Psalm 1:6 “For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish.”  (All quotes are KJV.)

When the Bible speaks of God knowing something in particular, or indicates that God learns something, does this imply that there are things that He does not know?

After Abraham shows his willingness to offer Isaac to the Lord in Genesis 22, God tells him, “Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.”  Prior to that act of willing sacrifice, did God not know that Abraham truly loved, trusted, and feared Him?

Of course, when humans approach the subject of God’s knowledge, we tread on ground both holy and unfamiliar.  The finite can hardly expect to grasp the infinite.  But in recognizing that God is not like us, we find the key to the answer of this question.

The key is that the Scriptures refer to God’s knowledge in two ways.  The first is the familiar one – God is omniscient, all-knowing.  There is no fact related to present, past, future, or even what might have been, that God does not know.  1 John 3:20 tells us, “God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”  If God were a computer, every possible fact would be stored on His hard drive.  Nothing can ever take Him by surprise, because He knows all things.

But there is a second way the Bible refers to the knowledge of God.  We find this concept presented with Abraham and in Psalm 1:6.  In passages like these, God’s knowledge is that upon which He acts.  If God were a computer, this would be the knowledge contained in the programs He is currently running.  He has access to all the rest, but He is only acting upon the information in the programs that are running.  So when God says that He knows now that Abraham fears Him, He is saying that now that Abraham has demonstrated his faith, God can act in Abraham’s life and on Abraham’s behalf on the basis of that faith.

This is the idea of Psalm 1:6, when God says that He knows the way of the righteous.  Of course, none of us are righteous on our own:  “there is none righteous, no, not one.”  But “Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness,” and so it is with us.  “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.”  

I am righteous in God’s eyes once my faith has been placed in Christ, and so God now knows my way.  Not that He doesn’t know everything about everyone, but He is actively involved in my life, acting upon His knowledge of my way.  While the ungodly are left to themselves, my way is a program God is running.  God is actively involved in my life, because He knows my way.