Naked Before God
We should walk through life naked before God.
What does that mean?
I say naked before God in contrast to shielded from God.
What does it mean to be shielded from God?
It means being unwilling to be seen by God, avoiding God’s gaze, refusing to regard and acknowledge the reality that God sees all things without exception, including the private depths of our hearts.
The reality is that I am naked before God whether I recognize it or not. I do not limit His knowledge by ignoring the reality of His knowledge.
I can acknowledge the reality of my nakedness before God. I can stand before God, be known by Him, and know that I am known by Him. I can act in light of the reality that I am fully known by Him. When I walk through life naked before God, I am under no illusion that I can hide secrets in the privacy of my heart. I do what is right externally, because here I am seen by both man and God, and internally, because here I am seen by God.
It is a relief to walk naked before God. Without His gaze, I will attempt to hide secrets in the privacy of my heart. In recognition of His accountability, I can do what is right, even in secret, and this is what I want. I want to be good all the way down to the private depths of my heart, and so I am grateful for His omniscience.
God’s omniscience is not a mere imaginary concept, a mere religious construct. It is a self-evident reality. When I act, for example, when I draw my pen across a piece of paper, I bring a real action into being, and that action has a real effect – a mark is left on the paper. As Isaac Newton articulated in his third law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. No action is small enough or private enough to escape this law. Even my private thoughts –real things that I bring into being, equally as real as the act of drawing my pen across paper – have real effect. We know this. If I spend my days indulging in private sexual fantasies, will this have no effect? Will it not cause me to do and say certain things and not others? Will it not affect the movement of my eyes in public? Will it not affect my interactions with women? Will it not at least spend my limited attention on fantasies instead of productive thinking? And therefore will I not I lack, as a consequence of my fantasizing, the output of that forgone productive thinking? Of course, we know that our private thoughts have real and meaningful effects. What I mean to emphasize now is that no thought is too small to have an effect. A single sexual fantasy is the seed of a habit, and ending its growth requires effortful correction.
What does this have to do with God’s omniscience? God is the sustainer of all things. God is the lawmaker who governs the patterns of reality. The effect of every cause is God’s judgment – this is not a profound theological claim but merely a matter of definition, and if you disagree, you do not understand what I mean when I say God. When I say God, I mean that ultimate governor of cause and effect in reality, the great power who governs all things. Nothing escapes His notice. No act is too small to escape His judgment – in other words, no real cause is too small to produce a real effect.
This is a terrifying reality. We have no hiding place. There is no escape. I can produce no meaningless action, not even in the privacy of my heart. Even my thoughts matter. So what do I do? I recognize the reality of my nakedness before God, and I submit myself entirely to Him. I do what is right before Him even in the privacy of my heart.
Finally, thanks to His gaze, I can be good.