You Have Searched Me and Known Me

There is a kind of knowing that feels like surveillance. Someone watching your every move, tracking your mistakes, waiting to use what they know against you. If that is the framework you carry into Psalm 139, the first few verses will make you uncomfortable.

But that is not the framework David is writing from. He is writing from intimacy. The knowing in this Psalm is the knowing of a lover, not a warden. And once you read it that way, it becomes one of the most extraordinary texts in all of Scripture.

The Intimacy of Being Fully Known

You perceive my thoughts from afar. Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely. Every thought. Every word before it is spoken. Every movement. Every moment of rest.

For most of us, the idea of being this fully known would be terrifying. We work hard to manage how we are perceived. We show certain faces to certain people and keep others hidden. We have a version of ourselves we present to the world and an interior life we guard carefully. The idea of a God who sees all of it -- not just the presentable version -- could easily become a source of shame.

But David's response to being this thoroughly known is not shame. It is awe. You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. He is not horrified by the completeness of God's knowledge. He is overwhelmed by it. The full knowledge of him by God is a kind of treasure, not a threat.

Nowhere to Hide -- and Why That Is Good

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. David is not trying to escape. He is establishing that escape is impossible -- and then sitting in the comfort of that.

If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me" -- even the darkness will not be dark to you. There is nowhere so dark that His presence cannot reach. There is no depth of suffering, no night of the soul, no exile so remote that He is not already there.

This connects to what we read in Psalm 88 two days ago. Even the darkest Psalm -- the one that ends in darkness -- is addressed to God. Because even in the dark, the writer has grasped something that this Psalm names: there is no darkness dark enough to put you out of His reach.

Knit Together and Thought About

You knit me together. Every cell, every nerve, every particular configuration of personality and capacity that makes you the specific person you are -- assembled by God, with intention, before anyone else knew you existed. You are not an accident. You are not an afterthought. You were made.

And then the verse that I find almost impossible to take in: How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. His thoughts toward you. Not His thoughts about creation in general. About you, specifically. More than the grains of sand on every beach on every shore.

If you have ever felt unseen, forgotten, unimportant, or like the details of your life were too small for a God this large to care about -- Psalm 139 is the direct answer to that feeling. He knows you completely. He thinks about you constantly. And He calls that knowledge precious.