grasp, rather like seeing the effect of wind that whips up sand into swirls, or brings clouds scudding across the sky, but never seeing the actual wind itself.

Yet the concrete impact of the Holy Spirit’s presence in Jesus’ earthly life is definitive and palpable. When Jesus is in trouble, in pain, the Holy Spirit is there; when Jesus needs power to heal, the Holy Spirit provides it; when Jesus rejoices, he rejoices in the Spirit (Lk 10:21). And when Jesus departs from this earth as a human being, the Holy Spirit comes to impart his Word to the world.

It’s a team effort, this Trinity, these three distinct, individuated Persons in one overarching consciousness of the Triune God. You are in good hands in this Life Together with the Holy Trinity!

For more on how to experience the Holy Trinity in your life of Christian faith, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY

Who is the Christian Trinity?

The Trinity is the ruah, God the Spirit, who is first mentioned in Genesis, the Spirit who broods over the deep as co-architect of Creation, the Spirit who is the action generator of life, of humanity -- of persons and personhood.

God the Spirit

The Trinity is God as a loving Father who guides and sculpts the Hebrew experience, providing structure and laws, while making a friend of Abraham, and of Moses, creating relationships unique to each person, with Hannah, Samuel, David, and Solomon -- forming a covenant with the Hebrews so that they would be his people and he would be their God.

God the Father

The Trinity is Jesus Christ, the subject and object of Scripture, sent by the Father and empowered by the Spirit, who through his personality and life on earth becomes the entry point for persons to find forgiveness of sin, and entrust themselves to the process of becoming Christlike.

God the Son

It is that first person, ruah, the Spirit of God, whom we now know as the Holy Spirit. That same Spirit who brooded over creation is now our Comforter and Friend, who was promised by the Son and sent by the Father to indwell all who receive Christ, quickening their trust in the Trinity, inspiring their development as persons, and strengthening their capacity to love both God and other people. 

God the Holy Spirit

Compass Psychotheology proposes that Christ in his essence, as both the Son of God and Son of Man, serves as humanity’s connection point to the Father and the Holy Spirit. For human beings to understand and participate more fully in the life of the Trinity, Three Persons in One God, the starting point is Jesus.

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY:

Compass Psychotheology Applied

Trusting in The Trinity