Let’s finish this wonderful journey through the Psalms with a bang!

Psalm 139 is relatively well known, with some of it’s verses being particular stand outs. If you’ve ever tried doing memory verses, this psalm has got quite a few classics that you might have recited and locked in.

The challenge with verses like these is that they become so rooted in our minds that we take their truth for granted. If we’ve heard a specific verse recited often enough, our brains will store it in memory in such a way that can bypass our critical thinking.

If you were asked, for instance, ‘is the Lord your shepherd?’, I’d imagine the instinct is to answer ‘yes, the Lord is my shepherd. Psalm 23 tells me so.’

What that neglects, however, is the work of contextualisation and biblical study that we’ve covered over these last weeks exploring this part of the scriptures. Those who, what, where, when and why questions that dig deeper into the words of our bibles.

As we read Psalm 139, then, let’s highlight some of the key sentences that we might already have known and think about what the theological impact is of holding onto those verses.

‘Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.’ Ps.139:4

Herein lies the concept of God’s omniscience – that is God being all knowing. There is a form of this in verse 2:

You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. Ps.139:2

Whilst verse 2 suggests that God knows all things happening in the present, a kind of divine super-awareness,  verse 4 goes a step further and describes how God knows what will happen in the future. God knows what we will do before we do.

God, by this idea, knows everything that has happened, is happening and will happen.

This isn’t, I don’t think, just a party trick. If God knows what we will say before we say it, as the Psalmist says, then that implies that God knows our hearts in a profound way.

Derren Brown might be able to predict once or twice what I will say. But, fairly often, Emily (who possesses none of Derren Brown’s tricks of the mind) will tell me ‘I knew you were going to say that!’ She knows me so well that she can anticipate my response in different situations. God, then, knows us better even than that. God knows “completely” the words on our tongue.

This connects to another idea that has deep roots which lead to this psalm – Pre-Destination.

In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. Ps.139:16

This speaks of God having knowledge of our whole lives (all the days) before we’ve lived. Whilst the New Testament develops this idea, there is also a similar theme found in Jeremiah:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah 1:5

We can interpret this in two ways.

The first reading affirms free will; God has knowledge of the story of our lives before we live it, but we still have freedom to make choices ourselves.  God just knows what we will choose in advance.

The second is that God has planned our lives in advance and we are simply living out that life. This is a less popular reading of these verses, but they can be read that way.

These Old Testament verses about pre-destination develop in the time of the New Testament, which focusses more on pre-election, as exemplified by this verse in Ephesians:

For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will. Eph.1:4-5

That kind of pre-destination is a tricky issue and one that the church, it’s leaders and theologians have debated for Millenia.

So, whilst I won’t get into that, it’s worth noting the origins of those kinds of beliefs, such as that which we read in Psalm 139.

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. Ps.139:7-8

It’s another ‘omni-’ here; Omnipresence.

God is everywhere. We cannot escape God. In the Ancient Near-Eastern worldview, the ‘Heavens’ were above and ‘Sheol’ was below, so this psalm is saying God is present all the way up and all the way down.

Sheol is not synonymous with more modern ideas about hell. It was a place for the dead – both righteous and wicked – and was a place of darkness and shadows. The Psalmist goes on to focus on darkness, so could be saying God is present in the darkness and the light, in life and death.

There is an apparent contradiction in this psalm – verse 2 says that God ‘discerns our thoughts from far away’, but verses 7&8 suggest that God’s presence is everywhere. Is God close or far off?

One way around this (not that we have to work around these issues, they can just exist) is that it’s possible that the writer is using language of distance in terms of felt closeness. Someone can feel far away or very close. God might, at times, feel far away, and other times feel immediate. God could be everywhere but we might not notice God’s presence with us.

Our final theological idea speaks of the relationship between God as creator and Humanity as the creation.

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Ps.139:13-14

This is a classic. One of the most common Christian encouragements or affirmations is that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. ‘Fearfully’ feels a little out of place there as I read it now, but that’s what it says.

Typically ideas of God as creator are based around the story of the creation of the world, in Genesis, and what we can learn about God’s character through that story. This part of this Psalm is similar; we are shown something of God’s heart. Unlike Genesis, however, people don’t tend to read this and understand it literally. The context of the psalms highlights the powerful imagery for us reading today. We have an advanced understanding of fetal development in a scientific sense, but the concept of God knitting us together speaks of such care and intimacy in creation.

It amazes me that the writer would not have known what we do about pregnancy and how we come to be formed, but considers that a spiritual and artistic process.

For the psalmist here, we are not just the results of biological reproduction, but each individual is carefully crafted by the God of the universe. God is at work in our lives before we’re born.

Connecting Genesis 1 and Psalm 139 is the idea that God takes a hands on approach to humankind from the beginning, both the beginning of everything but also the beginning of each of our lives.

 

So, there we have it!

11 weeks exploring the book of Psalms – an eclectic ensemble of songs, prayers, poems and writings, full of love and grief, joy and sadness. I hope that this time spent with the Psalms has encouraged you, maybe even challenged you, and that your appreciation for this group of texts, which so often can be thought of as secondary to the ‘main’ biblical narrative, has grown.