Before I Knew Him, He Knew Me
I get this feeling that comes over me when I see someone standing alone at the edge of the sea, staring out as if listening for something only they can hear. Once I even saw a dog doing the same — motionless, gazing at the horizon as though it too had a private world beyond my reach.
And sometimes I explore my own thaughts . When I listen to Solveig’s Song, or the adagio in Grieg’s Piano Concerto, or the theme from Dances with Wolves, I am struck by how far my mind travels and how abruptly it stops. The music lifts me toward a place I can almost sense, yet never fully enter. My mind has walls. It hints at infinity but cannot cross into it.
These moments draw me toward larger questions — the kind that sit just beyond the reach of tidy answers. What is infinity? How can Scripture reveal Jesus as part of the Godhead and yet distinct as a person from the Father? How does the human mind hold paradox without resolving it?
There is another question beneath all these questions: What is happening in God’s world while I am living in mine?
There is a beautiful and unsettling glimpse of this in the encounter between Jesus and Nathanael. Nathanael had never met Jesus, yet when Jesus saw him approaching, He said, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” Nathanael was puzzled. “How do you know me?” he asked.
Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.”
Whatever Nathanael had been doing beneath that fig tree, Jesus knew. Nathanael had been somewhere Jesus was not visibly present, doing something Jesus had not been told about by Philip. Yet Jesus saw him.
And that must have been an extraordinary moment for Nathanael. He thought he was simply living inside his own little world, beneath a fig tree, unseen by the man standing before him. But he discovered that his world was already fully visible to Jesus.
Nathanael did not know Jesus, but Jesus knew Nathanael.
There is something deeply moving about that. We spend our lives trying to understand God, trying to work out what He sees and what He is doing, while all the time we are the ones who are completely known. There are rooms in our minds that no other human being can enter, memories we cannot adequately explain, thoughts that come and go without words, longings whose origins we barely understand. We may not even understand ourselves. Yet none of this is hidden from God.
Maybe this is part of what it means to encounter Jesus. We imagine that we are the ones searching for Him, but then, sometimes, we discover that we have been seen all along.
All of this surfaced again this morning as I walked with God in my morning prayer and read Psalm 131:1–2. Only two verses, yet they carry enormous spiritual weight. It is one of those psalms that seems almost childlike in its simplicity, but becomes deeper the longer you sit with it. It is a psalm about quieting the soul before God.
We enter the mind of a man who lived 3000 years ago and yet, he is not different from us. David begins with humility: “My heart is not proud, LORD, my eyes are not haughty…” He doesn’t merely claim he avoids arrogant behaviour; he goes beneath behaviour to the heart. Pride, biblically, is not only thinking you are better than others. It can also be the restless conviction that you must understand everything, control everything, solve everything, or be important enough to matter. David is saying, in essence, I don’t need to be the centre of the universe. And that is profoundly liberating.
Then he adds, “I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.” He is not rejecting thought or inquiry. Scripture encourages us to seek wisdom. But David recognises a boundary: there are things that belong to God which we cannot carry. There is a difference between seeking understanding and demanding mastery. We can exhaust ourselves trying to explain every mystery, predict every outcome, understand every person, and control every tomorrow. Psalm 131 gently says: You don’t have to.
Some mysteries are not burdens but invitations — not to anxiety, but to trust.
Then comes the heart of the psalm: “But I have calmed and quieted my soul…” David likens his soul to a weaned child with its mother. A nursing infant is restless because it wants something. A weaned child rests simply because it is near the one who loves it. That is spiritual maturity: not abandoning questions, not suppressing longing, but resting in God even when understanding has reached its limit.
At first, our relationship with God often centres on what He gives: Give me this. Fix this. Protect me. Explain this. There is nothing wrong with asking; Jesus teaches us to ask. But there is a deeper place the soul can reach: Even when I do not understand what You are doing, I can rest in who You are.
And Nathanael gives me another way of seeing this.
Nathanael was concerned with what he could see and what he knew. Jesus was standing before him, but Jesus knew something about Nathanael that Nathanael could not have known Jesus knew. There was a part of Nathanael’s world that lay beyond Nathanael’s awareness of Jesus — but it did not lie beyond Jesus’ awareness of Nathanael.
That is the difference between us and God.
We live from the inside out. We see only what our eyes, minds, memories and senses allow us to see. God sees the whole. We encounter one moment at a time; He is not confined by our sequence of moments. We wonder what lies beyond the edge of our understanding, while nothing lies beyond His.
And that is why Psalm 131 does not tell us to solve the mystery. It tells us to quiet the soul.
The psalm gives us a threefold movement: humility, stillness, hope.
First: I don’t have to be God.
Then: I can quiet my soul.
Finally: I can place my hope in God.
It echoes Jesus’ teaching about becoming like a child. Childlikeness is not childishness; it is dependence without shame. A child does not need to understand the whole world before trusting a loving parent.
That is one of the great invitations of this psalm: you may be intelligent without needing to know everything; responsible without needing to control everything; curious without being consumed by questions; confronted by mystery without losing faith. You may simply rest in God.
Nathanael thought he was beneath a fig tree, hidden from Jesus.
He was not.
And there are moments in our own lives when we feel as though we are beneath our own fig tree — alone with our thoughts, our questions, our private struggles, our half-understood hopes. Yet the Christian claim is astonishing: you are seen.
Before you understood Him, He knew you.
Before you began searching for Him, He had already seen you.
And perhaps, ultimately, that is where the soul finds its rest. Not in knowing everything about God, but in knowing that God knows everything about us — and still invites us to come near.
And then comes that final word in Psalm 131: forevermore.
God does not offer the soul a momentary hiding place. He offers Himself as its home.
Psalm 131, in miniature, whispers:
Lower your eyes. Quiet your heart. Let God be God. Rest beside Him. And hope.
A very small psalm with a very large God behind it.