By Alexis Patterson

“But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Romans 5:8

God, who is both all knowing (omniscient) and all good (omnibenevolent), which means He alone knows everything and is perfect; He goes through great lengths to prove His love for us. It is His love for us that keeps and covers us. Knowing before we even existed that we would need His forgiveness and redemption, He prepared Christ, who was with Him in the beginning, to die for us. 

Jeremiah 1:5 says, “I chose you before I formed you in the womb; I set you apart before you were born.” There could be the question: “If God is all knowing, does He like all of me?” Paul in Ephesians reminds of God’s rich grace towards us when he says this “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace that He richly poured out on us with all wisdom and understanding” Ephesians 1:7-8. This Scripture reminds us again that God, knowing all things (with all wisdom and understanding) poured out the riches of His grace. Yes, God likes all parts of us. In fact He doesn’t just like us, He LOVES us. 

Now, let me be clear, God is not tolerant of our sin. He detests our sin, but knowing we will make mistakes, He provides grace and mercy that we don’t earn to envelop us because of His love. God is all knowing! That shouldn’t scare us, we should rejoice in it. We serve an intentional God that FOREKNEW, everything you and I would ever do. Every action and word that would come from us, He already knew and, like it says in Jeremiah 1:5, HE CHOSE YOU. 

Have you ever been car shopping? You look for the car that is best on gas, low on maintenance, easy on the eyes, comfortable to sit in, and fits all your passengers. We choose a vehicle based on what it can do for us and how it will make our lives easier. With foreknowledge, we would never choose a lemon, a car that will break down only after having it for a month or a gas guzzler that we have to fill up every few days; the kind of car that needs tons of maintenance with parts that have to come from all over the world to fix. We would never jump into agreement with that kind of car. But God... God chose us knowing we would be fickle, unfaithful, disloyal, forgetful, absent, and all the untrustworthy adjectives we could list, and yet He chose to create us anyway. Ephesians 1:4 “For He chose us in Him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in love before Him.” The all-knowing God of the universe decided you were worth it. He has a plan and purpose for you.