My cousin, my intuition, and the Westminster Confession are telling me no, so wouldn’t it be
thrilling to run up the slide on this one? Wouldn’t it be thrilling to watch God break the
we’ve built for Him? I suppose I want God to be suprisable simply because that would surprise
me. It’s also an appealing idea because surprise is a sort of vulnerability, and who doesn’t
secretly wish God was just a little bit more like themselves? We may not have evidence yet that
God can be surprised, but we do have evidence that he can be moved and affected—most
obvious in tears and laughter.

Moses 7:29
And Enoch said unto the Lord: How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all
eternity to all eternity?
Enoch (along with most of us) can’t seem to simultaneously hold God’s tenderness and His
infinitude.

John 11:35
Jesus wept.
Exhibit B. While Mary and Martha sat distraught in the seeming finality of their brother’s death,
Jesus simultaneously held the grief of this temporary absence and the hope of an immediate
resurrection. Was he affecting despair for the sake of his friends or was he truly affected by this
loss, however reversable? Was he merely modeling the covenantal act of mourning in solidarity?
Or was he caught in an unhypocritical pang of loss? The onlookers testified that Christ’s sorrow

was for Lazarus’s sake and not only his sisters when they exclaimed, “Behold, how he loved
him!”

“He” by Cherie Call
Some say dads are not the same and that they don’t have tender hearts
They’re not here for kissing bruises, they’re here to play a different part
I don’t know about other men, I simply know what I can see
And I see my Father’s mighty tears, and I know they fall for me
My dad’s tears stain the pages of A Christmas Dress for Ellen and The Last Straw invariably
every year. Is he performing because his tears have become expected, part of the ritual? Can he
simultaneously hold the familiarity of those holiday stories with the child-like wonder of the
season? Is it because there’s always a small child in the room who has never heard it before, and
he reads it through their twinkling eyes?

Psalm 59:8
But thou, O Lord, shalt laugh at them; thou shalt have all the heathen in derision.
Proverbs 1:26
I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh
Job 9:23
If the scourge slay suddenly, he will laugh at the trial of the innocent.
Key word: At. I do not want to believe that the Lord laughs at us in condescending displeasure. I
want to see him laugh in good-humored disbelief, in pure entertainment. Did he laugh when

Mahonri Moriancumer brought him a pile of rocks? Did he laugh when I set a dozen goals for
the new year?

Surprising God seems to also suggest a shade of deception on our part, even if that shade is only
cream or ebony. If you’re planning a surprise birthday party for me and so you tell me that I need
to come over to your house to kill a spider, but you really have friends crouching behind the
couches ready to burst into song upon my arrival, then you’re lying. And God would see past any
such shenanegan.

Hebrews 4:13
But all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him
So, did God just humor Adam and Eve in their game of hide and seek? As he waited for them to
show themselves and admit what they had done, was he performing for the sake of their
character development too? Surprise also requires a degree of ignorance (at least lack of
foresight), and that sort of vulnerability must be far below God.

Moses 1:6
All things are present with me, for I know them all.
He doesn’t just see all things from the beginning to the end. There is no timeline, and I think
surprises require lines. In the movie Arrival, the aliens speak in circles—literal rings of ink. After
some serious study and consistent exposure, the linguist starts seeing moments from her future as
if they were memories. At the climax of the movie, she works simultaneously in two moments:
She calls General Shang’s personal cell phone determined to stop the forthcoming war, but she

only discovers the precise words that General Shang needs to hear by accessing the future
moment when he personally thanks her for the call. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, her
present consciousness speaks through her future self, urging General Shang to repeat those words
that she once told him on the phone. She doesn’t just see the future; she is lucid and volitional on
both sides of a fading timeline. With that extra-temporal power she quite literally saves the
world. God is beyond omniscient. He doesn’t just see all things from the beginning to the end.
He doesn’t just work in the beginning and in the end.

Alma 11:39
He IS the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

So nothing can surprise Him, right? No thing. But what about some one? What if we were so free
and unpredictable that God could shed organic tears or peal organic laughter at our unwieldy
selves? What if he watched mesmerized at the paper shredder consuming his
neatly-time-stamped agenda? Would that make him any less powerful? God is qualified in both
senses of the word. Qualified in the sense that He can (independent of the infinite infinitives you
could finish that sentence with: He just can). He is also qualified in the sense that his power has
limits: namely, us. To watch him work around—no, work with—those limits shreds any doubt of
His omnipotence.