And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
Hebrews 4:13 (ESV)
This profound and solemn truth is one that man in his fallenness does not like to face: it is damaging to his self-esteem; it destroys his proud pretensions to wisdom and competence; and it discloses the futile superficiality of all the elaborate defenses which he seeks to erect against God. But God sees all things, as man never can, in the ultimate light of their undisguised reality; his gaze penetrates beneath the surface and beyond every specious façade to the radical heart of our being. Indeed, a man’s knowledge even of his own self is faulty and inadequate; and wisdom begins in his recognition of this fact and in the prayer that God therefore will search him and know him and reveal to him the true depths of his depravity and also the wonders of divine grace. The man who acknowledges that he is now and that he will be hereafter “naked and exposed to the eyes of the One with whom we have to reckon”, and that the discernment of God is always without error and his judgment righteous and equitable, is a man who is standing on the threshold of divine grace; for it is against the background of human guilt and powerlessness that the grace of God which, in Christ, brings forgiveness and victory is most particularly displayed.
Philip Edgcumbe Hughes
A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews