God's Anatomy upon Man's Heart
(Heb 4:13) "But all things are naked and open unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do."
We are met this day to humble our souls, and to bring our censer, as Aaron once did, and step in, that the wrath of the great God may be appeased. Was there ever more need to lie in sackcloth than when the kingdom almost lies in ashes? Or to shed tears, than when this nation has shed so much blood? These days are called in scripture soul-afflicting days: "for whatsoever soul it be that shall not be afflicted in that same day, he shall be cut off from among his people" (Lev 23:29). And certainly that may be one reason why there is so much affliction upon the state, because there is so little affliction of soul. Our condition is low, but our hearts are high. God sees with what hearts we now come, what is our spring, what our center; his eye is upon us. So says my text: "all things are naked and open."
I will set aside the connection to what precedes, lest I be forestalled, and treat the words as a complete proposition in themselves. We have here a map of God's knowledge. But before I draw anything from it, I will first open up the terms. In the law, the lamps were lit before the incense was burned; I may draw a parallel: first the judgment must be enlightened by doctrine, before the affections are set on fire. Ministers must first be shining lamps, and then burning ones.
All things are naked. This is a metaphor drawn from stripping the skin off an animal, which then appears naked. So our hearts are said to be naked; they lie open to the eye of God, with no covering. There is no veil over the heart of a sinner but the veil of unbelief, and this covering is itself what makes him naked.
That is not all, the apostle goes further: they are naked and open. This alludes to the cutting up of the sacrifices under the law, where the priest divided the animal into pieces, so that its inward parts became visible. Or it may allude to a dissection, where every part is opened and examined, the mesentery, the liver, the arteries. Such a dissection God performs on the heart: he cuts up the inward parts and makes a distinction, this is flesh, that is spirit; this is faith, that is fancy. He makes a division, like the knife that separates flesh from bone, bone from marrow, sinew from vein. All things are open; they are laid open before him.
The next word is all things. Nothing escapes his eye, and in this God's knowledge infinitely differs from ours. We cannot see in the dark, nor can we see many things at once, but it is not so with him. There is nothing so deep that God will not bring it into the light, "who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness," and he sees many things at once; indeed, they are to him as if they were but one. All things, represented to him in the pure crystal of his own essence, are but a single thing.
Again, "unto his eye." Eyes are ascribed to God not properly, but by metaphor. Idols have eyes, "yet they see not"; God has no eyes, yet he sees. The eye of God in scripture stands for his knowledge; all things are naked to his eye, that is, they are plain to his knowledge. We cannot sin except in the face of our Judge.
The last phrase is with whom we have to do, to whom we must give an account, to whom we must answer.
The words, thus opened, fall into these parts: here is the Judge, namely, him; the matter under examination, all things; the evidence given in, that all things are naked; the clearness of that evidence, naked and open; the witnesses, his eyes; and the persons to be judged, either for life or death, we, that is, every individual person, for none are excepted from this general court of assize, with whom we have to do.
The proposition I will expand on is this:
Doctrine: That the most secret, hidden designs of man's heart are all unlocked and clearly laid open before the Lord.
I could bring forward a whole cloud of witnesses giving their full vote and testimony to this truth. I will rest on two or three, that in the mouth of three witnesses this great truth may be established.
"He knows the secrets of the heart" (Ps 44:21), in the original it is the hidden things of the heart, those most veiled and masked from human perception.
And: "thou knowest my thoughts afar off" (Ps 139:2). Here are two phrases that set out the infiniteness of God's knowledge.
First, "thou knowest my thoughts," there is nothing comparable to a thought.
First, for its subtlety: it is called "the imagination of the thought" (Gen 6:5), or, as the word may be rendered, the first embryo and forming of the thought, something very subtle, and scarcely discernible.
Second, for its speed: our thoughts are winged, like the cherubim; they will in an instant travel over the whole world. They are "swifter than eagles" (2 Sam 1:23), but he who rides upon the swift cloud can overtake them; he can outpace them.
Third, for their incongruity: our thoughts are tangled and knotted together, with no logical order among them, yet even these are known to God and set in their proper place. What David says of his own limbs may be said of our thoughts: "are they not all written in thy book?"
Afar off, that is, first, God knows our thoughts before we ourselves know them. He knows what designs lie in the heart, designs men would certainly pursue, if he did not turn the wheel another way. God knew what was in Herod's mind before Herod himself knew it, that he would destroy the child Jesus. God knows our thoughts afar off; he sees what blood and venom are in the heart of a sinner, though it never finds an outlet. He looks at the intention, though it never comes to be carried out.
Second, afar off means that God knows our thoughts when we ourselves have forgotten them. They are far off to us, but present to him. "These things hast thou done, and I kept silence: thou thoughtest I was such an one as thyself," that is, that I had a weak memory, "but I will reprove thee, and set thy sins in order before thee" (Ps 50:21). Millions of years are to him but a brief pause in between; and lest we think God forgets, he keeps a book of records: "I saw the dead, small and great, stand before the Lord, and the books were opened" (Rev 20:12). God writes down: another entry, such a sin, and if the debt is not settled, there will be a heavy reckoning. But for every believer, the ledger is crossed out; the black lines of sin are canceled by the red lines of Christ's blood.
To cite one more scripture: "the night shineth as the day" (Ps 139:12). The clouds are no canopy; night draws no curtain across, or obstructs, his knowledge. We cannot write our sins in so small or so strange a script that God cannot read it; he has the key to every one. Indeed, we ourselves do not always know what to make of his providences, "his way is in the sanctuary" (Ps 77:13), we cannot read his handwriting, but he understands our hearts without needing a commentary. He is privy to all our treachery; we cannot climb so high but he sees us, we cannot dig so low but he takes notice.
The men of Babel were climbing very high; they set out to build a city and tower whose top would reach heaven, and in a sense it did, for God saw them the whole while. And what became of it? "He divided their language" (Gen 11:7–8). Achan dug deep to hide his plunder, saying, "no eye shall see," and hid the Babylonian garment in the earth, with the wedge of gold, but God exposed his theft (Josh 7:12).
If there is anyone here who, when they should have been doing God's work, has instead been by stealth hiding away the Babylonian garment, growing rich, feathering their own nest, instead of driving nails to fasten God's temple together, driving a wedge of gold into their own chest, God sees it. Let me tell you, all the gain you get, you may as well put in your eyes; indeed, if you belong to God, you must, and weep it out again. God has a window that looks into your heart. Momus complained of Vulcan that he had not set a window in every man's chest; God has such a window. He is the great overseer. We come into the world as onto a stage; every man plays his part or scene; God is both the audience and the Judge.
You have seen the doctrine proved.
For the amplification, let us consider what the knowledge of God is: it is a most pure act by which he knows, in a single instant, both himself in himself and all things outside himself, not only what is necessary and what is possible, but what will ever exist, after a most perfect, exact, and unfailing manner. From this description we may draw two things.
1. There is no succession in God's knowledge; our knowledge moves from effect to cause, but it is not so with him.
2. Things that do not exist have an objective place in his knowledge. "He calls things that are not, as if they were" (Rom 4:17), even things that are not yet have an idea within his knowledge.
Question: Here a question may be raised: if there is such perfection in the knowledge of God, then does he know sin?
Answer: The scholars distinguish a double knowledge in God. There is, first, a knowledge of pure intelligence, and by this he knows evil through its contrary good, as light exposes darkness, as we say, the straight rule shows what is crooked. Second, there is a knowledge of approval. In this sense God does not know sin, for he hates it and punishes it. Christ was made sin, yet he knew no sin, he knew it so as to hate it, not so as to commit or approve it.
I move on to the reasons.
Reason 1. From his creation. God is the Father of lights, and so he must see. It is his own argument: "he that planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that formed the eye, shall he not see?" (Ps 94:9). Whoever makes a watch knows every pin and wheel in it, and though these wheels turn against one another, he knows the true and perfect motion of the watch, and the spring that sets those wheels going. "He that formed the eye, shall he not see?" Man may be compared to a spiritual watch. The affections are the wheels, the heart is the spring; the motion of this watch is false, for the heart is deceitful, but God, who made this watch, knows its true motion, however false it runs, and the spring that sets its wheels going. God knows us better than we know ourselves; he is like Ezekiel's wheels, full of eyes, and, as Augustine says, he is all eye.
Reason 2. From his omnipresence. He is all-knowing because he is everywhere present. "Do not I fill heaven and earth?" (Jer 23:24). He is nowhere confined, and yet nowhere absent; his reach extends everywhere. God has an eye in councils, in armies; he lays the heart open. He sees what men's designs are, and where they are heading. If hatred wears the livery of friendship, if ambition comes masked as humility, if religion is made a stepping stool to reach the saddle of promotion, God sees it. "and tho' they dig into hell, thence shall my hand take them" (Amos 9:2). God can unlock hell itself.
Plato says of the king of Lydia that he had a ring which, when he turned its head toward his palm, let him see everyone while he himself walked invisible. In just this way, God observes all our actions while remaining himself unseen, as the apostle argues (1 Tim 6:16). So the scholars rightly say that God fills every place completely, man may be confined to a place, angels may be assigned to a place, but God is present everywhere by filling it entirely. His center is everywhere, and his eye is always at his center.
Objection 1. But is it not said, "I will go down and see whether it be done altogether according to the cry" (Gen 18:21)?
Answer: It cannot mean that God was ignorant, for though a cry is mentioned, this is spoken after the manner of a judge, who first examines the case before passing sentence. So to answer that scripture, "I will go down and see," it implies two things.
First, the restraint God exercises when engaged in a work of justice. God does not make the sword the judge; he first weighs matters in the balance; he always measures judgment against the line before he draws the line of destruction. When God undertakes a work of justice, he does not act in a riot, striking wherever it happens to land, but proceeds as if on a circuit against offenders, "I will go down and see." He does not punish rashly. This may be a useful lesson for those who hold power: they must work by line and plumb line, judging the case rather than the person; they must proceed in righteousness, or else their seeming zeal is no better than wildfire, not justice, but violence.
Second, "I will go down and see" signals God's patience in waiting for sinners; he waited until the cry rose up. God endures a great deal of injury at our hands before justice draws the sword. He spins mercy out into patience, and stretches patience into long-suffering. Oh, had God's patience not been infinite, we would long since have spent the whole stock of it. But let no sinner presume, though God is long-suffering, he does not tell us how long. When the cry rises, God comes down. If pride, lust, and oppression abound, God will hear the cry, and will quench the fire of sin with a shower of blood.
Objection 2. "I will search Jerusalem with candles" (Zeph 1:12), implying that something is hidden beyond his reach.
Answer: Not that God needs any candles to see by. Though it is said, "the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord" (Prov 20:27), this candle is not for him to see by, but for us. So this searching implies two things.
First, the exactness of God's knowledge, he has as deep an insight as men usually gain only by searching. Second, God threatens to search because he wants us to search. As it is written: "let us search and try our ways" (Lam 3:40). God's searchers are now abroad, his judgments. Let us find out our sins, or else our sins will find us out.
Application 1. And this has two branches.
Branch 1. "What manner of persons ought we to be" (2 Pet 3:11)? Does God have a window that opens into our hearts? Does he examine our actions with such a critical eye? Oh, what holiness, what sincerity, what exemplary piety becomes us, standing in such a presence! Were we to come before some great monarch, what solemn preparations we would make. Shall the eye of a king accomplish so much, and not the eye of God? The king can only see the outside, there may be treason within, for all he knows. But God has a key to the heart: "I the Lord search the heart" (Jer 17:10). And will this not command reverence? In these days of solemn humbling, God's eye rests chiefly on the heart. God looks there most, where we look least.
Some have no heart at all, sin has stolen it away. Others have too much heart, "an heart and an heart" (Ps 12:2). Others have hearts good for nothing, earthly hearts, like "Saul that was hid among the stuff" (1 Sam 10:22). Some have angels' tongues, but, like Nebuchadnezzar, have been given the heart of a beast. Brethren, if our hearts stood where our faces do, this would be a day of blushing, we would be ashamed to look at one another. Remember, God has a key to the heart.
When we come to these solemn duties, God asks the question Jehu asked Jehonadab (2 Kgs 10:15): he greeted him and said to him, "is thy heart right, as my heart is with thy heart?" And he said, "it is. If it be, give me thy hand: and he took him up into the chariot."
