1 O lord, thou hast searched me, and known me.
2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.
3 Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.
4 For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.
5 Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.
Introduction
An old Norwegian tale tells of a boy who found an egg in a nest as he was climbing in the rocky cliffs near his home. He took it home, placed it with the eggs under a goose, and it hatched a freakish creature! Its deformed, unwebbed, claw-like feet made it stumble as it tried to follow the little geese. His beak was not flat; it was pointed and twisted. Instead of having lovely cream-colored down, it was an ugly brown color. To top it off, he made a terrible squawking sound! He seemed to be an ugly and disfigured genetic freak.
Then one day a giant eagle few across the barnyard. The eagle would sweep lower and lower until the strange, awkward little bird on the ground lifted his head and pointed his crooked beak to the sky. The misfit creature, feeling a kinship to the eagle, then stretched out his wings and began to hobble across the yard. He flapped his wings harder and harder until the wind picked him up and carried him higher and higher. As he began to soar through the clouds, he discovered an amazing fact: he was born an eagle! All the while he had been trying to live like a goose.
We were born to soar. We are children of God. The tragedy is that too many human beings have never discovered their divine heritage, so they live a barnyard existence instead of soaring above the mountain peaks of life.
Until we know who we are and what we are, we are destined to live far below our potential. Once we see our potential, we know that the sky is the limit for us. Psalm 139 is a meditation upon the omniscience and the omnipresence of God. As the writer acquaints us with God, he points out the unique relationships we have to him that makes us so very special.
There are three great truths here about God. First, God is omniscient, which means he is all knowing (verses 1-6). God knows our acts, our words, and our very thoughts. There is nothing—absolutely nothing about us that he does not know. This fact literally blew the psalmist’s mind. It is sobering to realize that God has us thumbtacked.
Of all the generations that have ever lived, we ought to best understand that. Man has built a camera that can photograph a golf ball from 70,000 feet in the sky. He has built a radar that can track the course of a bumblebee’s flight from ten miles away. And we have built scales and balances that can weigh the ink in a period at the end of a sentence—even if that period has been cut in half. If we can do all of that, surely God can know all about us.
God is also omnipresent. He is everywhere (verses 7-12). The psalmist asked a question and then answered it himself. He asked, “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” The answer he came up with was that we can’t go anywhere and escape God. If we go up into the sky, God is there. If we go down into the heart of the earth, God is there. If we go to the deepest part of the ocean, God is there also. We can’t even hide from God in the darkness of night.
All of this is but a prelude to the primary message of this psalm. The key truth is that the God who knows everything and is in every place takes a special interest in every person. Notice the way David says this: “For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.” The word possessed means to create or to form. The word reins literally means “kidneys.” It refers to our innermost parts. The ancients thought of the human anatomy differently from us. The kidneys were sometimes looked upon as the seat of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. That shouldn’t seem so unusual to us. We speak of the heart as being the seat of these things. What’s the difference?
Have you heard the story about the little boy who was having a difficult time in his elementary anatomy class? His teacher pointed out the various parts of the human anatomy again and again but he could never seem to get them straight. When she pointed to her shoulder he called it a hip. When she pointed to her elbow he called it an ankle. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t learn the various parts of the body. Finally, one day something clicked. That day when the teacher asked him to name the parts of the body, he got every one of them right. She pointed to her shoulder and he called it a shoulder. She pointed to her elbow and he called it an elbow. She pointed to her knee and he called it a knee.
The teacher was delighted. In her joy she said, “Johnny, that’s wonderful! You have tried and tried to name the parts of the body and you just couldn’t do it. What happened? How did you finally learn the human anatomy?” Little Johnny pointed to his temples and said, “Kidneys, Teacher. Kidneys.”
That’s what the psalmist is doing here. He identifies the kidneys as the seat of our thinking, feeling, and acting.
The word covered means to “weave together” or “to knit.” This is poetic language. The psalmist pictures God as a master craftsman. In the same way that a weaver would take several strands of yarn and weave them together into a beautiful fabric, he says that God likewise takes our muscles, sinew, and bones and weaves us into a human masterpiece.
He then sums up his teachings by saying, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (verse 14). He continues, “My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.” The word substance means “embryo.” A marvelous truth in this passage is that you and I are not the result of some kind of assembly line production. We are each custom made. God was vitally involved in our being from the very beginning and our birth was no surprise to him at all. He knew us in our pre-embryonic state. When we were hidden from the eyes of everyone else, we were seen and known by God.
The Bible avows that personhood exists from the very moment of conception. This is a very important matter in the question of abortion. There are more than 1,800 abortions performed in America every day of the year. That’s an abortion every 48 seconds. Abortions performed in order to cover up sin or to escape responsibility are nothing less than murder. God prescribed the custom design for each individual. Psalm 139 extols God for his marvelous work in human creation. It also constitutes the most important periscope in scripture on one’s self-image. It uses simple poetic language regarding our formation in the womb that implies that God had prior knowledge of David’s life and of ours—all the way from the pre-embryonic stage through death.
Before we were fully developed, God knew all of the details of our physical characteristics and of our life. Even our allotted days were recorded in God’s book before we were ever born (verse 16). This suggests that our physical characteristics are prescribed by God and not by an accident of genetics. Therefore to criticize the creation is to blame the creator.
The psalmist concludes by saying, “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: when I awake I am still with thee.”
Another great truth that Psalm 139 expresses is that we are continually on God’s mind. He thinks of us day and night. He made us, he has planned our lives, and he continually is thinking about us. With a spiritual heritage like that, with this kind of relationship to the eternal God, how can we ever be content to spend our days in the barnyards of life? We were made to soar! We were made to rise above this world.
The marvelous truth of this passage is that God, the master craftsman, has taken our muscles, sinews, and bones and has woven us personally into a marvelous human masterpiece. We are so valuable to him that he simply can’t get his mind off of us. What a challenge to high living!
1. We are fearfully and wonderfully made.
The first great truth of personal identity is to remember that you were fearfully and wonderfully made. You were not formed out of the dough of life by some great cosmic cookie cutter. Nor did you come about as a result of some celestial assembly line. Every one of us has a custom design. We are all unique, and regardless of how we look, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”
Consider first the human heart. It is as hard as a muscle, weighs about 11 ounces, and pumps the blood throughout your body. There are more than 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body, and the heart recirculates all of the blood in the body every 20 minutes. In the average lifetime of 73 years, your heart will beat 800 million times.
Every day it pumps enough blood to fill a 4,000-gallon-tank car. In a lifetime, it will pump enough blood to fill a string of tank cars from New York City to Boston, Massachusetts. As complex as it is, the heart is one of the more simple organs of the body. Scientists can make an artificial heart, but they have not even tried to make such an ostensibly inimitable organ as the liver, which performs so many biological functions that a laboratory of considerable size would be required to duplicate them. I tell you, you are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Think too about the human hand. It is the most magnificent piece of engineering in all of creation. Nothing compares to it. There are 27 different bones in the human hand and more than 30 muscles, and thanks to them we are able to pick up a pencil and write down our histories. With that same hand, we can grip a hammer and build our civilizations. Yet the hand is so nimble that a skilled surgeon, using only his thumb and his forefinger, can tie a knot inside a penny matchbox. I tell you, you are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Think about the brain. The brain is a jellylike substance that weighs about 48 ounces and fills your skull cavity. It is sometimes compared to a computer, but to compare the human brain to a computer is like comparing a battleship to a dugout canoe. There are 100 billion synapses in the average human brain. Those synapses can be thought of as switching centers that determine mental activity. Together, it’s estimated that they can perform one thousand trillion operations per second. No computer on earth can compare. Actually, the most accurate computer ever made is the human digestive system. It never misses a calorie. I tell you, you are fearfully and wonderfully made.
In spite of the fact that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, there are many people who still don’t like themselves. They feel inferior, inadequate, and worthless. They think that they are too tall, too short, too skinny, too fat, too hairy, or too bald. Their ears are too big, their eyes bug out, or their nose is too crooked. They focus so much on their outward appearance that they forget the wonder and the glory of their inner being. The truth of the matter is that about 90% of all people don’t like their appearance. If they could, they would change something about themselves.
Interestingly enough, many of the people who have made the greatest advances in our world today have done so in spite of limitations and handicaps. Beethoven was born with a hearing problem. He was almost deaf at age 28 and completely deaf at the age of 30. What a handicap for a musician! Yet, 25 years after he went completely deaf, he wrote his Ninth Symphony.
Abraham Lincoln was the son of an illegitimate girl. He had an inadequate education and he never developed the social graces. He was so ugly that when he walked down the streets people gawked at him; he was even called “the original gorilla.” Yet he became one of the greatest of our presidents.
Thomas Edison, who invented the electric light, the microphone, the phonograph, the medical fluoroscope, the nickel-alkaline battery, and hundreds of other things, was almost deaf. Someone once told him, “It must be a great handicap to be deaf.” He replied, “Why, no, it helps me to concentrate. Besides, how many things have you heard today that you weren’t listening to?” His deafness actually enabled him to concentrate on his work much more.
Many of God’s great servants have had handicaps. Moses had a speech impediment. Jeremiah had an inferiority complex. The apostle Paul lacked an imposing physical stature. John Wesley, the great Methodist preacher stood only four feet 11 inches tall and weighed 120 pounds. D. L. Moody was so poorly educated that reading his unedited sermons would make an English teacher blush.
And George Whitefield—one of the most eloquent preachers whoever lived—was an asthmatic. He coughed and wheezed his way through sermon after sermon. He was reported to be so eloquent that he could bring tears to your eyes simply by pronouncing the word “Mesopotamia.” Benjamin Franklin went to hear him preach once. Knowing of Whitefield’s eloquence, he left all of his money at home lest he become so moved he would give it all away. After hearing Whitefield preach, Franklin was so stirred that he borrowed money from his friends and gave it all to Whitefield. Now that’s eloquent!
Whitfield once visited friends in Newport, Rhode Island. When the townspeople heard that he was there, they gathered outside the house where he was staying and clamored for him to come and preach to them. He climbed out of bed, got dressed, and stood on the porch. With a Bible in one hand and a candle in the other, he preached until the candle went out. Then he went upstairs to bed and died that night from an asthma attack.
We all have handicaps. We all have limitations. Yet still, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. You ought to consider your limitations to be a compliment from God. In certain forms of competition, if an athlete is really good, he is given a handicap. A handicap can be a compliment from God and not a limitation in life. So don’t go around complaining about your looks or your limitations. Remember that you are fearfully and wonderfully made and that God can use you uniquely in his service.
2. God has an amazing purpose for your life.
Before your allotted days began, God already knew your physical characteristics and his master plan for your life. There is a purpose for your being here, and the greatest joy in life is to find and to fulfill God’s will.
Don’t ever be guilty of thinking that your life is meaningless. If it is, it is because you have made it so by your own selfish pursuits. Your life was built for service and for dedication. Through commitment to God’s will it finds its highest purpose. When the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was under construction, the architect engineer of the project became ill. He was hospitalized and then was bedridden at home throughout the duration of the construction project. His workmen showed up at his house almost daily to report the progress of the bridge to him. It was only after the bridge was completed that he was able to see it. When he saw it, he said, “Thank God! It’s just like the plan.”
The finest thing that can ever happen to anyone is to live his life just like God planned it. That’s what Jesus did. Jesus once said, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (John 4:34). Then later on the cross, Jesus said, “It is finished” (John 19:30). Note that Jesus didn’t say, “I am finished.” He said, “It is finished.” What did he mean? He was referring to God’s plan for his life. He was speaking of world redemption, for he had come to give his life a ransom for many.
The apostle Paul lived with this same conviction. He lived with the conviction and died with the satisfaction that God’s very will had been completed. He said in the waning days of his life, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). The race that God had mapped out for him had been run to completion. He had finished what God wanted him to do.
God has a plan for your life also. God was only showing you a part of that plan when he made you. He gave you certain talents, abilities, and characteristics that suited you for it. If you will discover them and use them, you will find the purpose for your existence. Be careful about comparisons. There is always a temptation to look at others and to compare ourselves unfavorably to them.
I love Billy Graham. I love how he can preach. How I wish I could preach like that. However, the fact that I can’t doesn’t mean I am useless in God’s service. There are things that I can do that Billy Graham cannot do. After all, God created both of us. We must guard ourselves against the temptation to focus so much on what we cannot do that we fail to use the abilities that we do have.
3. We are always on God’s mind.
The final thought of the psalmist is that God is always thinking about us. We are always on his mind. His thoughts of us are like the sands of the sea—more than we could number. We are the object of his affection. We are the focus of his continual thought.
Jesus said the same thing in a different way. He taught us that God marks the fall and attends the funeral of every sparrow. He also said that God had numbered the very hairs on our head.
We have just passed through the hairiest era of American history. Long hair and shaggy beards have been the rage, and my two boys are right in style. In fact, there was a time when I felt like everything they ate turned into hair.
Did you know that the average man has 100,000 hairs on his head? If he has a beard, there is an average of 10,000 whiskers in it. The hair on your body grows approximately six inches a year. We lose about 80 strands of hair every day, and if we are fortunate, new strands replace those we lose.
Now that may be more about hair than you want to know. But I remind you that if God has numbered the very hairs on your head, surely he is interested in you.
A little three-year-old girl came home from Sunday school and said, “Mommy, Mommy, I learned a new song in church today.”
“What is it, honey?” the mother replied.
The little girl stumbled around and finally said, “Jesus knows me, this I love.” The mother said, “Honey, I learned that same song when I was a girl. I learned it a bit differently but I think I like it your way better.” Sing it any way you like: “Jesus loves me, this I know,” or “Jesus knows me, this I love.” It is just as true either way. He both knows us and loves us.
Though we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and though God has a plan mapped out for our lives, and though we are continually on his mind, we have one fatal flaw. We have sinned against God. We have transgressed his laws and are thus alienated from him. David, the king of ancient Israel, found himself in a midst of a confused national situation. His kingdom was torn by internal strife. His nation stood on the brink of perilous civil war that threatened its very existence. As he looked around him, he saw that every man thought himself to be perfect. Each individual placed the blame on other individuals. David saw the fountain of sinful pride rising higher and higher in Israel. So he did what all intelligent men should do when they reach the end of their rope—David turned to God.
He stopped asking God to destroy his enemies. It was revealed to him by the Spirit of God that the spiritual tide of his nation could rise no higher than the spiritual level of his own heart. In utter humility, he fell on his knees and prayed this prayer: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23-24).
David realized that the place he should start in making things right was with himself. His prayer contained a proper sequence. First, he prayed that God might search and know him. Next, he prayed that God might cleanse him. He finished by praying that God might direct him. His steps to God were sincere, logical, and well thought out.
To him, salvation was not merely a superficial, emotional experience. It was the biggest and most deliberate thing in his life. David’s transformation as a result of this prayer was full and complete. Salvation can come to you and me in the same way.