Psa 139:11,12   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; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

To appreciate darkness these days, or rather to be really aware of it, one has to live in the country. Living anywhere near a town means light pollution and with then increased habit of urban dwellers to put lights on the outside of their houses for security purposes, it seems there is rarely true darkness. Darkness is traditionally an opportunity to hide. John wrote, “men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” (Jn 3:19). There may have been a metaphorical sense about that but it is also true physically. Burglaries often take place at night. When it is dark you can escape and hide.

David has moved on from thinking about God knowing him absolutely, to God seeing him absolutely. He had thought about the extremities of height and depth and then of horizontal distance, and now simply of removal of light which is the agency that enables us to see anything and everything. Again David seems to pose a possibility of him being foolish and trying to hide from God. If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me seems to be the thoughts of a man trying to escape. It's as if he recognizes this foolish side of himself and speaks to himself against it.

There are two things that the foolishness of the old sinful nature tries to do. The first is to deny God, to pretend He's not there at all, hence the psalmist's cry, “Why should the nations say, "Where is their God?” (Psa 79:10). The second is to try to escape from God and to hide from him. As we've noted previously, Adam and Eve and Jonah are classic examples of this. In his pondering, David reflects on the thought of how silly this is. As observed above, the most common form of escape is in the darkness, and he ponders on how unreal that is. The phrase and the light become night around me just seems to accentuate what happens when the day goes and darkness comes. In the night we cannot be seen – and how more true that would have been in David's day when there was no electricity and they relied upon oil lamps. Night time was a time of real darkness and therefore an opportunity for hiding.

But then he faces the truth: God sees regardless of whether it is light or dark. Darkness doesn't mean anything to the Lord. He sees in the dark! He doesn't just see an outline like we might if there was a glimmer of background light. No, He sees us exactly as we are, as if there was bright light, as if there was a physical and spiritual x-ray machine that sees right through us: even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. The Lord does not rely upon light energy shining on the cells of the eyes to be able to see. He sees everything, whether there is light or not. Now that is one of the things that we don't often think about but which makes God so utterly different from us. That is why, in a foolish moment, we think darkness can hide us. We need light to be able to see anything. No light, and we can see nothing, but it isn't like that with God. He doesn't rely on light energy to ‘see'. Spirit sees spirit and spirit isn't anything to do with material existence, including light energy. One day we will put aside this material body and take on a purely spiritual body. God sees the spiritual us, wherever we are today, regardless of where we are and regardless of whether or not there is light.

When we reflect on this matter, we start to realize that this more than anything else, is the reason we cannot hide from God. We can imagine God pursuing us across the skies, in the depths of the oceans or across the face of the earth, but deep down we know physics and we know that without light you cannot be seen. And that's where the climax of this “God can see” thinking comes. You CAN be seen, regardless of light.

Now as much as David's thinking appears to be reflective countering his old sinful way of thinking, there is also always the need of security with God to be thought about, and so the comforting thing about this train of thought is that however dark it is, God can see us and is there for us. Now as we start thinking like that, it is natural to start thinking of darkness as the darkness that comes on the soul when things are going badly and the enemy seems to be oppressing us. I have known those who have been suffering mental affliction, mental illness if you like, and mostly we tend to think that in their darkness they cannot see or sense God, but that is not so. I came to the realization once, when counselling someone that in their darkness, God is. God is there with them in their darkness and they can know Him in the middle of that mental darkness as awful as it is. I found this came as a remarkable revelation, but it is true and as the person realises for themselves that God sees them in their darkness and is there with them in their darkness so, even in the midst of it, they can draw on His presence and love and the darkness starts to diminish.

If you are suffering the darkness of depression, the Lord still sees you and is with you in it. We don't feel Him or sense Him because we are beings who only properly see in the light. Yet we do have other senses and they can work in the darkness. He is there with you in whatever darkness you experience. That is the wonder of this. Nothing that can happen to you, including darkness, can take you to a place where God cannot see and God cannot touch you. Let that truth really sink into your mind and your spirit. He is there for you – in it!

Psa 139:13   For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.

In this psalm so far, David has been pondering on the thought that God knew absolutely everything there is to know about him (v.1-6), and that He saw him wherever he was (v.7-12). Now we might be tempted to think that David now moves on to a completely different subject if it wasn't for that little word ‘for'. ‘For' links what went before with what now follows, and so perhaps we might paraphrase it, “darkness and light are the same to you, nothing being hidden from you, even as you created the very innermost me, so you saw me (implied) in my mothers womb as you formed me.” From thinking about the impossibility of being hidden from God anywhere in the world and in any condition (light or dark) so David's mind takes him back to his very beginning in the womb – even there he was not hidden from God. That is the first and primary sense of this verse; it is another expression or way that we are not hidden from God. He's going on to say that God knew us from the point of conception and we'll consider this again and again as we ponder these verses but it will bear repeating because it is so important.

Indeed if you think this is wonderful, take hold of what Paul declared in that wonderful revelation called his letter to the 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 to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ.” (Eph 1:4,5). Before He even made the world, the Lord looked into what would be the future and saw all who would respond to the wonderful news of Jesus, and on that basis chose them to become His children for eternity. In that sense this world is just a filtering process whereby we are revealed for who we are, the chosen ones of God from before the foundation of the world, on the basis of our response to the work of the Son of God on the Cross. Isn't that even what Paul was hinting at when he wrote, “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (Rom 8:19) The spiritual world looks on and wonders, “Who of all these beings on the earth is going to be the next to be revealed at one of God's foreordained ones?” At one point it was you and all heaven rejoiced, for as Jesus said, “I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” (Lk 15:10)

So that is the bigger picture – God saw us even before He brought the world into being. Is it any surprise then, that as David thinks of all the places that the Lord sees, he realizes that one of them that He sees into, is the womb. If you like, God looks into all the nooks and crannies of life, of the world, and sees everything – including us as we are formed as those initial cells coming together in the womb.

But here we really do touch on a mystery because what is ‘life'? Today we are familiar with the talk of cells forming but surely basic cells are purely ‘material'. Think of specks of dust joining together to form eventually a big cluster of dirt – but it is an inert chunk of dirt. What is it in the most basic cell that makes it join with others and form what we call ‘life'? Don't resort to chemical language – oh it's just two chemicals reacting together. Well when two chemicals react together they usually form a compound – but it is still inert. What is there in this mystery that generates ongoing movement – heart beats, brain movement, that in turn energise the rest of the cells we call our body. At its basic scientists talk about electrical charges but where do they come from – from the mother? – but where did the first electrical charges come from? Are we are able to be reduced to mere electrical charges? Do we put down all the amazing works of art or amazing works of fiction or amazing music down to ‘random electrical charges' – because random they must be, totally lacking in personality if there is no God.

But David says you created my inmost being. Somewhere, David says, in the deepest recesses of who I am, you brought something which could not be there any other way. You brought something into being when there was nothing – you created. In other words, you brought an innermost spark of life to my body and you knit me together, you fused that ‘life' together with the purely physical to generate what we call a living human being. David here thus attributes ‘life' to God and in doing so he follows the Scripture tradition: “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (Gen 2:7), i.e. God took pure inert material and energized it with what we call ‘life' that strange and elusive characteristic that distinguishes us from ‘lifeless' things.

Here David has taken us on a step of faith. God isn't just ‘out there' as an observer of this world. He sees every intricate part of it, but more than that, He is, in a way that defies our understanding this side of heaven, involved in imparting ‘life' to us – His energy, for without it, nothing would live. This is what attacks godless man's sensibilities, this thought that we are utterly dependent on God for life. None of us knows how long we will have this life, but one thing we are sure of – one day we will die, one day this life which energises this body will cease and the body will cease moving and will from then on start to decay. This God-life energises every cell and keeps the whole thing functioning and without it, it cannot function and every cell starts to decay. God is there, yes. God sees, yes. But more than that, God is involved and it is His provision of life energy that activates and motivates us, and gives us sense of meaning, sense of purpose, sense of destiny and enables us to be creative human beings. I am, because He is.

Psa 139:14   I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

Because we live in a technological age, we have cameras that can take photos of the embryo at its various stages of growth. In fact the photography that has already been done is incredible. No longer is the growth of the foetus a mystery – well it is, but we can at least see it thanks to modern technology! Solomon once wrote, “As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things” (Eccles 11:5). How the body is formed is, even though we can view it, a mystery. Scientists can talk knowingly about genes and cells and so on, but ultimately we really don't know because, as we've commented here recently, it's not like watching a chemical chain reaction; this is something infinitely more complex and something stirs brain waves and heart beats into existence, something we call life. But more than that, deep within each of us, we are certain we are more than just energized cells, we have meaning and purpose – we may not be sure what it is, but each of us does not think we are random, meaningless chunks of energized flesh. I am me, and I am significant.

Our problem with all this is that we live with ourselves, we know ourselves (or think we do), and see ourselves in a mirror every day, and familiarity takes for granted. I take for granted that on the ‘front' of my head are two sets of receptor cells that are sensitive to light waves and which convey the light signals to my brain where somehow over the years of my life I have learned to process and recognize those light signals and am able to ‘see' everything before me so it makes sense. I take for granted that either side of my head are two areas that are sensitive to sound waves and do the same with them as my eyes do with light. I ‘hear' and have the staggering ability to distinguish between sounds. I can sit in front of a TV screen and after a few seconds say to my wife, “I recognize that voice. Who is he?” and with a little thought remember an actor from five years ago. How many voices have I heard in that time? Yet I have the ability to recognize and recall that particular one after all that time!

A number of years ago I stayed in a hotel in Singapore and when we went into the restaurant there was a buffet table about fifty feet long laid out with different dishes from end to end, mostly dishes I'd never encountered before in the West. It was a gourmet's heaven. How incredible that my taste buds could distinguish between all those incredibly varied tastes, sweet, sour and goodness knows what! How amazing are the pallet of a wine taster or an oil taster – oh yes, there are olive oil tasters as well, who can distinguish between different oils from different climates, and different countries. The pallet is an amazing assessor of taste. Dare we move on to smell? Well let's stick to the nice smells! What are the smells that thrill you? Newly baking bread and freshly ground coffee are two special smells in my repertoire, but of course there are lots more smells that bring pleasure to us – as well as the ones that make us ‘turn up our noses' and retch! The sense of smell is a blessing and a bane.

Have you ever watched a baby running its fingers over different textures? They are learning the different ‘feel' that comes from different materials. I particularly like running my hand over freshly sanded and polished timber, an incredible texture as far as I am concerned. And then we find that different parts of our bodies are sensitive in different ways that give pleasure. Ah, there is something to be considered. Have you ever considered how your body is designed for pleasure – how sight can bless you (a sunset?), how sound than bless you (an orchestra?), how taste can bless you (a gourmet meal), how smell can bless you (a scent from a bottle), and how touch can bless you (a tickle!)? Multiply each of those by dozens or even hundreds of times and you begin to realize again, or even for the first time, how incredible your body is and how amazingly it has been designed for pleasure. This is not to become one sidedly hedonistic but it is to appreciate how God has made us to be those who can enjoy this world in so many different ways – and so much of the time we take it for granted!

So far all we've covered have been the five senses. We haven't really gone near the brain in any meaningful way. How is it that we have this ability to process knowledge that comes to us through the senses and do things with it? Use words like science, technology, art, literature, and music and you are speaking of areas of activity where the brain has been hard at work – yet still the experts tell us we use only a tiny part of it!

It is only when we stop and pause and think and consider what we call our bodies that we appreciate the wonder of what it is that will be moving around this planet in my waking hours today. Indeed I am fearfully and wonderfully made and the more I realise that, the more I realise that I am not an accident of history, I am a designed creature and I have a Creator and if ‘He' can create something like me, He has got to be incredible and if He's incredible, then my response ought to be praise and worship. But I'm just the starting point of my reverie; as I gaze out into the world and start thinking about what I see, I join with David and say, Lord, “your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

Psa 139:15,16a    My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.

There are lots of questions in life, about life. The philosophical questions are who am I, why am I here, where am I going, what's life all about? Behind some of these are the additional questions, am I an accident, am I wanted, do I have meaning and worth or am I just the result of pure chance? The thing is, these aren't just ‘philosophical questions' for philosophers to play with, they are real questions for ordinary people. Increasingly we are being told that there is no God, and no ‘meaning' to life and then are surprised that people act in very anti-social ways. We all want to know that there is meaning and purpose to life – my life! Even more than that we all want to feel loved and wanted and it is at this point that our verses today really connect.

There are, tragically, many people who believe, and some have even been told, that they are unwanted accidents. Now since abortion on demand has arrived there are considerably fewer than before that happened, but nevertheless many of us do look back to the little we know of our beginnings and anguish, especially if the signpost of adoption was there, clearly marking that our parents did not want us. It is not uncommon for children to ask their parents, “I wasn't adopted, was I?” Why do they ask that? They ask it because we all want reassuring that we are loved – and loved from the very beginning. An additional problem is that clinical psychologists tell us that mothers communicate their feelings to the baby they are carrying, and so the unwanted child knows it before they are born! It may never be spoken to the child, but the child knows.

Now David takes this all-seeing aspect of God a stage further. He has previously said, “you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.” (v.13) and that had produced the praise in him for the wonder of who he was, that we saw yesterday. Now he adds a further dimension of intimacy: your eyes saw my unformed body. The Lord didn't just breathe life into him in some objective, distant, mechanical way. The Lord was there, imparting life, watching and observing carefully all that was happening. As we said previously, this is a mystery, how and when life was communicated, when spirit was imparted to these otherwise person-less cells. But however we don't understand it, let us take on board one thing that David is seeking to communicate here: somehow God is involved in the life bringing of every baby.

Now this has profound repercussions – and I realize this is an act of faith to believe this for it is not something that can be proved, but it is what the Scriptures declare – for it says that despite whatever feelings our parents had when we were conceived – God was involved! These verses today, if taken out of context, would simply tell us that God observes all that goes on in the womb, but when we link them with the verses that go before, we see that God is intimately involved in making you who you are – a living being with a spirit who is now capable of communicating with Him – spirit with Spirit.

At the point of your conception God was there and, in ways beyond our understanding, was involved in making you the person you can be. OK, perhaps you have the genes of your parents, but you also have a spirit from God which opens the way up for you to communicate with Him and receive purpose and direction from Him. It is only because you have a spirit, imparted at conception, that you were able to become convicted, able to respond to God about the god news of Jesus, and able to receive His Holy Spirit to create you in a new way at new birth. The possibilities for all that has happened to you as a Christian, started right back at the moment of conception. Even at that point God was imparting to you the possibility of a God-life at some point in the future. For some of us, it happened in our childhood, for others much later in life, but the ‘mechanics' of the possibility, the God-communication link, was established there in the womb – by God!

Yes He does that for every person but, as we've previously noted, He knew us from before the foundation of the world, He knew we were going to come to a point in life when we would respond to His call and surrender to Him and become children of God in daily experience, not merely in name. The truth is that when He imparted life to you in the womb, He was eagerly looking forward to the time when this bunch of living cells would grow and form into a person who would eventually recognise Him and respond to Him as a little child, at whatever age it would happen. Despite whatever your parents thought, as far as God was concerned you were no accident. You were the child He saw when He looked into the future before making the world, the child He knew would enter into a living, daily relationship with Him one day in time-space history.

As you were conceived this was the next exciting step, from God's viewpoint, in the possibility of that relationship coming into being, and so there was joy in heaven. Indeed, My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body, and so you rejoiced as you saw me coming into this world, for you knew, Lord, the day would fast be approaching when you and I would share together. Therefore your ‘seeing' was not objective and uninterested; you saw me, knew me, anticipated me and rejoiced in that anticipation. “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me , ( almost ) too lofty for me to attain,” (v.6) but I can with the help of your word and your Spirit. Thank you so much.

Psa 139:16b    All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

In philosophical and theological circles there is always much debate about just how free will works, how much free will we have, or how ‘determined are we, determined that is in the sense that life is pre-determined and we can't do anything about it. Certain things do seem fairly obvious. First we feel like we have the ability to choose what to do next. The determinist says, “Ah, but that's just it; but even your feelings are part of being linked in to all the events that led up to this one, and you in fact had to act like you did when you acted.” The only problem about that is that you can never prove that assertion. For that matter you can't prove that you have total free will, but feeling may be better than nothing. Which is where the Bible comes in handy, because when we look at Scripture we find God gives instructions to people but sometimes they go completely against them, and it would be a nonsense to think that God gives instructions and then makes you do the opposite. Israel as a nation were often examples of this, straying away from God's plan for living. Solomon was an example of this when he took hundreds of foreign wives contrary to God's instructions. Jonah was an example of this when he ran away to sea. Indeed it gets worse when you see people sinning in a whole variety of ways. To say God made them sin would be completely against His revealed character and a nonsense anyway.

Now we have been digging rather a hole for ourselves in our thinking so far, at least when it comes to the verse we have before us today. David's declaration is that even before history started ( before one of them came to be ), all our days were ordained. To unwrap this we perhaps need to go to the New Testament: “those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” (Rom 8:29 ,30) and “ 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 to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will” (Eph 1:4,5) and “This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge” (Acts 2:23 ).

Now let's pick up the truth from these verses. First God has a purpose. When He designed the world in His mind before it came into being, He had an orderly plan; He was working to achieve something specific. That's the first vital point. The second vital point is that God can look into the future and see exactly how it will all work out – the workings of the world, our responses and His actions, all woven together. He knew exactly how it would all work out, so God knew that we would respond to Him and He knew that sinful men would rise up and crucify His Son. It wasn't a case of making it happen, but He knew that with all the prevailing details, that was how it would work out. Now within all that, He knew and planned for Christ to come and the news about him would be the defining criteria for belief by which people could be saved. His purpose was that having responded to His call , we would become like His Son, Jesus, empowered and directed by His Holy Spirit. In that the outcome of His plan was this, we say He predestined us to become like Jesus and predestined us to be adopted as His children. Once we responded to His call, we were thus justified (or put right in His sight) and once we were put right in His sight, He placed His Holy Spirit within us and we were glorified (made glorious and with an eternal destiny in glory or heaven).

So, returning to our verse today, we can see that ‘ordained' can now be seen to mean the pre-known outworking of God which is an interaction of our free will and His knowledge and activity. This side of heaven we will never know how much or how little our free will contributed to this outworking or how much or how little His powerful working was involved. I suspect that He works so knowingly that, while still giving us opportunity to exercise this free will, He encourages us in such a strong way that we are encouraged into the course of action that brought us through to salvation - but we'll have to wait until we get to heaven to know that definitely!

In the meantime, as David reflects on the wonder of God's knowledge – which includes knowing him wherever he is, even in his mother's womb being formed, that knowledge even includes all the days ahead of David at the point he is born. What is amazing is that even though God knows we might blow it in the future, He still blesses us today. Have you ever wondered at the thought that God would have known that Solomon would have gone off the rails and taken foreign wives leading him into idolatry, and yet He still blessed him with wisdom and prosperity in the early part of his life. It is like God says, I will deal with you today on the basis of today, not on what I know you will do tomorrow. In that way we will never be able to say that God didn't give us every chance to get it right! That is awesome! The lesson? Don't take for granted the blessings of God today. Receive them gratefully and respond well to them. Use them to build your faith and don't become casual. God knows your future, but that doesn't guarantee blessing in it, if you become complacent and casual and turn away. The call is always to be alert. Be so!

Psa 139:17,18a    How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.

Have you ever said or heard anyone else saying, “My mind was going nineteen to the dozen.” It's a funny saying isn't it and I assume it literally means I'm cramming into my mind nineteen things where there is really only room for a dozen things, or, my mind is just buzzing with so many things at the moment. I once had a job where I was probably processing about twenty five pieces of work at any one time and I always felt it took about three days of holiday for my mind to slow down, and three days back at work to pick up the necessary speed of working again. The human mind is an amazing thing but in comparison to God we're not even on the starter blocks!

I don't know if it's crossed your mind once or twice in the last few days as we've been pondering some of the issues coming out of this psalm, but it's seemed to me once or twice that I've been imagining God's mind working like a gigantic computer. There's no other way that I can process the thoughts of God knowing everything, everywhere and throughout history at any one moment – because that is what we have been saying over the past days, and it seems like that is what David is thinking too. I mean, consider what we have seen so far. First there is David's assertion that the Lord sees him and knows all his thoughts. No problem – but He sees and knows the thoughts of every single human being on earth! Worse than that, we thought about the suggestion from C.S.Lewis that God stands above time-space history and looks down on it and sees and knows every person at every moment of history. Is your understanding of God's bigness growing?

But David pushed it to include everywhere, including heaven and hell. He then went on to ponder God knowing him in his mother's womb. Now this is going to get really mind blowing. God sees every single cell being added to this tiny embryo and, again, because He is outside time He looks down on time and sees every single cell, every single second of every moment and in every piece of space in existence – all at once. He knows it because He sees it – ALL ! Now, to be quite honest, my mind lost track of that lines back. Our minds just can't process that sort of thinking really. We can say it but we really can't grasp what it means – but this is the God with whom we have dealings and who knows us.

But it gets worse! God doesn't only see everything and know everything, He is interacting with everything – all the time! We pondered yesterday on the fact that He is constantly interacting with us to help us, guide us, direct us and empower us to work out His purposes. In that respect He is thinking about what He knows and what is best to work out this divine purpose. A tiny, tiny illustration of that we briefly referred to when we quoted the verse, “This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge” (Acts 2:23). The whole bringing about the death of Jesus as our substitution at the Passover relied upon God knowing exactly how sinful men thought and acted, and thus provoking them, step by step, through His Son, so that they rose up at exactly the right moment to bring about this death at this time. Now as we said, this is but a tiny, tiny example of what God is doing all the time as He works out His plans and purposes, interacting with the free will of mankind. There is staggering wisdom involved here.

David, like us, struggles with these thoughts. As he thinks about some of these things, he has perhaps a sense that he is receiving revelation. All these things we have been considering, we said, we have to take by faith. The Bible says them so we accept them. As the writer to the Hebrews put it, “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Heb 11:1) In other words, what we have seen but have simply been told in the word of God, we have to accept by faith. The Hebrews writer then gave an example of this: “ y faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command.” (Heb 11:3). David has a similar sense now, which is why he says, “ How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! ” He realizes how wonderful it is to be able to have this awareness of the truth. But it's not only the quality of what he's getting, it's the enormity of it: “How vast is the sum of them! ” He tries to put it into words: “ Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.” Well of course you can't number the grains of sand on all the seashores of the earth; it's an impossibility, but that's the best he can do to convey his awareness of the enormity of what goes on in God's mind. If you haven't grabbed it yet, read through this meditation today again – and then worship Him. (Worship is the bowing down and reverencing of a superior being by an inferior one!)

Psa 139:18b   When I awake, I am still with you .

There are times when reading the Bible when you suddenly come across a verse and think, “Where did that come from?” So often, so many of us just read the Bible almost casually, only skimming over the surface and when we do that we don't notice some of the oddities. I was once asked to read a large part of Psalm 22 for an audio-visual Easter presentation. After a few lines I had to call to the person making the recording, “Hold on, I need to think about this I don't understand what I'm reading.” When you are trying to do a dramatic reading you have to understand every line. Suddenly I realised that what I thought was a familiar psalm wasn't! Before we say anything more about this verse, can I ask you to read the Bible slowly and intelligently and stop and think and pray when you come across bits that don't make sense?

Here in this psalm David has just been thinking about the fact that God had known him even from his mother's womb, and that God knew every single day of his life. He began to realise just a little of the incredible mind of God and he realised that God's thought's are so many you can't count them. Then he suddenly says, “When I awake, I am still with you.” Hullo? Where did that come from? It's interesting sometimes, when you come across apparent anomalies like this, to look at other versions. The Living Bible paraphrase says, “And when I waken in the morning, you are still thinking of me.” The Message Version has, “Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with you.” The Amplified Version integrates it with the previous thought about numbering God's thoughts, “ When I awoke [could I count to the end] I would still be with you.”

There is almost an implication here that trying to count and work out the number and complexity of God's thoughts is really beyond us so that when we try and do it, we are simply left exhausted and we end up going to sleep out of shear tiredness. Yet when we wake up the next morning, the truth is that God is still here with us, even if we couldn't keep up with Him! This little verse is, if you like, almost an acknowledgement of our smallness and weakness and inability to keep up with Almighty God, and in that it's a good place to be. As we concluded yesterday, it helps us keep ourselves in perspective. As we begin to catch something of the awesomeness of God's mind, it makes us realise how small and inadequate we are. Yet when we realise, as we read the rest of the Bible, that this staggeringly amazing God seems to delight in communicating with and relating to us tiny ant-like creatures, it evokes praise and worship in us. Somehow we are so special to Him that he sent His own Son to live here to reveal His wonderful nature, and then to die here to take our sin and guilt and punishment. This is awesome!

The truth that seems to emerge with this verse is that it doesn't matter if we can't understand everything about God. He doesn't expect us to! He's only given us finite minds – as frustrating as that is for atheists who would like to think they know everything – and so we can never fully understand the infinite God. Yet He has given us sufficient in the Bible, about Himself, to enable us to have faith. We have sufficient to enable us to relate to Him in some small measure – and that's all He asks of us.

It is this realisation, at least in the subconscious level, that leaves so many of us feeling dissatisfied with our lives. We feel we are largely ignorant of God and of His ways, and our experiences of Him are so superficial and shallow. Maybe, but this verse suggests that God knows that and can live with that! I may be shallow, I may be superficial, but when I wake up tomorrow morning, He will still be there for me. His presence and His desire to bless me, doesn't depend on how much I understand. He knows we are like little children. When my children were very small they really knew very little of me, but that didn't stop them relating to me in a most meaningful way. They didn't know what job I did, they didn't know my thoughts and feelings; they just knew that I was there for them, and that was enough.

Psa 139:19,20 If only you would slay the wicked, O God! Away from me, you bloodthirsty men! They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name.

In yesterday's reading we commented how sometimes verses appear almost from nowhere and we have to look for the link-up in thinking. Well the same thing happens today. David has been pondering on the wonder of the knowledge of God. That has led him into some deep understanding. He has come on holy ground, and then it's as if he pivots on the spot and turns away from these thoughts and lashes out at the evil in the world. Why is that?

Well perhaps it is simply that as he had pondered on the staggering greatness of God, he realises the smallness of mankind and he realises that God could, if He wanted, utterly deal with all the wicked of the world. Having pondered on the wonder of God and His goodness and His knowledge and His purposes, it is as if it only makes worse the evil of the world, the stupidity of the world. He looks up and outward and he wonders now about the stupidity and awfulness of the wicked who cause violence and who dare to speak out against God, abusing His name. How can they do this? How can they speak out against this One who is so wonderful, who is so powerful, who is so knowing? Why doesn't God deal with them? Why doesn't He destroy them? He could do so, so easily with one word. Yes with one word God could wipe out every evil person in the world.

But where would He stop? So He kills off those who are violent and who speak evil against Him. Why stop there? Why not those who don't actually do evil, but simply think it? Why not actually remove every person who ignores God? Where to stop? This starts getting uncomfortable, because this is now getting near me! There are times when I ignore God? There are times when I am less than perfect, when my thoughts are less than good, and my words harsh. Yes, I'm sorry afterwards and I don't ever want to do it again, but why shouldn't I find myself facing the executioner, because this evil thing is only a matter of degree, so where might God stop with His judgement?

Why doesn't He wipe out all the wicked in the world? There I find myself at the foot of the Cross again. Because He sent His Son to die for us all, good, bad and indifferent! We all deserve to die, but we are all being given a choice to receive His salvation through Jesus. But surely God sees all those who will never make a decision to surrender to Him and receive Christ? Why doesn't He just wipe them off the earth? Well if He sees them, as we've seen, from before the foundation of the world, and from the moment they are conceived, and He knows they will never turn to Him, why does He even allow them to be born? Because they are the living proof of free will and the reality of being responsible for the consequences of our actions. If He terminated every person who He saw wouldn't surrender to Him, even before they were conceived, then the rest of us would soon come to realise that everyone makes a decision for Christ and that in itself would affect the very process and it would no longer be completely free!

There is a mix here of predetermined knowledge and moment by moment working it out, and even this really defies our minds. We struggle to understand it, but even them we're left wondering. Perhaps the presence of the wicked who determine to exercise their free will against God, simply shows up the awfulness of sin more clearly and the grace and goodness and mercy of God more clearly. Wicked men who do awful violent things, simply show us the depravity of which we're capable. How terrible is this exercising of our will against God, that leads us further and further into darkness. Not only does it lead us into evil deeds but it produces a warped and twisted mind. When the potential is utter goodness and kindness and gentleness towards others, how terrible that, like William Golding's Lord of the Flies , we can degenerate into savages who have little or no concern for one another and who can end up doing such terrible things to one another.

As we ponder all that God knows, we realise that He must know all this, that He who is perfect and knows the potential of the human being, knows every bit of evil that is being done on His earth, knows every wrong thought, every wrong word, and every wrong deed – and suffers. They say that constantly watching violent films desensitises you to violence, but God doesn't change, and so doesn't get desensitised, so every wrong causes Him pain. This was the price of giving us genuine free will. How terrible; how wonderful.

Psa 139:21,22 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD, and abhor those who rise up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies.

They say that like people gather together, that friends will be similar. There's nothing strange about that; like gathers to like. We tend to be friends with those who like what we like, think like we think. There are always exceptions, but it tends to be like that usually. David has spent time with God and his heart has become attuned to the Lord's heart. Perhaps he started out like that, perhaps that is why he was called in relation to the Lord, “a man after his own heart” (1 Sam 13:14, Acts 13:22).

In these verses today, David identifies with the Lord and stands against those who are against the Lord. He has strong feelings about them: Do I not hate those who hate you . Having just spent some time pondering about the wonder of the Lord, it only makes those who ‘hate' the Lord more awful. How can they possibly feel about the Lord what they do? They just don't know Him. If they had half a clue about Him they would realize something of His wonder and greatness and would turn their hearts to Him – but they don't! They don't seek the Lord, they don't find out about Him, and so they are just left with the lies that the enemy has sown in their minds. They see God as an oppressor (Psa 2:2,3) not as the liberator that He actually is. They see Him as a fearful God of anger, instead of the God of compassion that He actually is. They have allowed Satan to sow lies in their minds and these lies have grown to create even hatred for God. There are atheists who are almost evangelists for the humanist or materialist cause, so angry do they seem against God. They rise up with angry words against the God they say they don't believe in, and yet sometimes you wonder if they are simply pouring out words to try to cover up their conviction that they have deep down, that He is there.

Having seen something of the wonder of the Lord, and having realized something of the stupidity of such people, the feelings David now has are especially acute. You can look at an amateur painting and think it is quite good, but when you go to an art gallery and see and old masterpiece suddenly the amateur piece of work is shown up for just what it is – pretty awful by comparison! The wonderful makes the awful seem terrible. As David has seen the wonderful in the Lord, it has made his view of the foolishness of men against God seem even more terrible and when he says “I hate them,” it's like he is saying, “they absolutely revolt me, I am sickened by them.” The more you see the wonder of the Lord and the more you see the awfulness of sin, the more the sin seems so terrible and evokes strong emotions in us. The problem is that few of us today, it seems, have seen the awfulness of sin and so we don't feel strongly about it. Moreover familiarity has bred acceptance, and so when we see and hear of unrighteous men and women in our society, especially those who rant against God, we almost take it as normal and have so little feelings about it. We have become desensitized by the shear volume of it around us. The remedy is to seek the Lord, to ponder on His word, and come to see more and more His wonder. Then, and perhaps only then, will we truly start to realize how awful are the things that go on in our world and which we have grown to accept.

David doesn't accept these things. He speaks with passion about them – I hate them, I abhor them! Now of course Jesus tells us as Christians, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” (Mt 5:44) but merely because we love the person, it doesn't mean we shouldn't hate the sin. Does Jesus love murderers? When they turn from their sin and come in total repentance, yes, but Jesus is his Father's Son, and what the Father hates, Jesus hates. “There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.” (Prov 6:16-19) Listen again: “ You must not worship the LORD your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the LORD hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods.” (Deut 12:31). There is a deception around today that says we must accept every person like Jesus did – but actually Jesus accepted those who came to him. God hates evil, Jesus hates evil, and so must we. In fact it was Jesus' words of antagonism against those who were leaders abusing their positions, that got him to the Cross. Evil comes in many guises, and we must be ever alert to resist it when we see it. The simple question today is, do I feel what God feels? That will need some serious thinking about!

Psa 139:23,24    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 .

We thought yesterday how, having contact with God or thinking deeply about God, evokes various emotions in us. Yesterday it was .the awareness of sin and the abhorrence of it in other people. Seeing God as wonderful as He is, made David see the awfulness of sin that is in mankind even more starkly. But as he thinks further he realizes that this is not merely abstract thought for it has clear, practical outworkings.

Now before we move on, we must emphasise this. There is no point whatsoever simply reading the Bible and seeing it as a history book that is completely separate from our lives. If we deal with it like that then we have not seen it for what it is – God's communication to us so that our lives might be transformed. We cannot just read about God's acts in the Old Testament and remain unmoved. They are supposed to teach us about Him and therefore temper the way we respond to Him as we realize who He is. When we come to the Gospels, the Acts and the epistles and the Revelation in the New Testament, we dare not simply read them objectively as ‘interesting' literature because it means we haven't understood what these writings are – the record of God coming to live on the earth in such a way as to make a living relationship with Him possible, and that relationship has a number of characteristics which must be there if it is real. The Bible is not a book just to be read, but to transform our lives. Every time we come to it we need to pray, “Lord, speak to me throguh your word, bring it alive, apply it to me.”

David was aware of this in respect of the truth he had been thinking about. Yes, he had thought about the fact that God knew absolutely everything about him (v.1-6) and that wherever he went God would be there (v.7-12), and seeing absolutely everything meant God seeing and knowing every living cell in existence and which had ever existed (v.13-16), and he realized that this was almost too much to take in (v.17,18), but it brought him great security (v.18). That made him acutely aware of the sinfulness of mankind (v.19,20) and he also realized he aligned his heart with God's against them (v.21,22).

Now he realizes that all this knowledge has personal implications – it applies to him as much as to anyone else. Yes, God really sees him. He needs to acknowledge that but he also needs to use that knowledge. He needs to ask the Lord who sees him to convey to him any knowledge of anything that is not right, to check out his heart, to check out his mind, to look into the anxious thoughts he has and let him know if there is anything there that he should do something about – for that surely is the only reason for asking such a thing. It is an indication of the security that David feels in the Lord's presence that he can ask the Lord to search him in this way and (by implication) point out to him where he is falling short. To ask the Lord to show you where you are falling short means that you can a) trust that there is nothing so drastic there to warrant serious judgment, and b) that you trust the Lord's unfailing love, that He will not deal with you harshly. Dare we ask the Lord to search us? Do you remember Paul's exhortation before Communion? “A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup.” (1 Cor 11:28). Failure to do so resulted in strong discipline. How much better to ask the Lord to search you and cleanse you and deliver you from wrong!

But David has an ultimate goal in mind. He doesn't just want the Lord to show him and cleanse him; he wants the Lord to actually lead him. That is part of this living relationship with the Lord – an awareness that the Lord has a plan and purpose for our lives, a way for us to live, a path to walk upon that He has designated, and we need His help to be able to do that. We need the Lord to guide us so that we do walk on this path. The nature of this path and the goal of this path is everlasting life. Once we come to Christ we are receivers of that everlasting or eternal life, for it is Him Himself, His Spirit living in us who is eternal, and He it is who gives us an eternal capacity. The moment we come to Christ we come into this eternal dimension which continues on when our body lays down for the last time. But eternal life is a life whereby we walk on the path that God in His wisdom decrees for us, and it is a path of blessing and goodness. No one can snatch us off this path but we can be enticed of it by the enemy, and we can walk off it of our own volition, and thus we need to pray daily, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” (Matt 6:13). Notice the word lead there again. It's like Jesus was saying to pray, “Lead us from being tempted by the evil one, lead us in a right path, and keep us there.”

That is the awareness that David has at the end of this psalm, that all this knowledge, all this awareness of God's wonderful knowledge and presence and activity is boiled down to this one thing: He has a plan for me and I need His help to walk in it! May the incredible knowledge that is revealed in this psalm help you walk more securely with Him.