Consider the following passages from the Bible (all from the N.K.J.V.). Read them carefully and see if you can figure out the common theme that courses through each of them.

The eyes of the Lord are in every place. Keeping watch on the evil and the good. (Proverbs 15:3)

For His eyes are on the ways of man. (Job 34:21)

For My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from My face, nor is their iniquity hidden from My eyes. (Jeremiah 16:17)

For the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, And He ponders all his paths. (Proverbs 5:21)

For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to Him… (2 Chronicles 16:9)

You are great in counsel and mighty in work, for your eyes are open to all the ways of the sons of men, to give everyone according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings. (Jeremiah 32:19)

And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account. (Hebrews 4:13)

The common theme is that each passage talks about the eyes of the Lord and how those eyes see everything that everybody does everywhere. God’s eyes see all the good and all the bad. They see all the sinless acts and all the sinful acts. They see all the instances of justice and all the instances of injustice. They don’t miss a thing.

There have been a few times in my life when someone did something awful enough to me or my family to cause me to literally look up to the sky and ask God either in my mind or out loud, “Did you see that?” That was my way of expressing to Him that I felt like He should have done something right then and there to punish the awfulness. In my way of thinking, the fact that a lightning bolt hadn’t immediately struck the guilty party must have meant that God hadn’t seen what had transpired.

Of course, in each of those instances God had no doubt seen what had happened. For one thing, the Bible teaches that He is omnipresent, which means that He, as a Spirit, is everywhere all at once. For another thing, the Bible teaches that He is omniscient, which means that He has all knowledge of all things. So, not only does God see everything, He knows every bit of backstory behind everything.

God seeing everything isn’t particularly comforting when we do wrong, is it? On the flip side, though, Him seeing everything when wrong is done to us is very comforting. Imagine a court case coming before a Judge. Both parties offer their accounts of what happened and the Judge has to decide who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Now imagine the Judge saying to both parties, “Before I render my ruling in this case, I want each of you know that I was a personal eyewitness to what happened.” Talk about evoking two very different reactions! A wave of terror would wash over the guilty party while a wave of confidence would wash over the innocent party. Well, such confidence is what you should feel anytime you know that you were in the right regarding a situation. You should rest in the assurance that God saw what happened and that He’s not going to make a mistake regarding the final outcome of the case.

Life can be hard, and there are few things harder than unjustly getting the shaft while the person who did you a wrong turn gets the goldmine. It’s times like those when you’ll feel like looking up to heaven and asking God, “Did you see that?” But anytime you are tempted to do that just remember that God did see it. That’s why you can leave the revenge to Him. As He says in Deuteronomy 32:35, Romans 12:19, and Hebrews 10:30, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay.” Granted, it’s hard to wait on God to do your avenging, but as you wait you can at least draw hope from the fact that He was an eyewitness to what happened, which means that He’s not buying the guilty person’s version of the story.