There is a way of picturing God that feels reverent but is actually small. It goes something like this: God is watching. He sees what you do, hears what you say, notes what’s in your heart, and in this way He comes to know you, the way anyone comes to know anyone, by observation, by paying close attention over time.
It sounds humble, but it is also, quietly, untrue of God. And worse, it reduces the mystery of God to something far smaller than the reality.
The Direction Reversed
God’s knowledge of you is not caused by you; it is the cause of you.
Sit with that for a moment, because it reverses the direction most of us assume without noticing. We think knowledge runs from the world to the knower. A fact happens, and then, afterward, someone finds it out. That is how you know things, and how I know things, but it is not how God knows anything at all.
God does not learn that you exist by watching you come into existence. You exist, at this moment, and at every moment before this one, because God knows you. His knowing is not a report filed after the fact, but the reason there is a fact to report.
The classical theologians had a phrase for this: God’s knowledge is causal. It is not dependent, receptive, or built up over time the way a portrait is built up in layers. It is closer to what an architect’s plan is to a building, except, in this case, the architect actually causes what he has in his mind.
And this is not merely about how you first came to exist. We tend to speak of creation in the past tense: God created the world, God created you. But your dependence upon Him did not end once He brought you into being.
God is the cause of your existence now, just as truly as He was at its first moment. He does not create you and then leave you to continue existing on your own. He holds you in being at every instant. If He ceased willing you to exist, there would be no independently existing “you” left behind. There would be nothing.
Say it plainly enough and it becomes almost dizzying: the reason you are reading this sentence right now is not first a fact about you that God then discovered. It is a truth eternally known, without beginning, in the mind of God, and realized in you only because the God who knows you also wills you to be.
Even your knowledge of yourself comes too late for this. You already have to exist before there is a self for you to know. God’s knowledge of you does not presuppose you. You presuppose it.
The Scriptural Pattern
None of this is foreign to Scripture. The same principle appears repeatedly, and plainly.
God, through Isaiah, describes Himself as “declaring the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10), and the wonder there isn’t that He’s a remarkably good guesser. God does not wait for what we call the future to become present before He knows it, any more than He waits for a thing to exist before He wills it to be.
Saint Paul goes further still, and further than most of us are comfortable going: God “calleth those things that are not, as those that are” (Romans 4:17). Read that slowly. God doesn’t wait for a thing to exist before naming it. The naming is how it comes to exist at all. Genesis gives us the pattern from the beginning: “And God said: ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). God speaks, and what He speaks comes to be.
What Remains a Mystery, and What Doesn’t
None of this eliminates the mystery of how God’s causal knowledge and providence coexist with genuinely free human acts. Thomists and Molinists have disputed the question for more than four centuries.
Thomists emphasize God’s causal priority even in the order of our free acts; Molinists appeal to God’s knowledge of what free creatures would choose in any possible set of circumstances. The disagreement is real, technical, and unresolved. The Church has never settled the dispute and permits either position, while forbidding either side from condemning the other as heretical.
Some of the sharpest minds the Church has ever produced have spent entire lifetimes on this question and left it, in the end, still a mystery. That should be a comfort rather than an embarrassment.
But notice what neither side is debating. Neither Thomists nor Molinists imagine God waiting for a creature to act and then discovering what it did. God’s knowledge does not trail behind creation like a person reading yesterday’s newspaper. The mechanism remains disputed. The direction does not. And it is the direction that changes everything.
And here, finally, is why any of this should matter to you on an ordinary Tuesday. If God knew you the way a stranger comes to know you, by watching, by accumulating impressions, by getting a read on your character over time, then His knowledge of you would always be partial, always catching up, and always a beat behind who you actually are.
That is not safety but surveillance.
But since God’s knowledge is causal rather than merely observational, then there has never been a version of you, not the one you were at seven, not the one you were last week in your worst moment, not the one reading these words now, that existed for even an instant outside of God actively and presently willing you to be. He does not merely know every moment of your existence; His knowing and willing are the reason there is an existence there to know.
Augustine found the words for this with extraordinary clarity when he realized, after years of looking everywhere else for God, that God had been interior intimo meo: “more inward to me than my own inmost self.” God had not been watching him from a distance. He had not been compiling a file. And what Augustine discovered about himself is true of you: God is closer to you than you are able to be to yourself, because your very ability to be anything at all is already His gift, and always was, and always will be.
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Editor’s Note: This is the second essay in a four-part series exploring what it means to be truly known by God. The series will address God’s perfect knowledge of us, the Incarnation, and certain ancient errors that often recur in new forms, all toward a deeper wonder and love of the God who knows us better than we know ourselves.