In school, every child is assigned a number in the Admission Register and is also given an Identity card. In the university, he is given a Registration number and an Identity card. These measures are to avoid impersonation. Evil people may still do that. Two identical twins were reputed to have earned a name in evil. One of them would contract the services of a lady of easy virtue and after a while, pretending to be going out to urinate, his twin brother would replace him. The lady would not know and settlement would be as if it was one man.
In 1991, a village woman left Nigeria for the US for baby-sitting. Thinking that it was still business as usual, she did a lot of unprintable things, when nobody was around. One day, they replayed to her, the taped record of her activities, the good, the bad and the ugly. Oyibo! A lady in Dallas, US, visited her children in school and forgot her telephone there and mid-way to her journey home, she remembered it and turned back for it. None of the members of the security outfit admitted seeing it. The trouser pocket of one of them, she observed, was protruding. She suspected that her phone was there but realized that subjecting him for a search might attract legal action against her if he was not with it.
A mere trifling could make people in the US sue that they have been stressed and it will end in cash compensation. She rather reported to the school management. They assured her that the CCTV would have the story about her phone. As she was leaving, the security people asked her what the management said about her phone and she told them. ‘Let us look for it again,’ one of them said. A few minutes later, the phone was brought to her. Oyibo! Man has tried but the limit of the CCTV is that it can only pick objects within its focus.
The story is different with God. He told Jeremiah, the Prophet, that He knew him before He formed him in his mother’s womb. Parents do not know all the things their children do but God does. The implication is that nobody can hide anything from Him. In 1993, I attended a training programme in Oil and Gas at the World Trade Centre, New York. We were on floor 103. During my idle times, I would take delight in looking down from that lofty height, watching people on the streets. They never knew that I was there, muchless, watching them. I imagined then our folly in trying to hide anything from God, Who is in Heaven, a place higher by far than Floor 103 of World Trade Centre, New York.
Uncle Cain, the first son of Adam, looked this way and that way before killing Abel, his younger brother. In human court, lack of evidence might make him escape justice. It is not so in the Court of Heaven. To his consternation, God asked him where his brother was. “Thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground,” God told him.
Uncle Achan said, ‘When I saw among the spoils, a goody Babylonish garment and two hundred shekels of silver and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight, then I coveted them and took them and behold, they are laid in the earth in the midst of my tent and the silver under it’. There was no way any man could know all these. Before the battle, God’s children were told not to take anything there, but to destroy everything. Uncle disobeyed the command and nobody saw him what he did. Israel fought the battle with Ai, a city they would have defeated freely but did not. Their military leader, General Joshua, could not understand. What an insult to God and His people for AI to defeat them! He went into fasting. God told him to get up. That exercise was useless. There was fire on the mountain. ‘Get thee up; wherefore liest thou upon they face? Israel hath sinned’ – Joshua 7:11 & 12. The end result was that Achan and his family paid with their lives.
Sin is the cause of most of the problems we have: health challenges, poverty, divorce, imprisonment, et cetera. Most of the time, we resort to self-determined formulae: fasting, praying, financial sacrifice, rendering services in God’s House and all sorts of good works. The situation at the end remains the same. God was gracious to Joshua to have told him to discontinue his mourning. ‘Israel has sinned,’ He told him. Sin was the problem and what he was doing was not its reprieve. Achan, under duress, confessed the sin he committed. We should not do so. Conviction of what we did should compel us to make the confession. He paid for his sin but we will not pay for ours because our Lord Jesus has paid for it on the cross of Calvary. We should repent from it. That is the Good message of the Gospel writers to all men.
Many people believe that God is so busy in Heaven that He has no time to know the things we do. If they know that God does not only know, but that He is also interested in knowing, all the things we do, they will cease from committing evil. This is what morality is all about. Christianity is quite deeper than this. Morality is just an aspect of Christianity but not Christianity. A child of God does not commit sin because he is afraid of being caught in the web or that God, Who is all-knowing, will punish him for it. It is his love for God that makes him to hate sin as God does. He lives to please Him.
A child of God knows that God knows everything about him. When he is imagining something, right there inside his heart, God knows it. God deals with our intentions rather than what we do. It is possible to donate N100 Million to your Church. This is good and praiseworthy. This singular act will gain you much respect, especially, if it is announced but in many Churches, where no announcements of pledges and gifts are made, it may attract the respect of the leadership. The bad news about it is that God knows why you did so. This is a reminder to us, of the message God gave to Jeremiah, ‘I know you…’ He knows us. A human Judge may see when we slapped someone and if the matter is brought to his court, he will not say that he was present. In the Divine Court, God, the just Judge, sees all and also says all. In the Human court, you can appeal but in the Divine Court, there is no appeal. God’s verdict is final. Let us live to please Him.
That God knows everything about us gives us protection from evil men. “Touch not My anointed and do My prophets no harm,” Ps. 05:15. God warns those waging wars with His children. That He is all-knowing, however, makes us vulnerable to His wrath when we sin, for there is no place to hide from Him.
For further comment, Please contact: Osondu Anyalechi: 0802 3002-471;anyalechiosondu@yahoo,com