Luke 12:6-7 Aren’t five sparrows sold for two assaria coins? Not one of them is forgotten by God. . . . Therefore don’t be afraid. You are of more value than many sparrows.

God is continually aware of everything but, as emphasized in this Scripture, humans are especially precious to him. Moreover, squeezed in the middle of that quote is proof that you are the focus of that attention:

Luke 12:7 But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. . . .

He is not talking about people in general. Everyone has a different – and continually changing – number of hairs. That makes it highly personal. Every hair on your head is numbered. Then, to leave us in no doubt, there is this famous psalm:

Psalm 139:2-18 You know my sitting down and my rising up. You perceive my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but, behold, the Lord, you know it altogether. . . . This knowledge is beyond me. It’s lofty. I can’t attain it. . . . If I take the wings of the dawn, and settle in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there your hand will lead me, and your right hand will hold me. . . . For you formed my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother’s womb. . . . My frame wasn’t hidden from you, when I was made in secret, woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my body. In your book they were all written, the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there were none of them. How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is their sum! If I would count them, they are more in number than the sand. When I wake up, I am still with you.

As humans, we know that to maintain such an extreme awareness of someone is a very deliberate act, demanding great effort and reflecting an astonishing level of interest in someone. It would be like, but even greater than, a new mother in awe of her baby or a love-struck, starry-eyed teen so captivated by someone that she cannot stop daydreaming about him. When Jesus said every hair on our head is numbered he was speaking to people who fully understood the implications. The context clearly shows that he said this in order to assure us that we are cared about to a mindboggling degree and that this is conclusive proof that God feels highly protective toward us.

To anyone in any era but our own this is obvious. Living in a computer age, however, leaves us with such a jaded view of staggering numbers and statistics that, like never before, there are people who actually need the significance of God’s knowledge explained to them.

For the first time in history we have cold, emotionless machines mindlessly calculating and collecting information without the slightest interest in what they do. They have no real intelligence or will of their own but grind away doing only what their operator programs them to do.

But there is nothing unintelligent about God. It is contrary to every biblical revelation to think of God as a giant adding machine. The One who made us as an expression of who he is, always acts with purpose, never mindlessly. For example, the eyes of the Lord scan the entire globe. Why? On some random information gathering exercise? No, to strengthen those who are committed to him (2 Chronicles 16:9). The Lord records things. To while away the hours? No, because he deeply cares:

Malachi 3:16 Then those who feared the Lord spoke one with another; and the Lord listened, and heard, and a book of memory was written before him, for those who feared the Lord, and who honored his name.

Or, as Jesus put it:

Matthew 18:20 For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the middle of them.

Mark 9:41 For whoever will give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because you are Christ’s, most certainly I tell you, he will in no way lose his reward.

Matthew 12:36 I tell you that every idle word that men speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment.