Fully Known, Still Loved - Psalm 139

Genesis 3:8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

Psalm 139 walks right up to that bush, sits down next to you in the dirt, and takes you on a walk. Four steps. The Psalm opens as a fact and closes as a prayer.

1. God knows me completely (vv. 1–6)

Psalm 139:1–6 1 You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. 2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. 3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. 4 Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely. 5 You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.

John 1:47–48 47 When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” 48 “How do you know me?” Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.”

2. God is with me everywhere (vv. 7–12)

Psalm 139:7–10 7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

3. God made me personally (vv. 13–18)

• God knows you because he made you, by hand. “Knit together.” “Woven.” Picture a craftsman bent over the workbench, forming you in secret.
• “Wonderfully” comes from the same root the Bible uses for God’s wonders, his miracles. You are one of God’s recorded miracles, sitting on the same shelf as the Red Sea.
• Your worth is not grounded in your resume, your usefulness, your looks, or whether people want you in the room. Before you earned or blew a single thing, God saw you and called it wonderful.

Psalm 139:13–14 13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

4. God searches me lovingly (vv. 19–24)

• David looks at real evil and refuses to be neutral about it. Then he turns the light around onto his own chest.
• Don’t just search my opinions, search my heart. Don’t just search my enemies, search my motives. Don’t just search what I condemn, search what I quietly excuse.

Psalm 139:23–24 23 Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Grace turns being exposed into being invited.

“Lord, you have searched me, and you know me.”
Psalm 139:1

Psalm 139 “makes a long series of statements about the way God can know all about us and we can never be beyond God’s reach. It does not indicate whether this is good news or not, but simply makes objective statements. It then leaves readers to decide whether God’s knowing all about us and always having access to us is good news or bad news. The way we read the psalm then tells us something about ourselves and our relationship with God.” — John Goldingay

Yet our psalmist is able to find a song and to sing it out in response to the saving act of Yahweh that reaches into the isolated darkness of the flood. A similar understanding that God is not absent in the midst of trouble but continues to stand with us wherever we are is expressed in the powerful words of Psalm 139:7–12. — Gerald H. Wilson

The darkness section attacks our illusion that hidden sin is safer than exposed sin. Henry says, “No veil can hide us from God.” This can support a call to confession: if God already sees, then secrecy only isolates us from mercy. The way forward is not concealment, but surrender to the God whose light heals. — Matthew Henry

Psalm 41 offers two further insights into the kind of integrity that leads to being upheld by God. This kind of integrity is more than just a passive characteristic one can bear. It is a consistent way of acting—a life path, so to speak, that has its beginning and end in God. There may be individual stumbles along the way, but the integrated person is the one whose eyes remain firmly fixed on the goal. It is this person who can cry out with the psalmist: ‘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’ (139:23–24). — Gerald H. Wilson

There is something about reading the psalms from the beginning of the Psalter to the end, day after day, that does not allow us to master them—picking and choosing what suits us, shaping them to our will, fitting them to our perceived needs and moods. Instead, such daily and continuing familiarity with these texts—more than any other, I believe—ultimately masters us and shapes us to the will of God in ways we can hardly anticipate… And in these psalms this messy life—this real life—is constantly brought before God as our own messiness ought to be, before it is cleaned up and sanitized. God wants us to bring all of life before him as the psalmists do rather than just the parts we consider acceptable. How else can God’s healing, revealing, confronting, forgiving love penetrate to the darkest corners of our secret places unless we open the door to let in the light?” — Gerald H. Wilson

You do not have to hide from the God who already knows you.