GOD KNOWS OUR INMOST SOUL

Barnes Notes on the Old Testament for The Book of Amos chapter four says, “Their God whom they worshiped was but nature. Amos tells them, who “their God” is, whom they were to prepare to meet. He describes Him as the Creator of that, which to man seems most solid, to go furthest back in times past. Before the everlasting mountains were, God is, for He made them. Yet God is not a Creator in the past alone. He is a continual Worker. “And forms the wind,” that finest subtlest creature, alone invisible in this visible world; the most immaterial of things material, the breath of our life, the image of man’s created immaterial spirit, or even of God’s uncreated presence, the mildest and the most terrific of the agents around us. But the thought of God as a Creator, or Preserver, who is “outside” of us affects man but little.

To man, a sinner, far more impressive than all majesty of Creative power, is the thought that God knows his inmost soul. So he adds; “and declares unto man what is his thought,” that is, his meditation, before he puts it into words. God knows our thoughts more truly than we ourselves. We disguise them to ourselves, know not our own hearts, and wish not to know them. God reveals us to ourselves. As He says, “The heart is deceitful above all things; who can know it? I, the Lord, search the heart; I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings,” wrote Jeremiah, a prophet. A man’s own conscience tells him that God’s knowledge of His inmost self is no idle knowledge. “If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart and knows all things,” wrote the apostle John.”

“But those things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man.” Jesus