That’s a bit of a silly subheading really. God doesn’t have an epistemology like we do. While we are flapping around and bothering our little heads about whether God is there and how we can know him if he is, he just knows - knows everything, all the time, without effort or puzzlement or ambivalence. In particular, he knows us. This is slightly terrifying, but if we can get past our terror, I think we will become wiser and happier.
Psalm 139 finds David pondering God’s knowledge - in particular, his intimate and complete knowledge of David himself:
O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
God knows our actions, even the insignificant ones - when we sit down and when we stand up. He knows our thoughts. He knows our words before we speak them. He knows our “ways” - the paths we take through life and the choices we make, for good or ill. He knows all this no matter where we are:
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
There is no place in the universe where God does not see us. No running or hiding. He even knows us in the dark:
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
If you think God only sees the outside of you, think again:
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
God knows our bodies - every cell, from the mystery of our conception to the day of our death, and where each atom comes to rest as we dissolve into the earth.
The question is, do we want to be so deeply known? C. S. Lewis’ second space travel book finds the hero, Ransom, wrestling with a “sense of being in Someone’s Presence” which is “almost intolerable”:
…the very air seemed too crowded to breathe; a complete fullness seemed to be excluding you from a place which, nevertheless, you were unable to leave. But when you gave in to the thing, gave yourself up to it, there was no burden to be borne. It became not a load but a medium, a sort of splendour as of eatable, drinkable, breathable gold, which fed and carried you and not only poured into you but out from you as well. (Perelandra, Chapter 6)
I’ve always understood this as a picture of God’s close and present knowledge of us - intolerable until accepted, then suddenly glorious and good.
Between humans, of course, we hide many things. Sometimes this is sensible - not everyone is to be trusted with everything so there is such a thing as prudent restraint in our self-revelation. Sometimes we hide things that aren’t ours to share - secrets that others have entrusted to us or tender things that were never meant to endure the light of publicity. Often we hide from others in pride, wishing to be thought better than we are.
We hide, in other words, because we do not trust, and sometimes rightly so. Since the fall, we’ve needed clothes because we are no longer innocent. Many things need a decent covering. But where someone is trustworthy, and we aren’t too hurt to bestow our trust, there we can cease to hide and learn to delight in being known. I find also that trust engenders trust and knowing engenders knowing. A few times lately I’ve had conversations that were superficial until I stopped hiding, and then the other person stopped hiding too.
The problem is that we also hide from God, as Adam and Eve did in the garden, because we feel ashamed. The gospel reverses this - our shame has been taken away by Jesus. If you run to Jesus, there is no need to run from God - as if we could! If you’re hidden in Jesus, there is no need to seek fruitlessly for some corner of the universe that is opaque to the mind of God. And God is always to be trusted.
David knows this. He isn’t hiding from God. He is simply reveling in being known to the very core of his being - body, mind and soul. He isn’t terrified by God’s perfect knowledge of him. He trusts him. As the “Presence” was for Ransom, God’s omniscience is for David “a sort of splendour as of eatable, drinkable, breathable gold”. David isn’t just letting God see him, he loves the fact that God sees him.
Coming back to the question of epistemology, all this being known has a curious result. Psalm 139 suddenly turns from God’s knowing of David to David’s knowing of God:
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake, and I am still with you.
David is known, and knows himself known, and delights to be known by God. And what, as Bertie Wooster would say, is the outcome or upshot? David’s mind perceives the thoughts of God. He contemplates the impossibility of counting them. He knows himself to be in God’s presence. David knows God, not of course in full, but enough to be filled with wonder, trust and confidence.
So there seems to be some kind of connection between allowing God to know us and coming to know God. This makes me wonder if God hides from us until we stop hiding from him. One could take this too far, of course - I’m sure there are other reasons for our epistemic struggles - but before we protest that we can’t know God, maybe at least ask the question; are we hiding? Perhaps we don’t really want to know God because we don’t want him to know us.
How’s that for an epistemology?
Oh I love this so much!!