The World, the Church, and Me: Examine My Heart
“O LORD, you have searched me ….” Past tense. David’s story was a story already in progress, and so is yours and mine. Wherever you or I locate ourselves, we exist having made countless choices along the way. The psalmist acknowledges incalculable evidences of God’s intimate knowledge, His mercy, and His grace from before he was born to the last word––everlasting.
Continuing from last week, Psalm 139 is a prayer. A personal prayer to a Holy God. The psalmist does not suggest what other people ought to do as if he himself is exalted and exempt from examination. The words in verse 23, “Search me, O God,” “try me,” “know me,” and “lead me” accentuate his yearning for the personal attention his soul needs.
As long as we hear and apply the Bible from a distance (to the world), or from an elevated position (within the Church), we can avoid seeing ourselves the way God sees us. The Bible teaches that we are both loved unconditionally yet in need of seeing and acknowledging God’s absolute holiness. Of necessity, this involves feeling at times undone by His divine scrutiny.
A literal translation of the word “search” as it is used here is “to scrutinize.”
“David submits to divine scrutiny to face what is within him.”
Alistair Begg
My Times Are in Your Hands
After concluding that God sees everything, even in the dark, the psalmist reflects on his own conception. What place is darker than the womb? He acknowledges that he was made in secret, “fearfully and wonderfully made,” that all God’s works are wonderful, and “My soul knows it very well.”
Physically, the body contains the brain, blood and bone, and all parts and systems that make us human. Spiritually, the soul inhabits our bodies and is the seat of our mind, will, and emotions.
David states definitively “You, LORD, created me.”
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake, and I am still with you.
Psalm 139:13–18, ESV
While it’s one thing to think of God creating the whole world, to sing that He has the whole world in His hands, it’s entirely different to believe He created me, an individual distinctly different from every person ever born. Such knowledge is vast and unfathomable.
Where this gets tricky for believers, “All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be” (NIV).
Is this statement a literal declaration that my life span is determined before I was born?
One of my seminary professors, a Hebrew scholar, said that the word translated “precious” in verse 17 is the word for “difficult” in the original language. It is exceedingly difficult to take what cannot be proved as a promise, or a prospect. But I look at these verses from the other end too.
“Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay …”
Albert Einstein
I didn’t have a thing to do with my own conception, birth, family of origin, where I was born or when. And to believe “all the days ordained for me,” that is, determined for me, establishes boundaries and brings comfort amidst the tribulations in this life Jesus told his followers to expect.[1] Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount to take no thought for tomorrow for tomorrow takes care of itself. [2] I’ve heard Matthew 6:34 paraphrased, “Don’t import tomorrow’s troubles into today.”
The Bible states unequivocally that life starts and ends with God.
What about the wicked?
How the psalmist jumps from comforting thoughts to doubt makes his words particularly significant. How easy it is to point at someone else.
This section of Psalm 139 is “imprecatory prayer,” an appeal to God for justice. The desire for justice is universal. Yet the measurements of justice vary throughout the world and even within our own hearts.
So I refer to these verses as a “Highway to the Danger Zone.”[3] I must admit the natural tendency when praying to change the subject in order to avoid confronting any “wicked way” in my own heart.
In verses 19–22, David describes hatred of evil and his desire that God would slay the wicked. These enemies are David’s enemies because they are God’s enemies, those who hate God and misuse His name.
God does not expect me to address evil. The Bible instructs me to avoid evil.
The highway of the upright avoids evil;
Proverbs 16:17 NIV
those who guard their ways preserve their lives.
Psalm 139 uses the words to abhor evil.
abhor: extreme repugnance; loathing
What does it take for you and me to abhor evil?
We’ve grown accustomed to His grace
The psalmist ends where he began. God has searched him and knows him inside out. Now, he asks God to search him again.
Is there anything in my heart, LORD, that interferes with our relationship?
Like the frog in the kettle, I find myself adapting to the heat in a culture that denies God and misuses his name. Not only tolerating evil, I make excuses for the evil I tolerate.
Which is why, like David, I return to Psalm 139, asking God to search me. Again.
And then, He leads me forward from here.
[1] John 16:33 “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
[2] Matthew 6:34 “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
[3] Song used in the movie Top Gun.