Are You Content (Part 2)

"Your Father knows that you need these things"¹ - Luke 12:30

We were discussing contentment and the omniscience of God…let’s pick up where we left off…

²God’s omniscience, like His omnipotence and omnipresence, also relates to time. God’s knowledge is absolute in the sense that He is forever aware of all things. God’s intellect is different from ours in that He does not have to “access” information, like a computer might retrieve a file. All knowledge is always directly before God.

The omniscience of God is also a crucial part of God’s promise to bring about justice in the world. For a judge to render a perfectly just verdict he must first know all the facts. No evidence is hidden from the scrutiny of God. All mitigating circumstances are known to Him.

All of this underlies our contentment.  We can be content because God is omniscient and that omniscience is rooted in the other attributes of His character as the operate in complete agreement together.  He knows our needs, all of our personal needs and that knowledge implies that he will act to deal with those needs according to His good leisure and in accordance with His good character and promises.

In Luke 12:30 Jesus said: "For all these things the nations of the world seek after, and your Father knows that you need these things."  "Seek after" is a Greek word that means to want, or to seek out in earnest, to desire.  It is a strengthened form of the root word and thus is heightened form of the idea - they are really, desperately seeking out whatever they are desiring.

"And" is a contrasting conjunction and probably should be rendered "but" here instead of and as the idea of the verse is to set one phrase against the other.  The world desperately goes about seeking the things that satisfy BUT your heavenly Father "knows you need these things".  The idea is to comfort and bring ease of mind and contentment as we look at life - God will supply those things.

“…what you want or need is one thing; what you deserve is another.” - An awareness of God's grace and a real understand of our nature as man in relationship to that grace is one of the great keys to contentment.  Nothing irritates me more than to hear "Christian" leaders tell their listeners that they "deserve" blessing.  It happens all the time.  They deserve it, it is theirs to claim, Jesus died to secure some earthly well-being for them, or some other such positive thinking, positive confession nonsense. 

The fact of the matter is that all that we have, we have by means of the grace of God.  The closer we are to that truth, the more we understand of it, the better we grasp it, the more content we'll be.

Genesis 32:10 says "I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies and of all the truth which You have shown Your servant; for I crossed over this Jordan with my staff, and now I have become two companies." The verb is in the Perfect and is suffixed.  That makes it a sort of "double past" or lends emphasis to the fact that is past tense.  It is singular and first person.  The word means to be trifling, to be unworthy, to be not enough, that is, to be in a state of not meeting a merits test of one sort or another, implying one has applied relatively low status to the unworthy object, in this case, the self.  Jacob says to God that he sees that he is not worthy of the very least of God's mercies...  He says this in light of the fact that he left his homeland with virtually nothing and returns a great company, "two companies" actually!

That humility and that recognition of God's grace is precisely that of which we speak. All men have needs, we are flesh and bone, we have the needs common to those who share our frame.  But to view those as "deserved" or "coming to us" or anything less that being met by the grace and mercy of God is to pervert and misunderstand how and why those things come to us.  Jacob understood this.  Because of this he was well able to be content under all circumstances.  It will not until we share that perception that we will likewise be able to be content as he was.

_______________________________

[1] This year I am often using MacArthur’s devotional “Strength for Today” as a starting point for my comments. Quotes from MacArthur’s Devotional are in boldface.

[2]  Some portions of this post are taken from RC Sproul’s wonderful little book “Essential Truths of the Christian Faith”; the article on “Omniscience.