Sermon Tone Analysis

Dr. Harold Bryson tells of the two boys who went to their pastor to request his advice on what they could do to help people.

The pastor told them of a blind man who would love to have someone come and read the Bible to him.

The man was delighted when the boys came and told him of their plan.

"Where do you want us to begin," they asked?

"Well," he said, "Since you will be coming back each week, let's start with Matthew, and read through the New Testament."

So the boys began their reading, and as you recall, they first chapter of Matthew is full of begats.

"Let's skip this list of names," the boys suggested.

"No, read them all," the blind man urged.

It was an effort, but they plowed through the list the best they could.

When they finished they noticed tears coming down the blind mans cheeks.

"What is so emotional about a list of names"?

one of the boys asked.

The blind man said, "God knew everyone of those fellows, and he knew them by name.

Boys, that makes me feel important to know that God knows me, and He knows my name."

You don't have to make a name for yourself to be known by name to God, for God knows the least as well as the greatest by name.

In fact, God not only knows all persons by name, He has even assigned names to His inanimate creation.

Ps. 147:4 says, "He has determined the number of the stars and calls them each by name."

The implications of this are amazing, for if God even gives names to the billions and trillions of stars, then you can be assured there has never been a nameless person ever conceived.

The unknown soldiers of the world are known to God.

The John and Jane Does of the world have a name to God.

All of the unknown and unnamed of history are known and named in the mind of God, for God is omniscient, which means, He is all-knowing.

Even the human mind can be amazing in what it can know.

One night just before the orchestra was to play, the bassoon player rushed over to the famous conductor Arturo Toscanini and said his instrument would not play E-flat.

Toscanini held his head in his hands a moment and said, "It will be all right-the note E-flat does not appear in your music tonight."

He was a genius, and knew every detail of his music.

This is impressive, but it cannot compare to Gods knowing the number of hairs on our heads.

This is not very stable information, and it changes with every combing, yet it is not impossible for an omniscient God to be aware of this constant variation.

It makes even our best computers primitive by comparison.

But our text takes us to that which is beyond the borders of comprehension.

Jesus takes us into the realm of God's omniscience that is so mind-boggling and incomprehensible that many theologian reject it as impossible.

Jesus goes beyond saying God knows everything that has ever been, that is, and that will ever be.

That sounds like a sufficient body of knowledge to qualify God for being omniscient.

But Jesus goes one step further into a realm of knowing that man cannot follow.

Jesus says God can even know what might have been.

God can actually know the answer to all of the what if questions of life.

What if Jesus would have come into history centuries earlier, and done His miracles in Tyre and Sidon, or even the notorious Sodom?

Jesus says not only does God know what would have been, and how these wicked cities would have responded, but He says His judgment of these people will be modified by this knowing of what might have been.

They will be less severely judged because God knows that they would have repented had they gotten the same chance as Bethsaida and Capernaum.

Jesus takes Gods omniscience into a realm that is so beyond the mind of man that as far as I can determine it is an embarrassment to many theologians.

You sometimes have to choose between the God of the theologians and the God of Jesus, and here is a case in point.

Many theologians lock God into only being able to know what He has foreordained or predestined.

In other words, they say the reason God knows all is because He has decreed to be.

Even the great Jonathan Edwards said, "Without decree foreknowledge could not exist."

In other words, all God can know is what He has decreed to be.

But Jesus says God not only can know what He would do in all possible situations, but He can know what men would do in all possible situations.

It was not determined that Sodom would receive Christ's miracles and repent.

Just the opposite was the case, but God knew they would have repented had they received those miracles.

This is hard to grasp-more like impossible, so the theologians back off from this text.

We need to thank God for tough passages like this, for they set God free from the bondage of man's schemes.

The omniscience level to which Jesus exalts God is necessary, for without it theologians would think they had gone beyond Paul, and were not limited to seeing in part, and seeing through a glass darkly.

They would limit God to a system that is very human so that we could comprehend God.

The very goal of such a scheme, however, is contrary to the Bible.

Paul says in Rom.

11:33-34, "How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out.

Who has known the mind of the Lord."

It is an important part of our knowledge of God that we know we cannot know Him as He knows us.

He knows us completely, but we can only know Him partially.

This means God is by His very nature incomprehensible.

This means whatever we know about God is not the ultimate in what is knowable about God.

God knows much more about Himself than what He could reveal to us because it is beyond our capacity to comprehend.

The experience of the honest theologian is like that of the poet who wrote-

I have ridden the wind, I have ridden the stars,

I have ridden the force that flies,

With far intent through the firmament,

As each to each allies;

And everywhere that a thought may dare

To gallop, mine has trod--

Only to stand at last on the strand

Where just beyond lies God.

God is always beyond us, or He would not be God.

A God we could fully comprehend would be unworthy of our worship and adoration.

We would worship our own minds if they had such a capacity as to comprehend God.

I like the way one theologian put it-"We are not presumptuous Lilliputians, running out with verbal stakes and threads, to pin down the tall, majestic Gulliver of the Eternal and dance in theological exaltation round our captive."

The wise theologian and laymen alike recognize that God is not bound by our grasp of him.

Job 11:7-8 is a series of questions that speak to this issue.

"Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the almighty?

They are higher than the heavens-what can you do?

They are deeper than the depths of the grave-what can you know?"

There is no basis for pride in theology, for what we know of God, He has either made clear by His creation in His world, or by His revelation in His word.

There is much basis, however, for humility as we consider how much we do not know, and cannot know, because as God says in Isaiah 55:9, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

How much higher are the heavens than the earth?

Even this is beyond our measure, for we have not yet comprehended the creation of God, and this is but the work of His fingers.

God created us to love Him, and not to comprehend Him.

We have to know much about Him to love Him, but to ever think that we fully grasp Him is to begin to lose Him, for in pride we are setting up our knowledge as a mental idol of the true God, who is vastly superior to knowledge of Him.

Only the humble theologian is truly Biblical theologian, for He will not pretend to have God boxed up with no loose ends, but will say with Alexander Pope-

Thou Great First Cause, least understood,

Who all my sense confin'd,

To know but this, that thou art God,

And that myself am blind.

Thank God He makes the blind to see and by His grace He has given light abundant, and we know all we need to know about God to be saved, and to fulfill His purpose.

But let us never forget He is always more than we know.

When David considered the omniscience of God in his own life, and of how God knew when he rose or sat, went in or out, and knew the thoughts of his mind, and the words he would speak before he spoke them, he says in Ps. 139:6, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain."

Wise theologian know how little they can know of God's all-knowing.

The old Puritans like Richard Baxter could say, "You may know God but not comprehend Him."

Richard Sibbes, "You shall apprehend God but not comprehend Him." Stephen Charnock, "It is visible that God is, it is invisible what He is."

What this means is, we can know how God knows much, but we cannot know how He knows all.

Some people can do two or three things at once, and some have such powers of concentration they can remember hundreds of things at the same time, but this is all amateur night compared to God.

God specializes in everything, and attends to all things that exist at once.

Some of this is comprehensible.

God naturally knows all that He has predetermined.