What does omniscience mean?
Question 02038
The word omniscience comes from the Latin omnis (all) and scientia (knowledge). Applied to God, it means that His knowledge is complete, perfect, and without limit. He knows all things that are, all things that were, all things that will be, and all things that could have been under different circumstances. Nothing escapes His awareness. Nothing surprises Him. Nothing takes place anywhere in creation, at any moment in history, that He does not know fully and completely.
What Scripture Says
Psalm 139 is the most personal expression of divine omniscience in all of Scripture. David writes that God knows when he sits and when he rises, that He discerns his thoughts from afar, that He is acquainted with all his ways, and that He knows his words before they reach his tongue. The psalm is not primarily a philosophical treatise; it is a meditation by a man who genuinely feels known, in every dimension of his existence, by the God who made him. That sense of being entirely known runs through every verse.
Isaiah 46:9-10 extends this to history itself: God declares “the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done.” God’s foreknowledge of future events is not inference or probability; it is the certain knowledge of One who stands outside the sequence of cause and effect that constrains created minds. Hebrews 4:13 draws the necessary conclusion: “No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”
The Full Scope of Divine Knowledge
God’s omniscience includes not only what is and what will be but what would have been. When Jesus says to the towns of Chorazin and Bethsaida that if the miracles done in them had been done in Tyre and Sidon, those cities would have repented (Matthew 11:21), He is making a statement about God’s knowledge of unrealised possibilities — what would have happened under circumstances that never occurred. God knows what Tyre and Sidon would have done. This knowledge of counterfactuals is part of the complete omniscience the Bible attributes to Him.
God’s knowledge is also not merely propositional. He does not simply possess information about His creatures; He knows them personally. The same Hebrew word, yada, covers both cognitive knowledge and intimate relational knowledge. When God says in Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” the knowing is not simply awareness of Jeremiah’s existence. It is the personal knowledge of a Creator who has designed, purposed, and called a specific person. When Jesus says in Matthew 7:23 to those who performed impressive religious acts without genuine relationship, “I never knew you,” the absence is not informational. It is the most devastating thing He could say about a person.
What This Does Not Mean
Omniscience does not mean that God controls every outcome. Knowing what will happen and causing it to happen are different things. God knows every choice that every person will ever make, but this foreknowledge is not the cause of those choices. To say otherwise would eliminate genuine human responsibility, and Scripture consistently treats human beings as genuinely responsible for what they do. The two truths — exhaustive divine foreknowledge and genuine human freedom — are both biblical, and both must be held.
Omniscience also does not mean that God approaches His creatures with cold, forensic detachment. The Psalm 139 meditation ends with an invitation: “Search me, O God, and know my heart!” David, who has just described a knowledge from which he cannot escape, invites more of it. The God who knows everything about us is not a surveillance authority but the one who knows us better than we know ourselves and loves what He has made.
So, now what?
Divine omniscience means that no hypocrisy is sustainable in God’s presence, that no prayer is unheard, and that no act of faithfulness goes unnoticed. It is simultaneously a call to honesty — He knows anyway — and a foundation for trust. The God who knows the end from the beginning and who knew us before we were formed in the womb is not caught out by anything that happens to us. His knowledge is not distance. It is the deepest possible form of attention.
“You have searched me and known me… Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.” Psalm 139:1, 6