Before the Foundation of the World
As I sit here this morning with my first cup of coffee, my Bible open beside me, I find my mind resting on a single thought that I cannot move past.
It is a simple line of Scripture, but it carries a weight that feels almost too large to hold.
Before the foundation of the world I knew you.
I keep sitting with that sentence.
Not rushing past it.
Not treating it like familiar language.
Not reading it quickly the way we sometimes do when Scripture becomes something we assume we already understand.
Instead, I am trying to sit with it slowly.
Because if it is true and I believe it is then it changes how I understand my entire life.
Before the earth had shape.
Before the oceans spread across the globe.
Before mountains rose out of the ground.
Before history unfolded.
Before nations formed.
Before my parents ever existed.
Before my first breath.
God knew me.
Not in a casual sense.
Not in the way we sometimes say we “know” someone because we recognise their name or face.
But in a deep and intimate sense.
A knowing that reaches into the core of a person.
A knowing that sees the hidden architecture of a life.
A knowing that understands every layer of who I am.
That is the part that leaves me sitting here in awe this morning.
Because when I think about being known like that, I realise that God did not simply know the version of me that is easy to love.
He knew everything.
He knew the deep places in my heart that I still struggle with.
He knew the doubts.
The insecurities.
The fears.
The wounds that would shape my life.
He knew the thoughts that sometimes keep me awake at two in the morning when the world is quiet and my mind refuses to rest.
He knew the anger I would wrestle with.
The mistakes I would make.
The sins I would fall into.
The moments when I would try to run from Him.
The seasons when faith would feel thin.
The seasons when life would feel unbearably heavy.
None of that was hidden from Him.
And yet the Scripture still says something astonishing.
Before the foundation of the world I knew you.
Not tolerated you.
Not reluctantly allowed you to exist.
He knew me.
There is something deeply confronting about being fully known.
Most of us spend our lives carefully managing what others see.
We reveal certain parts of ourselves and hide others.
We show the pieces that feel acceptable.
The parts that feel strong.
The parts that feel respectable.
But the darker rooms of the heart often remain closed.
We fear what might happen if someone truly saw everything.
The doubts.
The scars.
The thoughts we are ashamed of.
The questions we sometimes whisper into the darkness.
To be fully known can feel terrifying.
Because if someone truly sees everything about us, they might decide we are not worth staying for.
But the knowing spoken of in Scripture is something entirely different.
God does not know me from a distance.
He knows me from the inside.
He sees the parts of my story that even I struggle to understand.
He sees the long threads running through my life the trauma, the suffering, the moments that shaped who I am today.
He sees the things that happened to me.
The things I chose.
The things I regret.
The things that still bring tears when I think about them.
Nothing about my story surprises Him.
And yet He chose to create me anyway.
There is another layer to this truth that carries enormous weight for me personally.
Some days the reality that God knows me, loves me, and created me in His image brings me to tears.
I do not say that lightly.
There are mornings when the thought overwhelms me.
Because all my life I have lived with a very different kind of reality.
My father has been present in my life, but the painful truth I have wrestled with for many years is that he never really wanted anything to do with me.
That kind of wound runs deep.
It does something to a person’s identity.
When a child grows up sensing that their own father has no desire for them, it plants quiet questions inside the heart that can follow you for years.
Questions about worth.
Questions about belonging.
Questions about whether you were ever truly wanted.
Even now those echoes can surface.
Sometimes in quiet moments.
Sometimes late at night when the house is silent and the mind begins wandering through old memories.
And so when I sit with the reality that the God who created the universe knew me before the foundation of the world, the contrast is almost overwhelming.
Because this is not a distant awareness.
This is not God noticing me after I arrived.
Scripture tells us something far more staggering.
Before the world was formed.
Before time itself unfolded.
Before my father ever existed.
God already knew me.
He knew my personality.
He knew the wounds I would carry.
He knew the places where rejection would leave scars.
He knew the nights when dark thoughts would circle in my mind and refuse to let me sleep.
He knew the anger I would wrestle with.
He knew the insecurity that would sometimes rise in my heart.
He knew every broken part of my story.
And yet He still chose to create me.
That realization lands with a force that is difficult to explain.
Because where human rejection once whispered that I was unwanted, the knowledge of God declares something entirely different.
It declares that my life was never an accident.
I was not an afterthought.
I was not a mistake.
I was known.
I was intended.
I was seen long before I ever took my first breath.
There are days when that truth breaks something open inside me.
Because when you spend years carrying the quiet pain of feeling unwanted by your earthly father, discovering that your heavenly Father knew you from eternity is not just comforting.
It is healing.
Slow healing perhaps.
But real healing.
It does not erase the wounds of the past overnight.
Those scars still exist.
But it changes how I understand my identity.
My story does not begin with rejection.
It begins with divine intention.
Before the foundation of the world, God knew me.
He knew the child I would be.
He knew the pain I would endure.
He knew the battles I would fight.
He knew the nights when I would lie awake wrestling with thoughts I could barely articulate.
He knew the seasons of suffering that would shape me.
He knew the strange path my life would take.
He knew the writing.
The books.
The calling that would slowly emerge from the ashes of suffering.
None of it surprised Him.
All of it existed within His knowledge before my life even began.
And that realization brings a freedom that I am still learning to live inside.
Because the God who knows everything about me has never turned away.
He saw the whole story from the beginning.
And still He said yes to my existence.
As I sit here this morning with my coffee growing cold beside me, that thought leaves me with one overwhelming response.
A quiet awe.
The Creator of the universe knew my story long before the world began.
And somehow, in His mercy, He still chose to write me into it.
About the Author
Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 1.2M views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the "light in the mundane."
- Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
- Explore the Journey: Follow Dylan on Google Maps
- Connect on Instagram: @porkysparadise
Comments
Post a Comment