What Does God Know?

The problem

There's something that's always bugged me about the theology that I’ve heard over the years. (If you’ve read many of my articles, you know there’s more than one something. I just want to address one in particular here. But don’t worry—I still stand firmly on the foundational beliefs of the faith. All my questions relate to the details of the theologies that have been built on that foundation.)

In my last post I said, “There’s a sense . . . in which God actually hurts.” (I should have added a reference to Genesis 6:6 here, but I didn’t think of it at the time.) “Because of that, He understands our pain more deeply and completely than we can ever imagine” (italics added). That’s what I’ve been taught. I’ve heard it from many wise sources. I’m willing to accept that there’s some sense in which it’s true, so I was okay with saying that in my article. But if we take it too far it can lead to serious errors in our view of God.

From what I understand, this idea is at least partly based on two passages in Hebrews.

Hebrews 2:17-18: For this reason, he [Jesus] had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Hebrews 4:15-16: For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

These verses seem to imply that the Son of God, a full-fledged member of the Trinity, was only able to sympathize with our weaknesses and become merciful by taking on human flesh and seeing what it was like to suffer from temptation. If God, as the Son, had not experienced being human, the Godhead as a whole (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) would be unable to really understand us.

The greatness of God

But God is GOD. He knows all. He understands all. He created all there is out of nothing. He created the full potential range of our emotions and thoughts. Even before the beginning, He knew us, not just intellectually, but deeply, richly, intimately, completely (Psalm 139).

The mistake we make is to think that if God hasn’t experienced something for Himself, then He can’t really understand it or sympathize with those who go through it. That tends to be true for us. We usually need to live through something ourselves before we can really understand how it feels to someone else. But I don’t see how it can possibly be true for an all-knowing God.

So maybe there’s something different about this concept of Jesus’ learning to sympathize with our weaknesses than what I’ve generally heard. Maybe it’s not that He absolutely had to have some kind of human experiences in order for God to really understand these strange creatures who have physical bodies, who feel pain, and whose lives end in that bizarre event called death.

Maybe the reason Jesus took on human flesh was because of our weaknesses and our needs, not God’s. Maybe it’s so that we can understand Him better, not the other way around. Maybe we desperately need the reassurance and confidence that comes from knowing that He’s been through everything that we go through. Maybe we wouldn’t believe that He could ever “get” us otherwise (even though He always has).

So what about those passages from Hebrews? What are they trying to tell us?

I’m not an expert on Scripture. I don’t understand it all. But I wonder if the teachers I’ve heard have been looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe the author of Hebrews is talking about the Son’s perspective during the thirty-some years of His incarnation.

Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. (Another mystery that we’ll never fully understand.) God never changes (Malachi 3:6), but as a human being, Jesus learned and grew. Luke 2:52: “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.” (This boggles my mind. How does God the Son grow in favor with God the Father???)

Maybe the passages from Hebrews mean that as a human being Jesus developed into a merciful and faithful high priest. As part of the Trinity, even prior to the incarnation He was merciful and faithful beyond anything we could ever deserve or imagine. (But maybe He didn’t take on His specific high-priestly role until after the resurrection?)

It was certainly as a human being that He made atonement for us. He sacrificed His own human flesh.

It was definitely as a human being that He suffered from temptation. James 1:13: “God cannot be tempted by evil.”

Resisting temptation has never been something that we can do all on our own. God has always been capable of helping those who are being tempted. David was asking for God’s help with it—and expecting a response—when he prayed in Psalm 141:4, “Let not my heart be drawn to what is evil, to take part in wicked deeds with men who are evildoers; let me not eat of their delicacies.”

So the idea that He can now help those who are being tempted can’t mean that God had to learn how to come to our aid through Jesus’ experience. Maybe it means that we can now relate to a human Jesus, who suffered when He was tempted. This change in our perspective gives us a powerful tool for resisting the temptations that we face. A tool that people who lived before Jesus’ time didn’t have.

The kind of teaching that I’ve heard tends to foster the misconception that God was somehow lacking in His understanding of us mortals until Jesus came along and discovered what we’re really like. That does a great disservice to our great God.

Whether or not God changes in some very limited ways, such as when Jesus experienced being human, is one of the big unanswerable questions of the Christian faith. But I suspect that the deeper relationship between God and people as revealed in the Hebrews passages means that we’ve been given the great privilege of being able to come closer to understanding Him, not that He needed to become human in order to fully understand us.