God’s knowledge reaches to our thoughts, desires, intents, and inclinations….The God “who knows the heart” (Acts 15:8) knows the sin of all people, and they will give an account for their disobedience to Him. But there is hope and comfort for all who believe in Jesus Christ because God’s covenant promise is to “remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). The God who knows your sin also knows your Savior.

What does it mean that God is omniscient? The roots of the word communicate that God has a knowledge (scientia) of all things (omnia). In some ways, to express God’s omniscience as a knowledge of all things can fall short of apprehending its grandeur and majesty. To understand God’s omniscience rightly, the first thing we must affirm is that God knows Himself.

God’s omniscience follows from the foundation of God’s knowledge of Himself. As the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:11, “For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.” God is simple—that is, without parts or composition of any kind—and has a perfect and complete knowledge of Himself. Theologians call this God’s “knowledge of simple intelligence.”

Because God knows Himself, He knows all things that can possibly be because He knows all things that He could possibly create. In man, logical possibility and practical possibility are separate things. So, a client may want a certain product that is logically possible, but engineers may have to give the bad news that it is not practically possible. The client’s idea could be accomplished in theory, but the engineers cannot do it. However, in God these two things are not distinct. Whatever can be, can be created by God. God knows Himself, therefore He knows all things possible.

Of all the things that could possibly be, God willed to create the world and everything in it “according to its kind” as He, the Master Artisan, saw fit (Gen. 1:11, 12, 25, 31). But God did not simply will the existence of things and leave them to be. God decreed “the end from the beginning” (Isa. 46:10) and “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11). Because God willed the existence of all that is and has decreed the unfolding history of all things great and small, from the beginning to the end, knowing the end from the beginning, therefore we can also speak of God’s “knowledge of vision.”

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