God Can’t Learn

  

Did you know that God cannot learn? He does not have the ability. 

 

That may sound like blasphemy. When we speak of a person’s inability to learn, it is usually an offensive, even if honest, assessment. When a person is unable to learn, there is usually some mental explanation as to why. Some people cannot learn, period. Some people cannot grasp certain subjects (like me and algebra. OK, like me and math in general). We throw up our hands in desperation when someone cannot learn. 

 

And yet God cannot learn. Many times we say things like “God can do anything,” or “There is nothing that God cannot do.” In reality, there are several things that God cannot do. He cannot die or lie, for example. It is also true that God cannot learn. 

 

God cannot learn because there is nothing He does not already know. Learning implies a person is lacking in some knowledge, but that cannot be said of God. As A.W. Tozer so simply put it in his classic work The Knowledge of the Holy, “To think of a God who must sit at the feet of a teacher, even though that teacher be an archangel or a seraph, is to think of someone other than the Most Hight God, maker of heaven and earth.” Tozer continued, “He never discovers anything. He is never surprised, never amazed. He never wonders about anything, nor…does He seek information or ask questions.” 

 

Even when God asks questions of people, it is for the benefit of the one He is asking (“Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?”), not so that God can learn. 

 

We refer to this attribute of God as His divine omniscience. Isaiah posed this rhetorical question: “Who has directed the Spirit of the LORD, or as His counselor has taught Him? With whom did He take counsel, and who instructed Him, and taught Him in the path of justice? Who taught Him knowledge, and showed Him the way of understanding (40:13-14)?” The answer is nobody.

 

David once wrote, “Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, but the night shines as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to You (Psalm 139:12).” God is never in the dark about anything, because to God, the dark is the same as the light. Teachers often speak about that lightbulb coming on in the minds of their students when they finally catch on to a new concept, but for God, that light has been on even before He said “Let there be light.”  

 

Every time we learn something, it should be a comfort to remember that God never has.