Psalms 139

Psalms 139:1

Psalm 139: God Is So Great!God is so great! There is nothing He does not know. There is nowhere He is not present. There is nothing He cannot do. If men insist on being the enemies of such a great God, they richly deserve their fate. That, in brief, is the flow of David’s meditation in this magnificent Psalm. 139:1, 2 First, he begins with the omniscience of God. God knows everything. There is nothing He does not know. Though limitless the universe and gloriously grand, He knows the eternal story of every grain of sand. But here it is His knowledge of the individual life that is particularly in view. In 1988 it was estimated that there were 5,000,000,000 people in the world. Yet God is intimately acquainted with each one. He knows all about every one of us. He has searched us and known us! Words and deeds, thoughts and motives, He knows us inside out. He knows when we sit down to relax and when we rise up to engage in the varied activities of life. He can tell what we are thinking, and even anticipates our thoughts. 139:3 He sees us when we walk and when we lie down; in other words, He keeps a constant watch on us. None of our ways is hidden from Him. 139:4 He knows what we are going to say before we ever say it. The future as well as the past and present is completely open to Him. 139:5 “And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account” (Heb_4:13). And because His knowledge of us is so inconceivably absolute, He can guard us behind and before. Ever and always His hand is laid protectingly upon us. 139:6 God’s infinite knowledge boggles the mind. Our human brains strain under the weight of the idea. It is too exalted for us to comprehend. But when we come to the frontier of our capacity to understand and can go no farther, we can still bow in worship at the immensity of the knowledge of God! 139:7, 8 Not only is God omniscient; He is omnipresent as well. He is in all places at one and the same time. However, the all-presence of God is not the same as pantheism. The latter teaches that the creation is God. The Bible teaches that God is a Person who is separate and distinct from His creation. Is there any place where man can evade the Holy Spirit of God? Is there any place where he can hide from the presence of the Lord? Suppose man should ascend into heaven, would he elude God there? Of course not; heaven is the throne of God (Mat_5:34). Even if he made his bed in Sheol, the disembodied state, he would find the Lord there as well. 139:9, 10 “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.” The wings of the morning are an allusion to the rays of the morning sun that streak across the heavens from east to west at 186,000 miles per second. Even if we could travel to some remote corner of the universe at the speed of light, we would find the Lord there, waiting to guide and uphold us. Incidentally verses 9 and 10 are fantastically appropriate for the age of jet travel in which we live. I shall never forget how the Lord spoke to me through this precious promise as I was about to embark on an extended ministry trip in 1969. The many jet aircraft in which I flew were like the wings of the morning, taking me literally to the uttermost parts of the earth. But always there was the sense of the Lord’s presence and protection, regardless of speed or distance. So claim this promise for yourself, and share it with Christian friends who travel by air. 139:11, 12 If a person wanted the darkness to hide him from God, he would be trusting a false refuge. Night cannot shut out the presence of the Lord. Darkness is not dark to Him. “The night shines as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to You.“God is absolutely inescapable. As Pascal said, “His center is everywhere; His circumference is nowhere.” 139:13, 14 So much then for the omnipresence of God. David now turns to consider His power and skill. And the particular phase of divine omnipotence he chooses is the marvelous development of a baby in his mother’s womb. In a speck of watery material smaller than the dot over this i, all the future characteristics of the child are programmedthe color of his skin, eyes and hair, the shape of his facial features, the natural abilities he will have. All that the child will be physically and mentally is contained in germ form in that fertilized egg. From it will develop: . . . 60 trillion cells, 100 thousand miles of nerve fiber, 60 thousand miles of vessels carrying blood around the body, 250 bones, to say nothing of joints, ligaments and muscles. David describes the formation of the fetus with exquisite delicacy and beauty. “You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb.” Yes, God formed our inward parts; each one a marvel of divine engineering. Think of the brain, for instance, with its capacity for recording facts, sounds, odors, sights, touch, pain; with its ability to recall; with its power to make computations; with its seemingly endless flair for making decisions and solving problems. And God knit us together in our mother’s womb. This aptly describes the marvelous weaving of the muscles, sinews, ligaments, nerves, blood vessels and bones of the human frame. David bursts forth in praise to the Lord. As he thinks of man, the crown of God’s creation, he can only confess that he is fearfully and wonderfully made. The more we think of the marvels of the human body, its orderliness, its complexity, its beauty, its instincts and inherited factorsthe more we wonder how anyone trained in natural science can fail to be a believer in an infinite Creator. 139:15 Again the psalmist reverts to the time when his body was being formed in his mother’s womb. Notice here that he uses the personal pronouns I, my, me to refer to the embryo or fetus. The scriptural view is that human personality exists before birth and that abortion therefore, except in cases of extreme medical necessity, is murder. David was aware that God knew him through and through from the very beginning. His frame, that is, his skeletal structure was not hidden from God when David was being made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. It cannot mean below the surface of the earth; no one is formed there. In the context it can only mean “inside the mother’s womb.” A similar expression is found in Eph_4:9, which speaks of Christ as having descended into the lower parts of the earth. Once again in the context it refers to His entering the world through the ante-chamber of the virgin’s womb. It is His Incarnation that is in view. 139:16 When the psalmist speaks of his unformed . . . substance, he uses a word that means something rolled or wrapped together. Barnes and others think that the word most aptly denotes the embryo, or the fetus, “where all the members of the body are as yet folded up, or undeveloped; that is, before they have assumed their distinct form and proportions.” Even in that preliminary phase of his existence, God’s eyes beheld the sweet singer of Israel. And in God’s book, all the days of David’s life were recorded by the divine Architect before that historic moment when David announced his arrival by that first lusty cry. 139:17, 18a The psalmist thinks of God’s careful planning in the creation of his spirit, soul and body. How precious . . . are His thoughtsHis attention to the minutest details. Andrew Ivy says, “Each cell almost without exception ‘knows’ its role in carrying out design or purpose for the welfare of the body as a whole.” 139:18b “When I awake, I am still with You.” It seems to me that the psalmist is here referring to the moment of his birth. In the preceding verses (13-18a) he has been emphasizing God’s closeness to him during the nine months prior to his birth. But even after he is born the picture does not change; he is still with the Lord as his Sustainer, Protector and Guide. He speaks of his birth as an awaking just as we speak of it as “first seeing the light of day.” 139:19-22 After contemplating the omniscience, the omnipresence and the omnipotence of God, the psalmist thinks of those puny men who dare to turn against Him, and he concludes that their punishment is well-deserved. Inevitably some will raise their eyebrows at David’s prayer in verses 19-22 as being something less than Christian in its tone. They will protest that the psalmist’s sentiments are judgmental and incompatible with divine love. For my own part I feel that the love of God has been emphasized all out of proportion to His holiness and righteousness. It is true that God is love but it is not all the truth. That is only one of His attributes.

And His love can never be exercised at the expense of any other attribute. Furthermore, the fact that God is love does not mean that He is incapable of hating; “the one who loves violence His soul hates” (Psa_11:5); He hates all evildoers (Psa_5:5); He hates haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and a man who sows discord among brothers (Pro_6:16-19). Edward J. Young reminds us: Before we proceed to condemn David for this prayer, it is well to note that we ourselves pray for the same thing, whenever we pray the words of the Lord’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.” The coming of Christ’s kingdom will be preceded by the destruction of His foes, so to pray for the one is to pray for the other. David unashamedly longs for the time when God will slay the wicked, and when men of blood will have ceased their harassment of him forever (v. 19). These are the men who maliciously defy the Lord God and who lift themselves up against God with evil intent. David’s hatred of these men was not a matter of personal pique. Rather it was because they hated God and rebelled against the Most High. It was his zeal for the Lord’s honor that made him hate them with perfect hatred and count them as his own enemies. In this he reminds us of the Lord Jesus whose zeal for His Father’s house prompted Him to drive out the money changers. “The strings of David’s harp were the chords of the heart of Jesus.” Young explains: David hated, but his hatred was like God’s hatred; it proceeded from no evil emotion, but rather from the earnest and thoroughly sincere desire that the purposes of God must stand and that wickedness must perish. Had David not hated, he would have desired the success of evil and the downfall of God Himself. It is well to keep these thoughts in mind when we consider the nature of David’s hatred. 139:23, 24 The Psalm closes with a prayer that has perennial suitability for all God’s people, a prayer that will never die as long as there are sinning saints on earth. It asks the Mighty God to thoroughly search and know the heart, to carefully test and know the thoughts or anxieties. It asks Him to expose every wicked way in order that it might be confessed and forsaken. And finally it asks Him to lead him in the way everlasting. It is not the challenge of a person protesting his innocence or righteousness. Rather it is the confession of one who has been in the presence of the Lord and is convicted of his own sinfulness. He realizes that he is not cognizant of all his iniquities and wants the Lord to point them out so they can be dealt with effectively.