Context No. 3069 of 4322 · Psalms

Psalms 139:1-16: in context

1LORD, you have searched me, and you know me. 2You know my sitting down and my rising up. You perceive my thoughts from afar. 3You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. 4For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, LORD, you know it altogether. 5You hem me in behind and before. You laid your hand on me. 6This knowledge is beyond me. It’s lofty. I can’t attain it. 7Where could I go from your Spirit? Or where could I flee from your presence? 8If I ascend up into heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there! 9If I take the wings of the dawn, and settle in the uttermost parts of the sea, 10even there your hand will lead me, and your right hand will hold me. 11If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me. The light around me will be night,” 12even the darkness doesn’t hide from you, but the night shines as the day. The darkness is like light to you. 13For you formed my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. My soul knows that very well. 15My frame wasn’t hidden from you, when I was made in secret, woven together in the depths of the earth. 16Your 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.

This is the great psalm of God's intimate knowledge of us. LORD, you have searched me and known me; you know when I sit and when I rise; you discern my thoughts from far away; before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely. Where could I flee from your presence? In heaven, in the depths, at the far side of the sea, your hand would hold me, and even the darkness is not dark to you.

The psalm holds together God's total knowledge of us and his intimate care for us. He knows everything, our thoughts before we think them, our words before we speak them, every path we walk, and there is nowhere we could go to escape him. That could be terrifying, to be so fully known. But the psalm frames it as comfort: the God who knows us completely is the God who knit us together in the womb, who holds us wherever we flee, whose hand leads us even in the dark. To be fully known by God is not to stand exposed before a judge, but to be held by a Maker who calls us fearfully and wonderfully made.

Does being fully known by God frighten me, or can I rest, like the psalmist, in the truth that the God who knows me completely also formed me and holds me?

Sources

Psalm 139:1: "LORD, you have searched me, and you know me."
Psalm 139:14: "I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."
Psalm 139:16: "Your eyes saw my body. In your book they were all written, the days that were ordained for me."