Psalm 139 - Who is My God

This sermon was preached on 28/7/2013

Psalm 139 was written by David, although he does not indicate when he composed it. Yet although we do not know when he wrote it, we can see from the contents how he wrote it. It is very clear that this psalm focuses on several of God’s attributes. So it is a worship song full of strong theology. Of course, there is more than one way of writing accurate theology. It can be put together in dry, tedious and complicated language, with the consequence that the God described is not attractive to the heart. In contrast, theology can be written in a warm, devotional and personal manner, with the outcome of loving and grateful adoration of the God of grace.

The God who knows me (vv. 1-6)

The theological term for God’s knowledge is his omniscience. To put it into one sentence, God knows all things actual and possible. He knows how many blades of grass there are as well as how many people there are. As far as each one of us is concerned, he knows every single thing about us. As David indicates, the Lord knows our behaviour in public and private and he knows our thoughts and our words. Moreover he has always known everything about us and always will.

Yet we have to be careful that we don’t regard God as a kind of super computer. David here describes God’s knowledge of him as a very personal act. To begin with, we can see that he speaks as if he was the only person with whom God was dealing. And that is one of the amazing realities about the relationship we can have with God. He can interact with each one of us and give us full attention all the time.

It would be possible for us to reduce God’s searching of us to the level of a snooping detective trying to find evidence that would lead to our conviction of a wrong action. And if we regard his knowledge in this way then we will be afraid of him because we will assume that he is pursuing us only to punish us. Or we can wrongly consider his searching of us to be like the actions of a visitor to a tourist site who is given a lot of information but leaves the place unaffected by what he discovered. The psalmist makes it very clear that his God is interested in him, and the reason why this is so is because the Lord has a great affection for him.

As we think about the knowledge of God, we can see that there are no secrets we can hide from him. So we should be encouraged to be honest before him. At the same time, we can be very hopeful because he knows us. If I have physical troubles, I want a doctor who can see all my problems and who also knows how to heal them. In a far higher sense, the Lord we worship is the heavenly physician who knows our sins and defects and who has the skill to apply his knowledge of the remedies required.

At the same time, he is the loving God who wants to share his knowledge with us. He does want us to know who we truly are (so he will convict us of our sins and correct us for our faults), but he also wants us to know who he truly is. Is that not what David is discovering? While it is not possible for us to assess how much David, as an Old Testament believer, knew about God and his plan of salvation, we know so much more because of the coming of Jesus. So when he says, ‘I know my sheep,’ it is the same idea as David says about God and him. And Jesus went on to say that his sheep know him, and we can see from this paragraph that David could say the same about God.

As we can see from verse 6, the response of David to the fact that God knows all about him is to express his wonder. And wonder is of the essence of worship. It includes adoration marked by awe, an attitude of delighted amazement at the greatness of God. But David has more to say.

The God who is with me (vv. 7-12)

David tells us that there is nowhere he can go and be separate from God. If he ascends to the stars or goes down to the grave, God is there. Even if he travels beyond where anyone has gone before, God will be there. So we can see that David is sure about the presence of God. This is a wonderful certainty to have as we make our way through life.

But we can ask David, ‘What will your God be doing for you in all those places?’ The psalmist replies by saying that his God will perform two roles. First, he will be David’s personal guide (v. 10). The examples of places that David mentions are ones that he had never been to before, which means that he would not know what to do when he arrived at any of them (similar to how we feel when we reach a destination we are unfamiliar with). Yet his God would be there to lead him on.

Second, David says that God will be his personal protector. The same hand that guides will also protect. Those unknown places for David could contain many unknown dangers, each of which would be too powerful for him. But they would not be too powerful for his God. He can easily deal with all possible enemies because he is the Almighty.

Third, the obvious conclusion that David deduces from the continuous presence of God is the complete safety that will be experienced. The most dangerous time for a person in the ancient world was the hours of darkness. But the presence of God is not diminished by the things that make us afraid. Instead the things that make us afraid should be diminished by the fact that God will be there wherever we are. There will be situations in life in which danger seems to be on every hand, yet the Lord will be our guide and our protector (believers can testify to numerous occasions when they have already discovered this to be the case). Each of us is proceeding daily to our encounter with the unknown experience of death. We cannot describe what it will be like, but we can say that God will be there to guide us and to keep us and bring us safely to the place where his presence is known in the profoundest way, in heaven.

The God who made me (vv. 13-18)

David now turns to think about what God did for him before he was born. He thinks about how he was put together in his mother’s womb. No one could see what God was doing for him then. In a real sense, there was just him and God, and it was obvious that David at that time was not contributing anything to the process.

As David thinks about what happened to him during those nine months, he realises that the involvement of God was hands-on, as it were. God joined together all David’s bodily parts and formed also the other aspects that would appear in his personality. We can imagine David scanning himself and saying, ‘God did all this.’ And we should do the same. There are different ways of looking at ourselves, and one of them should be that each of us is what God wanted us to be, apart from our sins and its effects. The reason why I don’t have the brains of Einstein is because God thought that I should be who I am. Realising we are what God made us to be is very liberating.

David realised that God was not only the Creator of his body. In addition, he was the planner of his life. The Lord has a book about each of us that is like a diary. In it he has recorded beforehand all that will occur in our lives. From our perspective, we have good days, bad days, significant days, normal days. From God’s perspective, each day is as he purposed. Of course, we cannot understand how God could do this. His record is not based on the fact that he would know what we would do in the sense that he could look ahead and see our behaviour. In a mysterious way, our behaviour fits with his plan. As far as each of my days are concerned, they are made up of things I initiate and things I did not initiate. I have some control over the former and no control over the latter. But both are certain because God planned them.

As with the former section, David’s reflections in this section lead him to have confidence in God and to be amazed at the Lord’s abilities. His thoughts about David are innumerable – there is not an aspect of David’s life that God has not covered. Every second of his life and every inch he will occupy have been thought about by his God. For David, that was very precious because it told him how much his God cared about him.

The God who will judge (vv. 19-22)

We may be surprised at David’s response in this section of the psalm. It seems to be so unchristian that we are tempted to say that his words reflect an Old Testament attitude that has been superseded by the teachings of Jesus about loving one’s neighbour. Yet such an idea seems to suggest that God’s ways in the past were wrong and that he changed his mind. So I think we need to look for another interpretation that would retain the unity of the Bible’s message.

One way to interpret this section is by considering David’s role in God’s kingdom. We tend to see him as a songwriter because that is how we use his material. Or we see him as the ancestor of the Messiah and are aware that God made a covenant with David about his Descendant. Yet we should remember that David was a God-appointed king who had to rule on God’s behalf and punish those who broke his laws. David was a very competent king, but he was not an omni-competent one. David was a righteous king, but there were many situations in which he failed to bring about the kind of situation of righteousness that God desired. And I would suggest that in this section David is praying for God to bring about that perfect society. The psalmist’s thoughts about God have reminded him that God has the ability to do so.

It may have been the case that David wrote this psalm during a time when a group of men were rebelling violently against his rule and saying that he was not God’s chosen king. Such rebellion was not only against David personally, it was also an attempt to destroy God’s kingdom on earth. David knew that he was God’s choice for the role of king and he could not tolerate any attack against it. It was not merely a personal attack against someone they may not have liked, it was wilful rebellion against the Lord, and David prayed therefore that they would be stopped by God. The fact is, when people oppose God we have to say that we are against them. We have to make sure that our motives are right, that we have what David calls here ‘complete hatred’, that our opposition to them is because we are wanting God’s kingdom to come. We pray that God would deal with them.

The God who answers me (vv. 23-24)

David seems to be aware that it was possible for his sense of anger at those who opposed God could become sinful. So he prays that God would search his heart and mind and deal with any sinful attitudes that were there. We should observe how David regarded such attitudes – they were ‘grievous’, which is an emotional word. Clearly David realised the horror of sin. Sometimes we can be almost casual and matter-of-fact in our descriptions of sin. But all sin is horrible and ugly, and our personal sins should grieve us, as should all other sins.

David’s prayer does not stop with a request to discover sin. He also wants to live a holy life, to be led in the way everlasting. Such a description suggests that the life of heaven begins on earth, not in the sense of its perfection, but in the sense of its direction and aspirations. It is a request to walk forever with the God who knows all about him and who has planned all his days, even the ones yet to be known in the eternal world.