Psalm 139
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Psalm 139:1-4:
O LORD, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, And are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O LORD, You know it all. |
The songwriter says that God searches him. The Hebrew term that led to this translation originally meant “to explore” and sometimes conveyed the idea of digging into or digging through something. The thought is that God explores, digs into, and examines me through and through. In the next sentence David pictures himself in two phases of life—passive (sitting down) and active (rising up). [Chuck Swindoll}
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Austin Gentry
Our minds only have so much bandwidth to ponder the details—big and small—of our lives; but since nothing could seem more insignificant than the number of times we sit down and rise up each day, those trivial moments are automatically discarded in our minds. And yet, God gives thought to it. He’s counted every single time we sat down and gotten back up. That’s how closely God is watching and looking after us. But this truth conveys more than just the fact that God counts and considers; it means that what we consider to be so utterly insignificant to us—is evidently significant to God.
This ought to give us great hope: If the most meaningless things to us actually matter to God, then clearly, the most weighty things to us matter so much more to God. If our own sitting and rising do not command our own attention, but they do command the attention and care of God, then how much more then does our anxiety and anguish, despair and doubts, our trials and tribulations command the attention, care, and investment of God. We may be dismayed and be tempted to think that God doesn’t know… oh, but He knows all that much—and much more. And that is a comfort. --Austin Gentry; God Hears, Sees, Knows You (Psalm 139)
This ought to give us great hope: If the most meaningless things to us actually matter to God, then clearly, the most weighty things to us matter so much more to God. If our own sitting and rising do not command our own attention, but they do command the attention and care of God, then how much more then does our anxiety and anguish, despair and doubts, our trials and tribulations command the attention, care, and investment of God. We may be dismayed and be tempted to think that God doesn’t know… oh, but He knows all that much—and much more. And that is a comfort. --Austin Gentry; God Hears, Sees, Knows You (Psalm 139)
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Psalm 139:7:
"Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee your presence?" |
The answer, of course, is nowhere. But nowhere is a popular place for a lot of people who call themselves Christian to go.
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Psalm 139:13-15:
For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mothers womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth |
Although the Bible makes no claim to be a textbook of embryology, here is a plain affirmation that the growth of the fetus is neither haphazard nor automatic but a divine work of creative skill.
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13. That the Lord has interest in our being formed in our mother’s womb is not strange to Scripture. The Lord says to Jeremiah (1:5) that “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (which knowing is specifically related to his calling as “a prophet to the nations”). But here, David expresses the formation of the crown of God’s creation. The wonder of this forming of a child before his birth is not always remembered, perhaps in spite of its common and frequent nature.
14. C. John Collins argues for another reading that takes the Hebrew for “to be wonderful” (alp) as another verb, “to be distinguished, to be set apart” (hlp). He offers this translation then: “I praise you for the fact that I have been awesomely distinguished; your works are wonderful, and my soul knows it well.”8 His argument supposes that the psalmist is stressing the fact that his covenantal relation to God was brought about even in the womb. There is perhaps some validity to this translation, but the traditional one is not lacking in support.
William Brown says, “Some modern readers may find the psalmist’s self-praise excessively effusive. The psalmist is no self-described ‘worm’ or ‘maggot’ of humanity (Ps. 22:6; Job 25:6). To the contrary, our author is unapologetically preoccupied with the sheer wonder of the self.” Such an understanding focusing on, as he says, the “praise of self,” emphasizes the author’s moral proclivity above the simple fact that God has created him.
The wonder and grandeur of creation is surely manifest in the moral agency of man, which is not absent in the psalm, but the focus here is the ‘frame’ of man. Morally speaking, the psalmist later cries to God that he would ‘search’ and ‘know’ his heart, to ‘try’ him. Nevertheless, Brown makes a pointed remark that, “In short, the psalm is a celebration of God’s invasion of our privacy.” This is certainly true, and can only prove comforting to one of his children.
The psalmist is acquainted with God’s wonderful works because he is acquainted with himself—not that he is impressed with the wonder of his own moral success, but with the physical workings of his body. Truly, this is something that today, in the face of an ever-growing medical knowledge of the wonders of the human body, ought to be ever more easily accepted.
15. “The earth was the mother’s womb of Adam, and the mother’s womb out of which the child of Adam comes forth is the earth out of which it is taken." Perhaps this passage ought to lead us back to the creation of our first father, Adam, made from the dust of the ground. Again, though the psalmist was formed and made ‘in secret,’ even unseen by his mother who carried him, he is not hidden from God.
--Paradise Regained
14. C. John Collins argues for another reading that takes the Hebrew for “to be wonderful” (alp) as another verb, “to be distinguished, to be set apart” (hlp). He offers this translation then: “I praise you for the fact that I have been awesomely distinguished; your works are wonderful, and my soul knows it well.”8 His argument supposes that the psalmist is stressing the fact that his covenantal relation to God was brought about even in the womb. There is perhaps some validity to this translation, but the traditional one is not lacking in support.
William Brown says, “Some modern readers may find the psalmist’s self-praise excessively effusive. The psalmist is no self-described ‘worm’ or ‘maggot’ of humanity (Ps. 22:6; Job 25:6). To the contrary, our author is unapologetically preoccupied with the sheer wonder of the self.” Such an understanding focusing on, as he says, the “praise of self,” emphasizes the author’s moral proclivity above the simple fact that God has created him.
The wonder and grandeur of creation is surely manifest in the moral agency of man, which is not absent in the psalm, but the focus here is the ‘frame’ of man. Morally speaking, the psalmist later cries to God that he would ‘search’ and ‘know’ his heart, to ‘try’ him. Nevertheless, Brown makes a pointed remark that, “In short, the psalm is a celebration of God’s invasion of our privacy.” This is certainly true, and can only prove comforting to one of his children.
The psalmist is acquainted with God’s wonderful works because he is acquainted with himself—not that he is impressed with the wonder of his own moral success, but with the physical workings of his body. Truly, this is something that today, in the face of an ever-growing medical knowledge of the wonders of the human body, ought to be ever more easily accepted.
15. “The earth was the mother’s womb of Adam, and the mother’s womb out of which the child of Adam comes forth is the earth out of which it is taken." Perhaps this passage ought to lead us back to the creation of our first father, Adam, made from the dust of the ground. Again, though the psalmist was formed and made ‘in secret,’ even unseen by his mother who carried him, he is not hidden from God.
--Paradise Regained
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Psalm 139:23-24: "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."
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The Psalmnist sets forth in poetry what theology calls the doctrine of the Divine Omniscience. He believes in Jehovah, the God of all the earth, and therefore believes in a Providence so universal that nothing is missed. It is not an intellectual dogma to him, but a spiritual intuition. It is not stated as an abstraction of thought, but flows from the warm personal relation between God and man, which is the great revelation of the Bible.
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