Here we find an expression that is most strange- God knows my heart. Nine times out of ten the speaker using this expression is seeking comfort in the face of some sin. I do something wrong. Either my own conscience or someone else points out my wrongdoing. That sense of guilt stings, so I seek to salve it by affirming that I’m still good because God knows my heart. My behavior may look bad to the casual observer. The all-knowing God, however, looks beyond the surface, and finds in my heart a veritable bouquet of sugar and spice and everything nice.
It is true enough that God knows our hearts. There is nothing hidden from Him. He will never allow circumstances or other outward so called “evidences” to mislead Him in any way. He knows the innocent to be innocent and the guilty to be guilty. Which is precisely why this expression “God knows my heart” ought to terrify us rather than comfort us. While our hearts are adepts at deception, they never fool Him. They fool us daily, but never Him. That we think Him knowing our hearts is a comforting thought reveals that we have already been fooled by our own deceptive hearts.
Where this expression gets truly strange, however, is where it actually is a comforting thought. Yes, there is a way to understand this expression and to rejoice in it. It is not that God knowing my heart leads me to believe that He knows my innocence. Rather it is that God knowing my heart leads me to believe that He knows my guilt. Why would that be a comfort? Because He loves me anyway. I never have to fear that God will one day discover something worse about me that will change His perspective on me.
God knows, better than the devil himself, better than me, better than those I have sinned against, exactly how dirty, dark, deceitful my heart is, and yet He still has adopted me into His family, loves me with an immutable, eternal, infinite and personal love, by name. He knows my heart and finds there not something lovely and honorable but something He has already forgiven in Christ. There is no waiting for the other shoe to drop. There is nothing to hide.
God’s infinite knowledge of all things, including each one of our hearts, is never going to change. It is an inescapable given. When we, fools that we are, seek to hide our hearts from Him, we can be assured they will be exposed. When we, by the power of His Spirit, confess and expose all that is in our hearts to Him, He covers them with the blood of His Son, He of the perfect, sinless heart.
Yes, He knows my heart. By His grace He is revealing more of its darkness to me, even as He is at work washing it. And He has declared me to be just, a saint, His own beloved son.
Oh what a gospel.