Your Heavenly Father Knows

Mat 6:31 Therefore do not worry and say, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, What shall we wear?
Mat 6:32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things: for your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things.

I am instantly reminded of Matthew 6:8, where Christ reminds us that God knows what we want before we ask for it in prayer. In that verse, Christ said that God knows what (hos, in Greek) we have need (chreia) of. Indeed, every term in this verse has been used in the previous verses in this chapter. The contrast here is between our uncertainty over our physical needs, and God's certain knowledge that we need physical things to survive.

However, the mention of the Gentiles (or rather, foreigners, ethnos) brings in the element of society. The Gentiles don't merely need (chrezo) these things, they seek them. The Greek term is epizeteo, which means desire or demand as well as searching for something. The sense here is the the Gentiles feel that they have lost something, that something is missing. The response is that they desire and search for it.

What Christ is saying is that nothing is missing. Everything is here. The Gentiles are wrong. God has provided, but we don't know how to see it. Certainly, as humanity has learned more of the universe, we have discovered how abundant the world is. However, we still have the Gentiles among us who doubt God's ability to satisfy us despite all the progress we have made.