The Omniscience of God: The Good News of an All-Knowing God for the Humble, Anxious, and Lonely

As we continue our consideration of God’s attributes, we turn to his omniscience. It may be a technical-sounding word, but it simply means that God is all-knowing. You will not find the word “omniscience” in the Bible, but the idea is thoroughly biblical: God knows everything.

Yet the purpose of studying an attribute like this is never merely to fill our heads with information, as though we were scrutinising some abstract object. The purpose is to know God better in a relational sense. As Daniel 11:32 puts it, “the people who know their God shall stand firm and take action.” Understanding him more truly should make us more able to stand firm and act.

While there are plenty of texts to which we might turn, Isaiah 40:28 is a fitting place to look, because it sets God’s omniscience within the story of salvation rather than in the abstract. Isaiah 40 marks a turning point in the prophecy. The previous chapters speak of judgement on Israel and the nations; now God speaks comfort to his people. “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God” (v. 1). Verse 3 promises that God himself will come to save, words later applied to John the Baptist: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” Verse 9 calls this good news: “Say to the cities of Judah, ‘Behold your God!’”

It is in this context of salvation that v. 28 declares: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.”

So when we ask what God knows, the first and most significant answer is that he knows whom he will save, and how. Your salvation is no accident. From eternity past, God decreed it and knew it with certainty. He does not merely hope that people will be saved, he knows them by name.

From this flows everything else God knows about us: our history, our family, the sort of homes and churches we came from. More broadly, Scripture tells us that God knows all of history and current events (better than the news does), and that he knows when we do right. Matthew 6:6 says our Father “sees in secret” and rewards the good we do. But he equally sees the evil we do. Ananias and Sapphira discovered, to their cost, that they could not deceive the Holy Spirit (Acts 5).

God knows our actions (Psalm 33:15), our words (2 Kings 6:12), and our thoughts (1 Chronicles 28:9). He knows all facts and all truths, from the mathematics that undergird creation to the timing of the seasons. As Isaiah says, his understanding is unsearchable.

If God’s knowledge is unsearchable, its implications for our lives are many. I will draw attention to three, in particular.

First, our pursuit of knowledge should produce humility and praise. If all truth is God’s truth, then whenever we learn something—whether from a textbook, a conversation, or an AI assistant—we have not created anything new. We have merely discovered what God has always known. Even our most surprising scientific facts are old news to him. This ought to produce delight, not embarrassment: We come to him not as those who have outsmarted him, but as children marvelling, “You made this, Lord! You knew this all along.” Job 21:22 asks, rhetorically, “Will any teach God knowledge?” Of course not! It is always the other way round.

This does not remove the joy of discovery, but it does guard us against pride. The German theologian Helmut Thielicke warned that truth without love “seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession…. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that.” In an age when information is a click or a voice note away, it is easy to mistake access to knowledge for the possession of wisdom, and to grow proud rather than humble. But the Christian view of knowledge should produce the opposite effect: The wisest person in the room ought to be the most humble, and the most in love with the God who knows all. Since all truth is God’s truth, the pursuit of knowledge is, in the end, a pursuit of God.

Second, we can entrust our regrets and anxieties about the life we might have had should to the God who knows. We are all prone to a kind of daydreaming, replaying old decisions and wondering how life could have gone differently, or fretting over what tomorrow holds. But who can truly say what would have happened had we chosen differently? Who can perceive the countless paths not taken? Only God knows what might have been and what will be. We are not called to know these things ourselves, but to entrust them to the one who does, the God who knows our past and our future and who, knowing us fully, has set his love upon us.

Third, God’s knowledge of us in Christ brings comfort in loneliness. Loneliness is not simply the absence of people; it is the sense of being unknown even in a crowd, whether at church, at school, or in a new job. Jacob voiced this very feeling: “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God” (Isaiah 40:27). In other words, has God forgotten me? But Scripture answers that despair. First Corinthians 13:12 promises that one day we shall “know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Even now, God knows us completely, flaws and all, and has chosen to love us in Christ. That is a real comfort in times of isolation.

May this truth never be merely a doctrine we recite. May it reshape how we pursue knowledge, humbling rather than inflating us. May it steady us when we are tempted to regret the past or fear the future. And may it comfort us in loneliness, knowing that we are fully known and fully loved by the God who knows all things. Above all, may we worship him with our whole lives.