Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

I Wonder

by Pastor Dave Wilkinson

Psalm 139

May 11, 2008

Audio version:

       The late Alex Haley, author of Roots, had a picture in his office of a turtle sitting on a fence post.  He said that the picture reminded him of a lesson he learned long ago: "if you see a turtle on a fence post, you know he had some help."

       Said Haley, "Any time I start thinking, 'wow, isn't this marvelous what I’ve done!'  I look at that picture and remember how this turtle ‑ me ‑ got up on that post."

       How did we become the people we are?

       It is interesting that the more science discovers, the more wonderful creation becomes.  It is only the pseudo‑scientist or the person with only a smattering of learning who thinks that true science destroys a sense of wonder.  All honest scholars admit their ignorance and wonder at how much there is to learn.  In recent years a parade of top‑rank physicists has turned to the Lord.  They reach the end of their search and discover that the universe they deal with isn’t a machine.  It is a wonderful mind.  That discovery opens the door to faith. 

       Albert Einstein wrote: "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious.  He who knows it not, who can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed‑out candle."

       Who are we and how did we become what we are?  How did we get up on this wonderful fence post?  These are the great questions David explores in the beautiful 139th psalm.  If you are struggling with an identity crisis or you're not quite sure just who you are, then I suggest you read and listen especially close as we look together at this marvelous psalm.

                   Read 139:1-6

       The psalm is divided into four major sections.  In each section David asks a question about himself in relationship to God.  In the first section he asks, "How well does God know me?" He answers: "O Lord, you have searched me and known me!"

       The Hebrew word for "searched" is the word to dig.  So literally, David says, "O Lord, you dig me! ‑‑ You dig into me and therefore you know me."  It is not surprising that the word dig came to mean "to know or understand" – at least when the Beatniks ruled the earth.  This is the way David begins: "Lord, you dig me!"  Can you dig it?

       "You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You discern my thoughts from afar.  You understand and know me in my conscious life. You know when I sit down (my passive life) and when I rise up (my active life).  And you know me also in my subconscious life ‑‑the level of life from which my thoughts arise.  You know how I think and what I think about.  You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways."  You know the way I choose to go, and you know the habits of my life.  "You know me, Lord," says David. "Even before a word is on my tongue, you know it."

       A cynic once said that "people have two reasons for doing something ‑‑ a good reason and the real reason."  But David knows that God is not fooled by play acting ‑‑ even if we manage to fool ourselves.   "God, you know what I am going to say before I open my mouth.  You know every detail about the flow of my sentences, their superficial sound, their real meaning, and their connection with my attitude to life, my faith, or even my lack of faith."

       "You are active God" David declares, "in my past, my future and my present.  You beset me behind (the past) and before, (the future), and lay Your hand upon me now, (the present).  Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it." 

       David is completely overwhelmed by the fact that God knows him so completely.  I think David is also somewhat frightened at the vast scope of God's knowledge and involvement in his life.

       In his autobiography, "Surprised by Joy", C.S. Lewis talks about his own encounter with God when he became a believer.  I don't think Lewis would have liked Psalm 139 before he became a Christian.  Because above all, Lewis had not wanted to be "interfered with."  And the all knowing God described in Psalm 139 terrified Lewis.  He describes God as the great cosmic interferer.

       Lewis writes: "People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of knowing that there is a God.  Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about "man's search for God."  To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse's search for the cat.  I've no use for spies and snoopers.  I would be private.

       "Remember", Lewis writes, "I had always wanted, above all things, not to be 'interfered with.'  I had wanted (mad wish) to call my soul my own."  I had been far more anxious to avoid suffering that to achieve delight.  I had always aimed at limited liabilities.

      “You must picture me alone in that room, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.  That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.  In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed; perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England ."

       I think that David shares some of Lewis' natural discomfort in the face of the all‑knowing, all interfering God.  David asks: "Lord, how can I get away from you?  Is there any way I can escape?  If I go to heaven, you are there, of course.  And even though I go to hell I still will not escape you.  Of course, scripture make clear that there is a vast difference between the experience of God for one who is in heaven and for one who is in hell.  But God is still God. That is the point. God owns and runs His universe and there is no escaping His presence.

       And that's okay.  David sees that the presence of God is not a fearful thought.  He knows that God's purpose is not to create fear but joy.

                        Read 139:9-10

       The "wings of the morning" is a beautiful poetic expression.  If you have stood and watched the sun come up you will have noticed how the rays of the rising sun shoot across the heavens with the speed of light and reach to the farthest bounds of the horizon.  This is what David is describing.  "If I could travel with the wings of the morning," that is, with the speed of light; "if I could go with the speed of light and reach to the farthest points of earth even there," David says, "I would find you, Lord.  You have gone before me, have preceded me, and You will take hold of my hand!"   Even darkness cannot separate me from You and Your love:

 

                        139:11-12

       Remember when you were little and misbehaved.  You felt guilty and tried to hide by crawling under the covers or lying under the bed or in the closet?  You thought that God could not see you because humans couldn't.  There are many grown ups who still try to do that.  They feel that if they do not think about certain things, then God will not think about them either.  But He does.  No darkness, physical or mental, can hide us from God's presence.  He knows us and sees us, no matter how dark it is.  Whether we know God or not, God is but a touch away.

       Someone might say, "Well, this is certainly beautiful poetry, all this about God's knowing me and being with me, but how do you know it's true?"  "All right," says David, "I’ll tell you.  I figured it out from looking at the design of my own body."  This is David’s Mother’s day poem.

                         139:13-14

       David is amazed at the vitality and complexity of the forces in his own body, which are essential to life, but which he has no control over.  "There is something outside of me that regulates and runs me.

       Have you ever stopped to think how much of your life depends upon the forces at work in you?  If any one of them stopped you would die very quickly.  You depend on something over which you have no control.  Your heart is thumping away right now, and it would be terrible if you had to control it with your mind or will if you had to say to your heart, "now thump!" or to your lungs "okay, breathe!"

      We are not God.  We are but part of created matter ‑ and yet! Every ligament, every tissue, every blood‑vessel in our bodies, the hundred billion neurons or nerve cells inside our skulls, the chemical reactions that take as little as one‑millionth of a second to act, all these marvels are listed in the master plan or diagram that God had, by which he designed the various components he needed to create you and me.  David is struck by the process that is necessary in forming a human being.

                            139:15-16a

       There is a story abut a bright young boy who chose as his subject for a sixth grade essay, "The Mystery of Life."  He had read up on the subject:  it was not difficult to find literature that dealt with it, and he had become quite well read.  He thought he would get some first hand information from his mother, to add a personal perspective to the report.  He asked her, "Mother, where did I come from?"

       His mother had been waiting for this question with dread for several years.  But she had the answer ready: “A stork brought you, dear."  Impatiently he said, "Well then where did you come from?" and she replied, "Why a stork brought me too, dear."  Disgusted he went to his grandmother and asked, "Grandmother, where did you come from?" she answered evasively, "Well a stork brought me, child."

       So the boy began his essay with the line:  "There hasn't been a normal birth in our family for three generations."

       But in writing of being formed in the depths of the earth, David is not talking about abnormal births.  "In the lowest parts of the earth" does not suggest that the baby is not formed in the mother's womb.  It is poetic language for secrecy and mystery.  We come from the dust of earth though we are formed in the mother's womb.

       The frame David describes is the foundation of the body, the bone and muscle system.  That is where the body begins to be put together.  Without a frame we would just be but rolling balls of gelatin. 

       The phrase skillfully wrought" is one word in Hebrew.  It is the word for "embroidered."  David describes the delicate embroidery of the body, the things that tie us together so that one organ supports another.  All the parts are amazingly embroidered together.

       In verse 16 he says: "your eyes beheld my unformed substance." literally, the word in Hebrew is, "my rolled up substance."  It pictures the embroidery, all rolled up.  People ask questions today about when life begins.  When does an embryo become a human being? When does abortion affect a human being?  David's inspired answer is "your eyes beheld me, not an impersonal collection of cells that wasn't me yet, in my rolled‑up embryonic state."

       Some of you may have read about the Alger Hiss espionage case in the early 1950s.  If you want to know more about it, we have a few old guys who come to Men’s Breakfast who were there.

       Hiss was accused of spying for the Communists while he was an employee of the State Department.  The case brought into prominence a then unknown congressman named Richard Nixon.  A participant in that case was a man named Whittaker Chambers.  Chambers was also a Communist and a contact of Alger Hiss.

       Now Whittaker Chambers later wrote a book called Witness in which he tells how he later became a Christian.  He writes how one day he was sitting with his little two‑year‑ old daughter on his lap. His eye fell on her ear and it caught his attention.  He was struck by the design of that ear.  How beautiful, how shell‑like it was, and how perfectly designed to catch every sound wave in the air to be translated into sound by the brain.  Knowing something of the mechanics of the ear he began to think about it.  He was struck by the impossibility that anything so intricate, so complex, so beautifully designed could ever occur by chance.  That led him to other lines of thought and eventually he investigated the Christian position and became a Christian.  The argument from design is a great argument and it is what David uses here.

       But that is not all.

                            139:16b

       David is not only impressed by the argument from design, but by the evidence of a great plan or determination.  David had experiences in his life when many unrelated factors and incidents suddenly tied together.  He knew it must have all been brought about by a mind greater than his own.  This was evidence of pre-made plans.

       We have all had this feeling.  Something that we did not plan or expect suddenly takes place. Many varied factors all of a sudden fit together. They dovetail beautifully.  Then we become aware that someone else is planning our days and yet allowing us free will in experiencing them.  Even before David’s days occurred they were recorded in the book of God.  He planned them. 

       But this is not the impersonal blueprint of a distant engineer.  It=s the loving plan of a gracious heavenly Father. God makes us as He wants us to be.  Then He aims us or a life that will best fulfill all that he put into us!  As Paul writes in Ephesians 2:10, "we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before hand, that we should walk in them"

                            139:17-18

       David moves from contemplating his own thoughts to considering God's innumerable thoughts towards him.  He is not exaggerating.  Even in his own body, there is an unimaginable wealth of detail, every point of it from the mind of God.  Such divine knowledge is not only 'wonderful' but precious, because it carries its own proof of God's infinite commitment to us.

      That would be a beautiful way to end the psalm ‑‑ maybe just add a benediction.  But the Psalm doesn't end.  Instead it takes an abrupt and disturbing turn.

                          139:19-22

       Why does David suddenly interject these bloody thoughts in this beautiful Psalm?  Why this sudden word of passion, "Lord, kill the wicked!"

       Well first, we need to recognize that everything that is declared in the psalms is not necessarily a reflection of God's will.  While God inspired, the palms are the experiences of believers.  They honestly mirror people=s viewpoints, and we need to understand these passages in the light of their context.

       David has just considered the wonder of God's knowledge, presence, and power.  If God has all these wonderful attributes, David suddenly asks, why is evil so successful in this world?  If God so creates and values life, how can He allow those who are bloodthirsty to destroy what He creates.  Good question!  God knows all things, and God can do all things!  Yet, God seems to be doing nothing! 

       Now as Christians, we realize that God has settled the sin problem at the cross.   God Himself has suffered for us, so that we cannot accuse God of not doing anything.  But David did not have the benefit of this clear event.   

       So David asks God to take care of the problem of the wicked.  He says, "Lord, wipe them out," as though such a simple remedy for human ills had never occurred to the Almighty.  David=s forgotten Noah and the flood.  “Lord, wipe them out, that's all.  That will take care of them."

       Now notice David does not say, "Why don't you let me do it?  He recognizes that vengeance belongs to God and that if anybody is going to do it, God alone must do it.  But he is saying, "Lord, it's your problem.  So why don't You do it?"

       Suddenly, however, David remembers that since all people are sinners then he is one too.  And in shock and horror at what he has been saying about other people he realizes that evil isn't all "out there".  It’s also "in here."  So he humbly asks God to search him.

              

          139:23-24

       David says, "Lord, I don't understand this problem of evil.  It appears to me the easiest way is for you to eliminate the evil people -- or at least the ones who are more evil than me. But Lord, I also know that I don't think very clearly and I don't often have the right answer.  There can easily be in me a way of hurtfulness. I have often found, Lord that my thoughts are not right.  So, Lord, in case I don't have the right remedy for this evil problem, let me add this prayer: "search me, O God, and know my heart!  Try me and know my thoughts!  See if there by any way of grief in me, and lead me in the truth, the way that leads to everlasting life!"