Good morning. I’d like you to find Genesis 16 in your copy of God’s Word. And we’re going to wind up in John 4, so if you want to mark that too, then you’ll be ready at the end of the service.
We have been talking in this series about the never changing, ever faithful God. Hebrews 13:8 says that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. In Malachi 3, we hear God saying through the prophet, “I am the Lord. I do not change” (Malachi 3:6). So we’ve talked about the God who is always speaking. Always working. Always hearing.
And so this morning, we come to the truth that God is always seeing.
But as I was preparing this week, it occurred me that of all the “Always” statements we are going to talk about, this is the one that, just because it’s true, that doesn’t mean it’s comforting.
How does it make you feel knowing that somebody’s always watching you? When Rockwell, another one-hit wonder sang “I always feel like somebody’s watching me” in the 80’s, there wasn’t any comfort in it. It was more like an ode to paranoia.
And also from the 80’s, there’s The Police’s biggest radio hit: “Every single day, every word you say, every game you play, every night you stay I’ll be watching you” But if you were the one Sting was singing about, would you feel protected? Or stalked?
So God is always seeing. He is always watching. Hebrews 4:13 says
13 And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
If that verse was all you knew of God, how would you feel about Him? Maybe He seems like the cosmic cop, waiting for you to mess up. Or maybe He’s like Roz in Monsters Inc. I’m always watching, Wazowski. Always watching.
AW Tozer, one of my favorite dead theologians, famously said, “What comes to our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
So this morning, I want to ask you, “What comes to your mind when you think about God always seeing? Always watching? Because how you respond to God seeing you is going to reveal a lot about how you see God.
Let me pray for us. And then we will dive in to what God’s Word says about the always seeing God.
[Pray]
Main Teaching
So really there are two questions: 1. Does God really see everything; and 2.How do I feel about that? So first, let’s see what the Bible says about how God sees everything:
1. God Sees What We Do. This is all over Scripture, but here’s just a few examples. Notice all of the “seeing” verbs:
Psalm 33:13-15 – “The Lord looks down from heaven; he sees all the children of man; 14 from where he sits enthroned he looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth, 15 he who fashions the hearts of them all and observes all their deeds.”
Proverbs 5:21 – “For a man's ways are before the eyes of the Lord, and he ponders all his paths.”
Proverbs 15:3 – “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.”
God sees our obedience. If we are faithfully serving Him, God sees it:
2 Chronicles 16:9a – “For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him.”
God sees everything, even if no one else does. Remember what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount?
Matt. 6:4-6 – “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. 5 “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
And yes, God also sees our disobedience and sin:
Jeremiah 16:17 – “For my eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden from me, nor is their iniquity concealed from my eyes.”
Psalm 90:8 – “You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.”
Maybe you think: “God’s got so much to keep track of. Surely He’s not paying attention to me fudging the numbers on this expense report. Or googling the answer to a test question underneath the desk.
If I use the Incognito browser and clear my search history, he won’t see me clicking on this site I have no business being on.
But the truth is, nothing gets past him. He sees everything. He sees our faithfulness and obedience…as well as our unfaithfulness and disobedience.
“All are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”
How you feel about that truth probably has a lot to do with which you have more of in your life right now. Faithfulness or unfaithfulness? Obedience or disobedience?
But God doesn’t just see our behavior,
2. God Sees The Big Picture.
Remember where God is positioned. He is ruling and reigning…sitting enthroned over all his creation.
One of the freakiest descriptions of God in the entire Bible is found in Ezekiel 1. Ezekiel has a vision of God seated on His throne. But the throne is on a flat plane, held in place by four living creatures. And each living creature is standing beside a wheel within a wheel. And verse 18 says, “the rims were tall and awesome, and the rims of all four were covered with eyes all around.”
Now here’s what all these symbols mean: The throne is high, which means God can see further than we can see. And these wheels with the awesome rims are covered with eyes, which means God sees more than we can see. And they can go in any direction—front, back, sideways. Past, present, future. God sees all there is to see.
Because of where God is positioned, he has a different perspective and He sees things we don’t see.
God sees ALL the pieces at play…he sees what will bring us harm…he sees what will bring him the most glory… he sees the cause and effect of every choice we make before we make it…as well as everyone else walking the earth!
And this is why we can say and believe with confidence the promise of Rom. 8:28 – “ And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”
Our seeing is limited…God’s is not. And this should be one of the main reasons we worship him.
John Piper – “God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.”
3. God sees the spiritual realities that we don’t. He even sees (1 Pet. 5:7) our adversary the devil prowling around like a roaring lion seeking to devour us. He sees what is really real…and that’s the spiritual battle we are in.
He also sees the whole battlefield of spiritual warfare that we don’t. Recall the words of Paul in Ephesians 6:11-12 – “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. 12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
Are you understanding a bit more clearly why we desperately need God so much? Because he sees what we don’t.
But for all this, you may be kind of on the fence about how to feel about all this. Does it comfort you, or does it scare you?
Because if you’re being honest, you already know what a messed up, jacked up person you are. There are things about you that you honestly are thinking, “If my boyfriend knew this about me, he would break up with me.” Or, if my kids ever found this out about me, I could never look them in the eye again.
And so we’ve just spent half this sermon talking about how none of that that we try to keep hidden from other people can be kept hidden from God. And the only thing keeping you from bolting out of the pew and into the parking lot right now is that, if you did, other people would know what it is you are struggling with.
So let me turn the corner. I can’t answer for you how this makes you feel, but I want to suggest to you how it should make you feel. And to do that, I want to tell you about the only person in Scripture who actually gave a name to God.
Anybody want to guess who it was? It wasn’t Abraham. Or Moses. It wasn’t King David. It wasn’t a prophet, or a king, or a priest.
It wasn’t a Jewish man. In fact, it wasn’t a man at all.
The only person in all of Scripture who gave God a name was a runaway slave girl named Hagar. Her story is told in Genesis 16.
Hagar was the Egyptian-born slave of Abraham’s wife Sarah. God had promised Abraham and Sarah they would have a child, but it had been ten years, and still no baby. So Abraham and Sarah get tired of waiting on God. Sarah says to Abraham, “Here. Take my slave girl and sleep with her, and since she’s my property, any children she has will be mine.”
Abraham says, “Ok,” He uses Hagar as a sexual surrogate. With no love, no affection, no tenderness, he gets her pregnant.
Now, I’m deliberately putting this in pretty harsh terms, because I want you to really feel what Hagar is feeling. She’s a foreigner. She’s a slave. She’s property. She has been objectified. And on top of all this, her pregnancy makes Sarah, her master, jealous, and Sarah begins to treat her harshly.
So she runs away. A fugitive foreigner, a runaway pregnant slave.
- She is tired.
- She is alone.
- She has absolutely nothing and no one.
She finds her way to a spring of water in the desert. And verse 7 says that “the angel of the Lord found her” there. Most biblical scholars say that when the Old Testament uses the definite article THE angel of the Lord, as opposed to AN angel of the Lord, it is referring to a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ Himself.
If that is true, then Christ tells Hagar go back home. Put a pin there because that’s going to come up again.
Go back home. Submit to Abraham and Sarah. And the angel of the Lord promises her in this that she will have a son. And listen to her response.
Genesis 16:13 (I’m reading this in the New International version): She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”
Again, this outcast, objectified, foreign, marginalized slave woman is the only person in the entire Bible who names God. And she calls Him the God Who Sees Me.
About three thousand years later, Jesus would meet another woman at another well. Turn to John 4. Like Hagar, the Samaritan woman is an outcast and a foreigner. She comes to draw water from the well at the hottest part of the day, which makes no sense. Most women come to the well in the early evening, when it’s cooler, so they can visit with one another, catch up on the latest gossip, and maybe swap stories about the latest cute thing their kids did. Because this was before Instagram.
But the woman knows she isn’t welcome in those circles. We find out later she’s had five husbands, and she isn’t married to the man she is currently living with.
I had always assumed that this implied she was an immoral woman. But the Bible never says that. One commentator I read this week suggested that she might have been barren. In a society that valued women primarily because they could have lots of babies, if a woman couldn’t have any it was grounds for divorce. So perhaps this had happened to the Samaritan woman. She wasn’t necessarily immoral. Maybe she was just infertile. Unproductive. Maybe husbands one through five just considered her useless.
She comes to the well, alone, hoping to be left alone.
But the God Who Sees, sees her.
John 4 records the longest conversation in the Bible between Jesus and an individual. Jesus asks her for a drink. Jesus offers her living water. Jesus gently confronts her with the truth of her situation: “You have had five husbands, and the man you are living with now is not your husband.”
Jesus answers her theological questions,
And then, Jesus tells her something He doesn’t tell anyone else in His earthly ministry. He tells her that He is the Messiah.
And then, just like Hagar three thousand years before, the Samaritan woman goes home.
28 So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?”
He told me everything I ever did. He saw me. He really saw me.
And he loved me anyway.
I believe this is the desire of every heart: to be known, and yet to still be loved.
Loving someone without knowing them is superficial.
Knowing someone without loving them is judgmental.
But knowing someone and loving them—that’s Jesus.
How does it make you feel that God sees you?
We said at the beginning of the message that if all we knew about God was Hebrews 4:13, it would be terrifying.
3 And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
So aren’t you glad we have Hebrews 4:14-16?
14 Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. 16 Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Beloved, Jesus is able to see you completely, yet still love you unconditionally, because He understands you fully.
In his book Gentle and Lowly (which, by the way, I have a copy of for every person that’s here today. A wealthy, anonymous donor was so moved by this book that he contacted the publisher and said “I will donate up to 500 copies of this book to any church that asks for them.” So if you would like a copy, we will have ushers at the exits following the service with a copy of this book.
But here is the way Dane Ortlund explains what it means for Jesus to sympathize with our weaknesses. He says,
Jesus is not Zeus. He was a sinless man, not a sinless Superman. He woke up with bed head. He had pimples at thirteen. He never would have appeared on the cover of Men’s Health (he had “no beauty that we should desire him,” Isa. 53:2). He came as a normal man to normal men. He knows what it is to be thirsty, hungry, despised, rejected, scorned, shamed, embarrassed, abandoned, misunderstood, falsely accused, suffocated, tortured, and killed. He knows what it is to be lonely. His friends abandoned him when he needed them most; had he lived today, every last Twitter follower and Facebook friend would have un-friended him when he turned thirty-three—he who will never un-friend us.
Someone needs to know this today: God still sees you right now.
- In the midst of your hurt and pain. God sees you
- In your struggle and hardship. God sees you.
- in you your confusion and tears – God sees you.
- In your secret sin, God sees you.
- In your addiction, God sees you.
- In your broken relationships, God sees you.
When God looks down on us, He sees two categories of people…only two. There are those who are “in Christ” and those who are not.
Those who are in Christ have acknowledged their sin. They know they can’t hide from the God Who Sees. But they trusted that Jesus, who according to Hebrews was tempted just like us in every way, yet didn’t sin, took our place when He died on the cross.
Notice that the writer of Hebrews describes Jesus in the present tense: He has passed through the heavens. We have a high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses. Why? Because three days after Jesus died, Jesus rose again.
When we place our faith and trust in Jesus, God no longer sees us and our sin, but instead sees His Son.
Col. 3:3-4 – “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”
You can’t appear with Him in glory if your life is not hidden with Christ in God.
What does God see when He sees you? Does he see Christ due to you trusting in his sacrificial and substitutionary death on your behalf or does he see someone following their own rule and reign?
I do know this – God sees and what He sees is always certain.
If you don’t know this God that sees and cares in a personal way, I want to invite you to know Him today.
And if you do know Him, know with confidence that He is still seeing you…everything you do…and still caring for you like only He can.
Let’s pray together.
