Psalms 139

The psalm opens not with a petition but with a recognition: O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me (v. 1). The verb is strong - not a passing glance but a thorough investigation, the kind of probing that turns a thing over until nothing is left concealed. And the result is the plainest verb in the language: known. David is not telling God anything; he is awed that God already has it all. The next lines spell out how total the knowing is. God knows his downsitting and his uprising - the whole arc of an ordinary day, the moment he drops into a chair and the moment he gets back up. God understandest his thought afar off - a thought caught while it is still distant, half-formed, before it has even reached the surface of the mind. God is acquainted with all his ways - not just where he walks but how he walks, the habits and patterns that make up a life. This is knowledge with no gaps in it. And the remarkable thing about how David frames it is that he never once sounds cornered. He sounds like a man who has discovered that the most complete attention in the universe is already trained on him.

Verse 4 presses the knowledge to its most intimate edge: For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether. This is knowledge that runs ahead of speech. Before the word leaves the tongue - while it is still only an intention, a sentence forming somewhere behind the lips - God already knows it, and knows it altogether, completely, in full. Most of what other people know of us is what we choose to let out: the words we decide to say, the face we decide to show. God's knowledge is of a different order. It does not wait for us to reveal ourselves; it precedes the revealing. The little word lo - an old way of saying look, behold - carries David's astonishment. He keeps stopping to point at the wonder of it: look - even this, even the unspoken word, You already know. There is no editing oneself before God, no managing the impression, because He is reading the sentence before it is written.

David gathers the whole movement into one image of encirclement: Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me (v. 5). To be beset is to be hemmed in, surrounded on every side - God before him and God behind him, no angle uncovered, no exit. And then the gesture that interprets the whole: and laid thine hand upon me. A hand laid on someone can mean arrest, but it can also mean blessing, ownership, protection - the hand a parent rests on a child, the hand that steadies and claims. Everything in the psalm tilts this image toward the gentle reading. David is not describing a trap closing; he is describing being held. And then comes his honest confession of the limit of his own mind: Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it (v. 6). He does not pretend to comprehend it. A knowledge this complete is simply beyond him - too high to climb up to, too vast to take in. He can only stand under it and call it wonderful. There is a kind of understanding that consists precisely in admitting a thing is past understanding, and worshipping anyway.

Having marvelled at a God who knows everything, David asks the natural next question - and asks it as a kind of experiment: Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? (v. 7). If God knows me this completely, is there anywhere I could go to be unobserved, unknown, alone? He runs the thought to its furthest extremes. If I ascend up into heaven - the highest height - thou art there. If I make my bed in hell - the deepest depth, the realm of the dead - behold, thou art there. Up and down, the two poles of the universe, and God fills them both. Then the horizontal: the wings of the morning - the speed of the dawn racing across the sky - carrying him to the uttermost parts of the sea, the far western edge of the known world. And there, at the literal end of the earth, the experiment fails again. The question of verse 7 expects the answer nowhere, and that is exactly what David finds. There is no coordinate, no altitude, no distance that is outside the presence of God. The flight is impossible - and as the next verse will show, that impossibility is the best news in the psalm.

Watch the verbs David chooses for the moment the fugitive is overtaken: Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me (v. 10). This is the hinge of the whole movement, and everything depends on those two words. He could have written catch me, seize me, trap me - the language of a manhunt ending. Instead he writes lead and hold. The hand that finds him at the end of the earth is not the hand of an arresting officer; it is the hand of a guide and a guardian. To be led is to be shown the way; to be held by the right hand - the hand of strength and favour - is to be kept, supported, refused to be let go. So the inescapable presence, which began as something David tested as if it might be a problem, turns out to be the deepest possible security. He cannot get away from God - and thank God for that, because everywhere he might run, God is already there ahead of him, hand outstretched not to catch a runaway but to steady a child. The omnipresence of God is not a net thrown over a suspect. It is the everywhere-ness of a love that has nowhere it will not follow you.

David tries one last hiding place - not a distance but a covering: If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me (v. 11). Darkness is the oldest refuge of those who do not want to be seen; we still say a thing was done in the dark. But the hiding fails like all the others: Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee (v. 12). To human eyes, darkness is the absence of seeing; to God it is no obstacle at all. The night is as transparent to Him as noon. There is no shadow deep enough, no secrecy thick enough, to put any act or thought beyond His sight. For someone with something to hide, that is a sobering thought. But set it back inside this psalm, and it becomes another comfort. The same verse that means nothing you do in the dark is unseen also means you are never lost in the dark to God. When you cannot see your own way forward, when everything around you has gone black, you have not dropped off His map. The night shineth as the day to Him - He sees you perfectly in the very place where you cannot see at all.

Now David answers the question the first two movements raised but never explained: how does God know him so completely? The answer is in the little word that opens verse 13 - For. God knows him through and through because God made him through and through: For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. The reins in older English are the kidneys, and in Hebrew thought the kidneys were the seat of the deepest feelings and the conscience - the most hidden, interior part of a person, the place where motives live. To say God possessed them is to say God owns and formed the very innermost self, the part no one else can reach. And thou hast covered me in my mother's womb pictures God at work in the most secret place there is, weaving a person together in the dark before any eye but His could see. This is why the knowledge of the opening verses is so total and so tender at once. God does not know David the way a watcher knows a stranger; He knows him the way a maker knows what he himself has made. The One reading the unspoken word is the One who fashioned the tongue that would speak it.

Verse 16 stretches God's knowledge across time itself: Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. God saw David when he was unperfect - not flawed, but unfinished, still incomplete, the way a thing only begun is not yet what it will be. And David pictures a book in which all his members - the parts of him - were already written before a single one of them existed. The image is of a God whose care precedes the thing cared for, whose attention runs ahead of our very existence. This is knowledge that does not merely keep up with us; it goes before us. Before David was, God knew David. It is the same comfort the prophets and apostles would lean on - the conviction that we did not stumble into being unnoticed, but were seen and known by God before we could see or know anything at all. However one understands the mystery of how a person comes to be, the psalm's point stands over every reader alike: you were not an afterthought. You were in the mind and care of God before you had a face.

The movement closes not with a fact about David but with David overwhelmed by God: How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand (vv. 17-18). The psalm began with David astonished that God knew his thoughts; now it turns around, and David is astonished trying to reckon with God's thoughts toward him - and finds them beyond counting, more than the grains of sand on a shore. He cannot get to the end of how much he is thought about. And then the last, quiet line of the movement, almost whispered: when I awake, I am still with thee (v. 18). After all the heights and depths, all the searching and forming and the uncountable thoughts, it lands on the most ordinary moment imaginable - waking up - and the steadiest fact of all: He is still here. The One who was there before David existed, there at every coordinate of the universe, there in the womb weaving him together, is there again the moment his eyes open in the morning. The knowledge that began as something almost overwhelming has become a companionship. To be known by this God is, in the end, simply never to be alone.

The psalm takes a sharp and difficult turn. Out of the wonder of being known and made, David rounds suddenly on the enemies of God: Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God… Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred (vv. 19, 21-22). It is jarring language, and it should be heard for what it is. Notice first who the enemies are: they are defined entirely by their stance toward God - they speak against thee wickedly, they take thy name in vain, they rise up against thee (vv. 20-21). David's quarrel is not a private grudge; it is grief over those who set themselves against the God he has just spent eighteen verses adoring. His hatred here is the burning of a man who cannot stay neutral about evil - who loves God enough to be wounded by what stands against Him. Perfect hatred means whole, undivided, with no secret sympathy for the wickedness. And yet the Scriptures themselves will not let this verse become a license. The same God David serves later teaches plainly, Love your enemies… pray for them which despitefully use you (Matt. 5:44). The psalm gives us a real and honest zeal for God's honour - but it is a zeal that, in the very next breath, David hands back to God for inspection. He does not stay standing as judge over others for long.

And here is the turn that redeems the whole fierce passage. Having declared his hatred of those who hate God, David does not leave the lamp shining on them. He swings it around onto himself: Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me (vv. 23-24). The very same searching he was sure God would bring against the wicked, he now asks God to bring against him. Search me - the identical verb from verse 1, where the psalm began. The man who said I hate them with perfect hatred immediately exposes his own heart to the same scrutiny, as if to say: and if there is any of that wickedness in me, find it; do not spare me. This is what keeps the imprecation honest. David is not claiming the high ground of the innocent denouncing the guilty; he is the first to lay himself open. The fiercest words in the psalm are followed at once by the humblest, and the order matters - zeal against evil is safe only in the hands of someone willing to have that same zeal turned on himself first. He asks to be examined for any wicked way, and trusts God enough to want the answer.