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The sermon teaches that God’s knowledge extends even to death, hell, and the deepest recesses of the human heart. Human beings are therefore condemned not only for visible actions but also for sinful thoughts, motives, promises, and religious pretense. Spurgeon presents divine omniscience as a warning of unavoidable judgment and as a practical summons to abandon sin and hypocrisy. The dominant emphasis is confrontational and warning-oriented, with repentance implied as the necessary response.
Theological center: God is perfectly omniscient: He sees every outward act, inward thought, and secret intention, and will judge all people accordingly.
Applications: Live before God’s watching eye · Abandon hidden sin · Examine religious sincerity · Consider practical atheism
Primary texts: Proverbs 15:11 · Jeremiah 17:10 · Jeremiah 23:24
“Hell and destruction are before the LORD: how much more then the hearts of the children of men?” Proverbs 15:11 YOU have often smiled at the ignorance of heathens who bow themselves before gods of wood and stone. You have quoted the words of Scripture and you have said, “Eyes have they, but they see not; ears have they, but they hear not.” You have therefore argued that they could not be gods at all, because they could neither see nor hear, and you have smiled contemptuously at the men who could so debase their understandings as to make such things objects of adoration. May I ask you one question—but one? Your God can both see and hear—would your conduct be in any respect different if you had a god such as those that the heathen worship? Suppose for one minute that JEHOVAH, who is nominally adored in this land, could be (though it is almost blasphemy to suppose it) smitten with such a blindness that He could not see the works and know the thoughts of man? Would you then become more careless concerning Him than you are now? I think not. In nine cases out of ten, and perhaps in a far larger and sadder proportion, the doctrine of divine omniscience, although it is received and believed, has no practical effect upon our lives at all. The mass of mankind forget God—whole nations who know His existence and believe that He beholds them, live as if they had no God at all. Merchants, farmers, men in their shops and in their fields, husbands in their families and wives in the midst of their households, live as if there were no God—no eye inspecting them, no ear listening to the voice of their lips, and no eternal mind always treasuring up the recollection of their acts. Ah! we are practical Atheists, the mass of us. Yea, all but those who have been born again and have passed from death unto life, be their creeds what they may, are Atheists, after all, in life. For if there were no God and no hereafter, multitudes of men would never be affected by the change—they would live the same as they do now—their lives being so full of disregard of God and His ways, that the absence of a God could not affect them in any great degree. Permit me, then, this morning, as God shall help me, to stir up your hearts. And may God grant that something I may say, may drive some of your practical Atheism out of you. I would endeavor to set before you, God the all-seeing one, and press upon your solemn consideration the tremendous fact that in all our acts, in all our ways, and in all our thoughts, we are continually under His observing eye. We have in our text, first of all, a great f…