He Knows

I think most people have had that dream—nightmare really—where we show up for work or school completely naked. Everyone else is clothed, and there we stand in all our glory without a stich of clothing—fully exposed. The truth is, we’re all living that dream—we’re all walking around fully exposed to a God who knows everything.

There are no secrets from God. You can put secrets up there with unicorns and the oompa loompas. They don’t exist. No matter how dark, no matter how well hidden, no matter how crafty or clever we are, God knows. He always knows.

Hebrews 4:13 says, “There is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him.”

This is the very same thing that David both rejoices in and laments in the Psalms when he says, “Where can I go from You?” If I climb up to the top of a mountain, You’re there. If I go over there, You’re there. If I stay here, You’re here. No matter where I am, You’re present. No matter what I try to cover up, you see through it all.

You might be able to hide from your church, your spouse or your kids all the dark things inside you, but you can’t hide from God. There’s not a room in your house that He cannot see into. There’s no motivation of the heart, no matter how cleverly you try to justify it to yourself, that God doesn’t sniff out. He knows. There are no secrets with God.

It seems horrifying. We’re living the dream, naked and unclothed. Yet, this isn’t our problem. Our problem is how we respond to this reality. Our problem is what we do in light of the fact that God knows and sees everything in our lives.

So many of us fail over and over again because we spend our lives trying to cover up and compensate for the areas we don’t want anyone to see. But the writer of Hebrews tells us that our job isn’t to cover. Our job is to turn our eyes to Jesus and hold fast to our confession.

What is our confession? Our confession is that we cannot fix ourselves and we need  Jesus. Since everything is seen, since there are no secrets, since all our junk is clearly seen by God, we need to run to God—not away from Him. We must hold fast to this confession and not drift away from the truth that we are a mess and we need His help. We must press into the Lord.  Let us never ever, ever, ever, ever get away from confessing, “I am broken and need Jesus.”

Sin brings about shame, guilt and despair. There’s a weight that occurs when we do what we hate. But Hebrews 3:15 says, “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”

Hebrews says that when we feel the weight of sin and shame on our soul, we don’t have a high priest who cannot sympathize with us. It says that Jesus sympathizes with us in that moment. He doesn’t look at us and go, “Oh, when are you going to get this right?” He looks at us and sympathizes with us—because He is the “One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.”

The Scriptures say that all the temptations that you face and that I face, all of them, every one of them, all of the temptations that befall you and befall me, Christ knew them. He knew them.

This is good news for every one of us. We have a high priest who knows and covers us. We don’t need to be horrified by the dream we live in—the reality of being exposed. We only need to look to Him as our covering.