THE EYE-IN-THE-SKY IS WATCHING

Just about the dumbest thing in the world is for Adam to go behind a bush, and think he can hide from God. Or a descendant of Adam’s, like you or me, going behind some year 2002 bush and think WE can hide from Him. The good news flip side is: no one can ever go to God and blackmail you.

I have a little bit of Wednesday news for you to think about with me. First of all, every single thing you say — I mean, every word, every syllable — is being recorded. Everything you do, every action, every slight movement, is, at this very moment, being archived on a 24/7 basis. I mean it. Everything about you is known, and being updated all the time. Your mail is scanned. Your e-mail is being logged and filed and sorted. And get this: even your thoughts, here in the year 2004, are being catalogued. The visual images in your brain, the things you say just to yourself, the inner, unspoken ideas you caress . . . are all being taken down and saved.

How do you feel about that? In the October 15, 2001 issue of Newsweek magazine, writer Steven Levy told us, in a section entitled “War on Terror,” that Larry Ellison, CEO of the company Oracle, which maintains huge databases, was willing to donate to America the software needed so that all citizens could carry “high-tech identification badges.” In other words, a universal ID card.

A tiny chip on this “smart card” would hold all basic information about you. And if you wanted to rent a car, or even drive a car, or get on a plane, or get into your office at work, you would have to flash, or swipe, your smart card. A digitized version of your fingerprint, or even retina scan, using what they now call biometric data, on record in some central bank, would be automatically compared with the one on your card before you could fly. If you were a terrorist, Big Brother would immediately flag you.

Well, speaking of Big Brother, civil libertarians let out an immediate howl. Would the United States of America soon be pulling everyone over to the curb to “check their papers”? Keeping track of where we all go and what we all do? Larry Ellison didn’t seem much concerned. “Privacy is [already] an illusion,” he said. “The private sector already gathers vast stores of information about customers.”

And now . . . let’s talk about the holiness of God. How on earth does my new Citizen U.S.A. card connect up with the Bible’s teaching about how God is a perfect and awesome holy being?

In The Knowledge of the Holy, A. W. Tozer suggests to us that God’s ways, and His thoughts, are not only perfect, but perfectly COMPLETE. Much of what makes us unholy is the incompleteness of our obedience, or our understanding, or our love. But God’s knowledge of us is holy, not only because of its purity, but also because of its fullness.

That scary, Orwellian, Big Brother-like scenario I just painted for you — about someone knowing your words, deeds, and thoughts — is actually dead-on reality. Friend, this is how much God knows about me and about you. He has a perfect and full and holy knowledge and awareness of you at every single moment in time, from before the moment of your conception until the EKG machine in the hospital registers the moment of your passing. He knows it all. And He knows it without effort, without painstaking private-eye work, without having to scratch and dig. You say it, and He hears it. You think it, and He knows it. That’s either a good-news fact, or a bad-news fact, depending on how you choose to look at it, but one thing it IS . . . is fact. He knows.

Tozer comments on this very reality, and even concedes along with the rest of us sinners, that this is a disquieting thought. Can we comprehend the utter foolishness of a human being trying to give God an excuse? “Uh, Lord, I had a flat tire on the way to church.” “Excuse me, Father, but I had a bunch of unexpected phone calls yesterday; that’s why I didn’t visit the widows and orphans.” Here’s what Tozer says about that:

“The unblessed soul may well tremble that God knows the flimsiness of every pretext and never accepts the poor excuses given for sinful conduct, since He knows perfectly well the real reason for it. ‘Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance.’” Moses must have known the jig was up, because that’s one of his psalms, the 90th, and verse eight. Tozer continues: “How frightful a thing to see the sons of Adam seeking to hide among the trees of another garden. But where shall they hide? ‘Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? . . . If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the night shineth as the day.’”

Have you ever thought how completely insane it was for Adam to think he could hide behind a tree and God wouldn’t find him? Or that God somehow “wouldn’t know”? If I put this in a drawer, God will never find it? Come on. And Tozer sadly acknowledges that the sons and daughters of Adam are forever looking for other trees in other gardens, vainly hoping that a perfect God with perfect, holy knowledge, and unparalleled access to all details . . . will somehow miss our one supposedly secret sin.

But as King David, who once made a futile attempt to divert heaven’s prosecution team from his own Bathsheba-gate computer hard drives, admits in Psalm 139:

“Darkness can’t hide me from You because to You, the night is as light as the day.”

Well, friend, to the burglar in all of us, this sounds like terrible news. The holiness of God is an ever-present condemnation of the lack of holiness in you and me. An unknown Bible student once wrote:

“Holiness is living that pleases God.”

And how many of us are succeeding there?

So how do we feel, here on this cold Wednesday, to know that God’s data bank is so divinely fine-tuned? That God knows every hair ON my head, and every thought inside it?

Hannah Whitall Smith, the marvelous Quaker writer from the 1800s, wrote a book called The Unselfishness of God. That might calm our fears just a little bit, but in this spiritual autobiography, she describes how a friend of hers grew up “in a perfect terror of God.” She had this idea of God being a cruel giant with an awful “Eye.”

“[It] could see everything, no matter how it might be hidden, and . . . He was always spying on her, and watching for chances to punish her, and to snatch away all her joys. She said she would creep into bed at night with the dreadful feeling that even in the dark the ‘Eye of God’ was upon her; and she would pull the bed covers over her head in the vain hope, which all the while she knew was vain, of hiding herself from this terrifying Eye, and would lie there in a tremble of fright, saying to herself in an agonized whisper, ‘What shall I do? Oh, what shall I do? Even my mother cannot save me from God!’”

Friend, have you lived on that street too? Especially here in 2004, with the entire world on high-alert, with the government wanting to give us smart cards, and with TV cameras at every intersection and at all entrances to Yankee Stadium, measuring not just who makes illegal turns, but who has illegal thoughts? The Eye is watching.
But let me tell you the rest of the story of God’s holiness. Because our Lord God in heaven is a merciful Father; that is all. A Father with a perfect and holy and unlimited love for you. Yes, He sees all. And I’m sure He often weeps. But this is Dad who perfectly knows and loves His sons and His daughters.
And Tozer culminates his essay with this thought. Certainly our Father knows our frailties and our faults. But this means that no enemy, no terrorist invader, can come to Him with thoughts of blackmail or a desire to alienate Him from us. God already knows! Tozer puts it this way:

“And to us who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope that is set before us in the gospel, how unutterably sweet is the knowledge that our Heavenly Father knows us completely. No talebearer can inform on us, no enemy can make an accusation stick; no forgotten skeleton can come tumbling out of some hidden closet to abash us and expose our past; no unsuspecting weakness in our characters can come to light to turn God away from us, since He knew us utterly before we knew Him and called us to Himself in the full knowledge of everything that was against us.”

Isn’t that fantastic? In the case of Hannah Whitall Smith’s childhood friend, a loving mother finally took that little girl’s hand, and explained what a kind and good friend Jesus was, with a Father that was just like Him, just as kind and friendly, just as eager for her to be healthy and happy and holy. God was not a tyrant to be feared but a friend to embrace.

“She went about all that day,” Hannah Smith writes, “saying to herself over and over, ‘Oh, I am so glad I have found out that God is like Jesus, for Jesus is so nice. Now I need never be afraid of God any more.’ And when she went to bed that night she fairly laughed out loud at the thought THAT SUCH A DEAR KIND EYE WAS WATCHING OVER HER AND TAKING CARE OF HER.”

Yes, friend, I can tell you that Big Brother, our completely holy God, is watching me and watching you. Aren’t you glad?