The hairs of your head are numbered

“The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Observe what a full knowledge God has of each one of His children. If there were nobody else in the world except you, and God had nothing else to do but to think of you, and there were no objects of His attention beyond yourself, and His eternal mind had no object of consideration but you only, the Lord would not then know more about you than He does now. The omniscience of God is concentrated upon every single being, and yet it is not divided by the multiplicity of its objects; it is not the less upon any single one because there are so many. How it should astonish us, that the Lord knows us at this moment so intimately as to count every hair of our heads! The knowledge which the Lord has concerning His people is most minute, and takes in those small matters which men set down as unconsidered trifles. He knows what you and I hardly wish to know; He knows that which we may be content to leave unknown, “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.”

He knows us better than our friends know us. Many a man has a kind friend who knows his affairs most accurately, but even such a familiar acquaintance has never counted the hairs of your head. No man’s wife has done that, nor even the doctor who has, by his long attendance upon us, become aware of the condition and health of every part of our body. God knows us better than we know ourselves. Nobody knows how many hairs he has upon his own head, but the very hairs of your head are all numbered by One who knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows matters about us that we could not of ourselves discover. There are secrets of the heart which are unknown even to ourselves, but they are not secrets to Him. His penetrating knowledge reaches to the most hidden things of life and spirit.

Do you not think that a charmingly tender knowledge is intended when we are told that the Lord counts the very hairs of our heads? Does it not intimate how much He thinks of them? There are some, who love us very much, and they are always aiming at our good, but God goes beyond them all in a more than motherly care of us, strikingly minute in its thoughtfulness. We see that His love passes the love of women, for the very hairs of our head are numbered, and that at every period of our lives. Does it not imply a very sympathetic care? When one has a sick child, and watches over it night and day, every little fact about it is known and noted. The darling looks a little pale today, or he fails a little in his appetite; the symptom is anxiously noted. You know how easily love can degenerate into foolishness in that direction, but, without any folly, God is infinitely careful and kind towards us, for He knows when we have lost a hair from our head. We cannot make one hair white or black, but He knows when they turn white with grief or age. He understands all about our fading and our growing grey, the little details concerning our body as well as the minute circumstances that try our souls. It seems to me—I do not know how it strikes you—as meaning a very, very, very intimate, tender, and affectionate knowledge of us, and the fact that the Lord thus graciously looks upon us should fill us with joy.

The Hairs of Your Head Are Numbered - Sermon 2005, Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Photo credit: By Derek Wolfgram from San Jose, CA (2013-08-29 05.47.06) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons