The Omni-Experience of God
Consider this confession from the apostle Peter in Acts 11:34-35: 34: Then Peter began to speak, ‘I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism, but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right.’
God shows no favoritism and is not limited to experiencing what goes through specific genders, nationalities, ages, races, economic classes, marital status or health.
God is not limited to a human experience. He experiences our bodies the way we do. He experiences the Christian woman’s life as she does, so He is able to understand a woman’s perspective on marriage, having children and her desired place in the world.
God is in His people no matter their ages, so He understands our perspectives at every age. God understands the energy and vigor of youth, and also the restrictions and limitations of aging. He is in us, so He experiences our lives as they are lived.
God experiences different races and nationalities. He knows what it’s like to be a minority.
God experiences different economic classes. As He dwells in rich Christians, God knows the trappings of wealth, the posh lifestyle and advantages and disadvantages. God also experiences the ruthlessness of poverty as He is in the lives of His people in the squalor of slums and tin shacks. God also can relate to middle-class suburbia and occupations.
God is across the labor spectrum. He understands what is to be a doctor or nurse concerned over their patient, or an aide looking after the elderly in a care facility. He knows what it’s like to be on the battlefield as a soldier, running into burning buildings as a firefighter and responding to distress calls as a law enforcement officer.
He experiences life as a tradesman through His people while they are working on cars, building homes, making repairs, fixing machinery, picking up the garbage, ringing up the sales as a clerk, waiting on customers, selling cars, delivering goods, styling hair, coaching sports. The list goes on.
God, while living in His people, experiences and understands what it is to lie in a hospital bed, suffering. He knows what it is to have the frustrations of teenage life and to grow a body.
God understands every Christian’s temptations and weaknesses. He knows what it’s like to be tall or short, heavy or thin. He experiences everything. He understands what it is to be intellectually disadvantaged.
God lives the human life through each of his people, and that life as it was lived in its time. God isn’t just experiencing our lives in the here and now, but has experienced each of His people’s lives in the past also. So God experienced slavery as an African American. God experienced the Great Depression and those hard times. God experienced life in the colonial days of America. He also experienced life in the Middle Ages, as a slave, as a pauper.
God feels what we feel, from loneliness and the betrayal of adultery to the anxiety of job loss and the struggle against addictions.
He also experiences the joy of a baby’s arrival, the excitement of the promotion. The feelings aren’t His in origination, they are ours, but they are His experiential because God is in us.
God experiences our failures, struggles and successes. God is also in the recovery. God knows where we used to be as well as He knows where we never were. And He’s in our life with us through and through.
It’s true, we are not our own. Whatever our gender, age, class, stage of life, race, emotions, trials, that’s his life experience also. He lives in each us, experiencing us.