Sermon series: A SUMMER IN THE PSALMS

Psalm 139
O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up; you understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, You know it altogether. You have hedged me behind and before, and laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven. You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, "Surely the darkness shall fall on me," even the night shall be light about me; Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, but the night shines as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to You.
For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.
My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.
How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!
How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand; when I awake, I am still with You.
Oh, that You would slay the wicked, O God! Depart from me, therefore, you bloodthirsty men. For they speak against You wickedly; Your enemies take Your name in vain. Do not I hate them, O Lord, who hate You?
And do I not loathe those that rise up against You?
I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.
Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my anxieties; and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Language utterly fails me in the exposition of this Psalm. Where does one begin? What does one include? This Psalm is so full, intricate, detailed, grand in concept, and thrilling in its statements and stanzas.
It seems so wrong to leave any word unexplored, yet our space and time are limited, so we will ask the Holy Spirit to help us learn from this beautiful portion of Scripture what He wants to teach us today.
It is clear today that many people suffer from a lack of intimate relationships. Our technological society has made it possible for us to live in one city, work in another, and relate to people in another. This has led to a significant breakdown in community.

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At the same time, we function in a highly competitive society. We tend to look upon people as combatants rather than companions. We constantly judge how we are measuring up and find little freedom to share our struggles and our weaknesses with each other for fear that they will be used against us. In this decade, style has replaced substance as our preoccupation. We are excessively concerned about the image we project to people, because we are uncertain that there is anything behind it. People also tend to become means to our ends, rather than ends in themselves. We all know how it feels to be used, stepped on, and stepped over. At the bottom of all of this is a spiritual sickness. Our lack of intimacy with each other comes from our lack of intimacy with God. The recovery of intimacy starts with allowing God to become intimate with us. This is what He desires, and He will do it if we will let Him!
Psalm 139 is compelling in its descriptions of how close God wants to be to us. He is not satisfied to be simply the reigning King, exalted in the heavens, enthroned before a sea of angels. He desires to have a personal relationship with us on the deepest level of our being. He searches and knows us (v. l); His eye is always upon us (vv. 2-3). He hears all that we say (v. 4), and His hand is upon us (v. 5). All this staggers the psalmist. (v. 6). Moreover, God's presence is always there, in heaven or hell, in darkness or in light (vv. 7—12).
But why is it that God knows us so intimately? The answer is that He created us (vv. 13-16). He knows us the way a painter knows his picture, or a sculptor knows his statue. As a result of all of this, God's thoughts are precious to the psalmist (v. 17-18), and he hates those whom God hates (vv. 19-22). He concludes with an invitation for God to search him, try him, know him, and lead him "in the way everlasting." (vv. 23-24).
Although Psalm 139 deals with some of the highest and most important of all theological concepts, the omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence of God, it nevertheless has two practical aims that become clear at its close (vv. 19-24). First, the writer wants to separate himself from all who deliberately practice evil. Second, he wants God to search him out thoroughly and purge him of anything that might be offensive to God so that he might walk in the way everlasting. It is hard to think of any more practical reasons for theology than those.
The theme of the first six verses is the omniscience of God, the proper term for the fact that God sees and knows everything. Omniscience is not expressed here as mere doctrine; it is confessed in wonder and adoration.
The unique quality of the knowledge possessed by God is perfection. God knows all things, and He knows them exhaustively. We also know things, therefore we have some idea of God's omniscience, but our knowledge is only partial and imperfect. God knows everything; everything possible, everything actual; all events, all creatures, of the past, the present, and the future. He is perfectly acquainted with every detail in the life of every being in heaven, in earth, and in hell. Nothing escapes His notice, nothing can be hidden from Him.

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The important thing in religion is not the belief that God is omniscient, but the experience that God knows me; and it is on this the Psalmist dwells. It is almost implied in the connection of his words that in the heart of the writer there was a kind of passive resistance which God's spirit overcame, piercing and discovering all his inner life. We are slow to know ourselves, and sometimes do not wish to. Purposes form in the background of our minds, of which we are hardly conscious; latent motives actuate us; perhaps our own words or deeds in which they suddenly issue, startle us; we are amazed that we should have said or done such a thing. But it is no surprise to Him! "Thou understandest my thought afar off." Such knowledge of man by God is quite different from omniscience. Omniscience is a Divine attribute, but what is here experienced is a Divine action-—it is God through His searching knowledge of us entering with power into our lives. It is God besetting us behind and before, and laying His hand upon us.
Now, this perfection of God's knowledge is disturbing, which is one reason why people try so hard not to think about God. As long as we only think about God knowing things or other people, the idea of God's knowledge is only amusing, like our reaction to the report about schoolchildren who were asked whether they thought God understood computers, and the majority thought He did not. We are amused because we know that God does understand computers. The subject is not so amusing when we consider that God also knows about us. What are we to do with a God "before whom all hearts are open, all desires known. An all-knowing God is immensely threatening, which is why we try to banish Him from our minds. For the unsaved person this powerful, pervasive knowledge seems intrusive and frightening, and with good reason. God is the end-time judge with whom we must reckon. Strikingly, the response of the psalmist is not fear. He is not trembling when he thinks of God's omniscience. On the contrary, he shelters himself in God's knowledge and marvels at it. For the psalmist, God's knowledge is not a threat, it is a refuge! "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it" (v.6). Instead of trying to shrink God's omniscience, David reveled in it.
If he wrote this psalm just after learning that God was to establish the messianic dynasty in him he had good reason to be glad God knew him thus.
In verse 7, the Psalmist turns his thoughts toward the omnipresence of God. "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" In religion, the important thing is not the idea that God is everywhere, but the experience that wherever I am God, God is with me. Why, it may be asked, should we want to go anywhere? Why should we try to escape from God? The answer does not need to be given, because every one can give it for himself. The first man tried to hide from God, and so have all his children, but always in vain. When we least expect Him, or even do not want Him...He is there! Just ask Jonah! or David!

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WHERE CAN I GO? David imagines three areas in which escape from God might be thought to be possible, but he dismisses each one. The first thought that might come to us is to climb higher than God so God can't reach us, or descend so low that we will lie beneath His grasp; but the highest point to which we can rise is heaven and God is obviously there, and the lowest point to which we can descend is hell and God is there!
God in hell? He is there in His judicial aspect. In fact, the thing that makes hell so terrible is that it is run by God. It is not ruled by the devil in spite of such popular descriptions of hell as John Milton's in PARADISE LOST.
Amos uses this same language to describe the folly of people who think they can escape God's judgments.
"Though they dig down to the depths of the grave, from there my hand will take them. Though they climb up to the heavens, from there I will bring them down" (Amos 9:2).
The sinner will meet God in hell! People who have ruled God out of their lives will wake up in hell to discover that He is there, that His eye is on them.
The dreadful sentence will have been passed: "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still...(Rev. 22:11). Death does not change character. Those who are lost will plunge into eternity possessed of all the reprehensible attitudes, consumed by all the dreadful lusts, they lived on earth. In a lost eternity people will burn with horrible passions but will have no way to satisfy them!
God will be there but only as Judge. The thought should send a shudder through the sinner's soul; death does not hide us from God.
I CAN'T GO UP NOR DOWN, NOR EAST OR WEST...in trying to flee from God. "If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me." (vv. 9-10). Dawn rises in the east, and from David's perspective in Israel the far side of the sea was west. To 'rise on the wings of the dawn' probably means to flash from east to west as fast as the dawn's early light streaks from horizon to horizon. Would that help? Even if it were possible, it would not enable us to escape God, for when we get to that far distant horizon, we find that God is already there before us.
Spurgeon writes: "If I could fly with all swiftness, and find a habitation where the mariner has not yet ploughed the deep, yet I could not reach the boundaries of the divine presence. Where could we speed on the wings of the morning breeze, and break into oceans unknown to chart and map, yet there we should find the Lord already present."
Our Psalmist continues: "If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to Thee." People pursue evil in the dark, thinking, "Surely the darkness will hide me" but even the darkness is light to God!

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The trouble is that "men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil." It is under the cover of darkness that most of this world's crimes are committed. The darkness effectively hides man from man but it does not hide him from God.
There is another meaning suggested in the original language that is helpful. When our scripture says..."Surely the darkness shall cover thee" it is suggesting that darkness can come over us as a tempest. The idea is, If darkness should overpower, overcome me suddenly...if I should be involved in sudden darkness which would seek to snatch me away from God, all this would be in vain as far as God is concerned! "Even the night shall be light about me." In respect to me, it shall be as if I stood in the full blaze of light. God can see me still; He can mark my going; He can perceive all that I do as plainly then as at mid-day. This is so...and what a thought this is for a wicked man who seeks to escape detection in his crimes by perpetrating them at night! What a thought for a good man, that in the darkest night of sorrow, when there seems to be nothing but deep midnight, when there appears to be not a ray of light in his dwelling, or on his path, that all to the eye of God is as clear as noon-day. For in that night of sorrow God sees him as plainly as in the brightest days of prosperity and joy! Darkness does not make darkness to thee. It makes things dark to us; not to Him. So it is in natural darkness; so in moral darkness. It seems dark to us; it is not so to Him. Things appear dark to us——disappointment, bereavement, trouble, care, losses; but all is light to God. The existence of sin and suffering on the earth seems dark to us, not to Him, for He sees the reasons and end of all!
Verses 7 through 12 prompted Francis Thompson's classic poem "The Hound of Heaven," a poem in which the poet describes how he tried unsuccessfully to hide from God...
I fled Him down the nights, and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind, and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up visaed hopes I sped; and shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

Thompson fled from God, but he could not escape the Omnipresent One, because God always followed after him.
Our Psalmist continues: "For Thou has possessed my reins; Thou has covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well." (vv. 13-14). We have already seen that David is writing with his heart as well as with his head in this psalm, and this means that he is not thinking of God's omnipotence abstractly, but as it applies to him. More particularly, he is thinking of the power of God in forming him while he was still in the womb of his mother. No wonder God knows me, he says. God made me. He formed me from my very first moments, from my beginning!

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David knew nothing of the modern science of embryology, nothing of the mysterious process by which a baby grows in the womb. He had only the haziest of ideas about these things, but he knew enough to be awed at the process. And if David knew enough to be awed, what about us? We know that every living creature is made up of microscopic cells so small that the letter O on this page would contain between thirty to forty thousand of them. Each microscopic cell is a world in itself, containing an estimated two hundred trillion tiny molecules of atoms. Each cell, in other words, is a micro-universe of almost unbelievable complexity. All these cells put together make up a living creature. Each cell has its own specialized function and each works to an intricate time table which tells it when to grow, when to divide, when to make hormones, when to die. Every minute of every day, some three billion cells in the body die and the same number are created to take their place! During any given moment in the life of any one of the cells, thousands of events are taking place, each one being precisely coordinated at the molecular level by countless triggers. The human body has more than a million million of them—a million in each square inch of skin, thirty billion in the brain, billions of red blood cells in the veins. We are fearfully and wonderfully made!
These verses plainly teach the individuality of a child while it is still in its mother's womb. David is not writing about abortion, of course. Nothing could be further from his mind. But no one can read these verses thoughtfully today without considering their obvious bearing on this important contemporary problem. The chief issue in discussions about abortion concerns the identity of the fetus. People who argue for the right of a woman to have an abortion—-"It's my own body; I can do with it as I please"—-usually argue that the fetus is not yet a person, but is only a part of the woman's body, like a gallbladder or appendix that she can elect to have removed. That is why language describing the unborn child has changed so radically. A generation ago everyone referred to the unborn child as a baby, and pregnant women knew they were carrying a baby. It is hard for anyone to think calmly about killing a baby. So today people talk about the fetus or the embryo or even mere "tissue" instead. To get rid of tissue doesn't seem so bad. But this is not the way the Bible speaks of the unborn child.
What is more, growing medical knowledge of unborn children undermines that comfortable delusion. The Greek philosopher Aristotle speculated that the fetus becomes human when it quickens in the womb, that is, when the mother feels it move. We know today that the movement of the fetus is only a matter of degree; the baby is moving all the time. Others have argued that the fetus becomes human only when it is old enough to survive outside the womb, but advances in the care of premature babies make it possible for even extremely small infants to survive, certainly infants that are younger and smaller than many being aborted today. It is increasingly common today to identify life with brain

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activity, but we know there is brain activity in the unborn child even before the mother is aware that she is pregnant. For that matter, there is a beating heart and the circulation of the baby's own blood as well.
The problem with trying to determine a point before which the developing child is fully human is that there isn't one. There is an uninterrupted development of the child from the very moment in which the sperm of the father joins the ovum of the mother and the cell begins to divide. The father's seed cannot multiply by itself, nor can the mother's egg, but as soon as the two sets of chromosomes combine, not only does the development of life continue steadily unless interrupted, either accidentally or deliberately, but the life that is developing is a unique life.
In the perceptive wording of this psalm David is speaking of his unique individuality from the first moments of his existence in the womb. From that very first moment, God knew him and had ordained what his life was to be! If that is how God views the unborn child, dare we call it only tissue and destroy the unborn, as we are doing in this country at the rate of more than a million-and-a-half babies each year?
The phrase..."when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth" needs some explanation. The Hebrew words used refers to the act of weaving, such as weaving carpets. The reference here is to the various and complicated tissues of the human body——the tendons, nerves, veins, arteries, muscles, as if they had been woven, or as they appear to be curiously interweaved. No work of tapestry can be compared with this; no art of man can weave together such a variety of most tender and delicate fibers and tissues as those which go to make up the human body.
Who but God could make them? IN THE LOWEST PARTS OF THE EARTH is the Hebrew way of saying that the infant baby is wrought in a place as dark, as obscure, and as much beyond the power of human observation as though it had been done low down beneath the ground where no eye of man can penetrate. (This was written before there were instruments and methods of determining by observation the infant in its formative stages.)
In the next two verses David reflects on the abundance of God's thoughts toward him, ending, "When I awake, I am still with you." The writer is not alarmed at the fact that God knows all about him; on the contrary, he is comforted, and even feels himself to be enriched. That God should think upon him is the believer's treasure and pleasure. It is a joy worth worlds that the Lord should think upon us who are so poor and needy; it is a joy which fills our whole nature to think upon God, returning love for love, thought for thought. (Spurgeon) The remark is made here doubtless in view of the numberless thoughts involved in planning and forming a frame so wondrous, and in the care necessary to bring it to perfection; to develop it; to provide for it; to guard and defend it. WHEN I AWAKE, I AM STILL WITH THEE...when I am lost in deep and profound meditation on this subject, and am aroused again to consciousness; I find the same thing still true.

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Spurgeon comments: "Thy thoughts of love are so many that my mind never gets away from them; they surround me at all hours. I go to my bed, and God is my last thought; and when I awoke I find my mind still hovering about His palace gates: God is ever with me, and I am ever with Him. If during sleep my mind dreams, it only wanders upon holy ground. The Psalmist does not say, "When I awake I return to Thee," but, I AM STILL WITH THEE, as if his meditations were continuous, and his communion unbroken."
At this point in our Psalm, David looked about him and realized that he still had plenty of foes, some of them his own countrymen. It is not easy to account for the sudden transition or diversion of the train of thought from the main subject of the psalm. In verses 19 through 22, David gives vent to his feelings towards the wicked, and prays that they may depart from him.
In keeping with the personal tone of the psalm so far, what David is actually saying is that he wants no part of the evil that evil men devise. We say, "Hate the sin, but love the sinner!" It is nice advice, but it is also hard to do since love of the sinner, if we are not extremely careful, leads first to a love of the sinner's sinful ways, and then to a participation in them. David was not at all sure that he could successfully love one and hate the other. So his decision was to separate from evil persons entirely. This separation does not mean that David never had anything to do with sinful people; he himself was one. It only means that he did not want to be with those who were openly marked by evil or were hatching evil actions. So taken was he with the greatness of God that he wanted nothing to endanger his relationship with God. David hated only those who hated good and of this hatred he is not ashamed, but sets it forth as a virtue. To love everyone with benevolence is a duty, but to love any wicked person with complacency would be a sin. The more we love God the more indignant shall we grow with those who refuse Him their affection. You cannot love God and be comfortable with sin! Flee from evil!
Our psalm comes to an end with this beautiful prayer:
SEARCH ME, O GOD, AND KNOW MY HEART: TRY ME, AND KNOW MY ANXIETIES: AND SEE IF THERE IS ANY WICKED WAY IN ME, AND LEAD ME IN THE WAY EVERLASTING.
The Psalmist was no hypocrite. He knew that there were depths of wickedness lurking in his own heart. He knew its secret lusts. Like a sensible man, faced with the omniscience of God, he did not try to hide his inner thoughts. He opened them up to God's inspection. He pleaded that the Lord would lead him in the way everlasting—that not only in inward life, but his outward life might be pleasing to the God he cannot escape (and clearly, from whom he had no desire to escape). His prayer include four requests: (1) for God to know him and expose his thoughts; (2) for God to try, or perfect, his thoughts; (3) for God to purge away whatever evil remains in him; (4) and for God to lead him in the way everlasting!
This is my prayer too!