| “The eyes of the Lord are everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good.” |
| —Proverbs 15:3 |
While driving in traffic, how often have you seen a blatant disregard for the law and for safety? Someone passes another car on the right. A car sails by you doing 80 in a 55 mph zone. A driver makes a left turn, where a sign clearly indicates “NO LEFT TURNS.” My reaction, is probably like yours: “Where are the police when you need them?”
In our Christian spiritual formation, we sometimes forget the “All-Seeing Eye of God”—or, His Omnipresence and His Omniscience. We fail to remember that even our thoughts do not go unnoticed by God. In other words, God’s ability to see and perceive everything that happens to us, or within us, can either bring us great fear or bring us great comfort.
From Psalm 139:4, we learn that before a word is even on our tongues, God knows it completely. That should give us pause every time we speak. In Psalm 139:11-12, we read that we can’t hide from Him. He sees in the darkness as well as in the light. It is crazy for us to think God can’t see us!
At the same time, we can gain comfort from the fact that God sees what others do to us, or say about us. When Jesus first sent His disciples out into the surrounding towns without Him, as recorded in Matthew 10:26, Jesus taught them:
… there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.
And, Jesus was talking about people who would abuse and betray the disciples in their ministry, and other circumstances that Satan might use to discourage them.
God wants us to trust Him that He does see everything. He does hear everything. He does know all about our pain, when others malign us. Psalm 33:13 tells us that:
… from heaven, the Lord looks down and sees all mankind.
In Psalm 33:18, The Psalmist writes:
The eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love.
In our human faility, we sometimes may lose our patience as we wait on God. But, we need to realize that He will resolve all the issues that trouble us.
When God told Abraham that He was about to destroy Sodom because of their great sin, Abraham believed that Lot and his family would be spared because they were “the righteous” members of that terrible society. Abraham’s rhetorical question in Genesis 18:25 reveals his trust in God’s ability to “get it right”:
Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?
To take a sober look at God’s Omnipresence and His Omniscience means that while we need to keep careful watch on our own behaviors, we also must learn to trust God. For, in His own time, He will take care of all those things we cannot make right by ourselves, things that prompt us to say to Him: “Did you see that?”
