I have long had a special place in my heart for Psalm 139. When I was in the youth choir at my home church in Texas, we sang two different songs based on Psalm 139. Both songs were beautiful meditations on the truths about God’s intimate care for us laid out in verses 1-18. I still enjoy hearing both songs today. But having studied Psalm 139 much more closely now than I did in high school, it strikes me that neither song that we sang back then had any material from verses 19-22, where David calls upon God to slay the wicked and expresses his perfect hatred for them. To us, those verses seem to stick out in an otherwise calming, peaceful psalm, and we may not know what to do with them.
But one big part of learning how to read the Bible well is asking the question “Why”? Why are verses 19-22 there? What is God telling us by shaping this psalm in precisely the way that he did through David? I think the answer can be found when you consider how verses 1-18 constitute David’s meditation on God, and all of verses 19-24 constitute his response to the truths about God that he has pondered. David’s theology leads to application. And in this case, we see that a right view of who God is fuels our desire to pursue holiness in our own lives. If we understand the truth that God is inescapable, in both his lordship over us and in the love that he has for us, we will have the right theology in place to motivate our desire to live holy lives before him and to seek to make known his glory in this world.
Consider the alternative. When you commit an act of sin, or worse, drift into a pattern of sin, do you find yourself thinking about God in the ways described in verses 1-18? Do you contemplate his inescapability? Do you reflect on his sovereignty over you? Do you consider that nothing you do can be hidden from him? Do you remember his constant presence and intimate care for you at all moments of your life? My guess is that the desire for sin eclipses these other truths. It’s not so much that you deny these truths about God as it is you ignore them. It’s so easy for us to ignore what we know to be true when our hearts pull us toward sin. By contrast, renewing our minds with truth about God is fuel for holiness of life. So my goal is to meditate first on what this psalm teaches us about God in verses 1-18, followed by meditation on David’s application of this truth in verses 19-24.
First, in verses 1-18 we see
It can be a bit unnerving to think about how it is almost impossible to escape from the surveillance operations of the National Security Agency or from the data mining of Google. I don’t trust the federal government, and I don’t trust Google to seek my best interests with the information they have about me. By contrast, David celebrates the inescapability of God because he knows that God’s love for us is real and unchanging. We can trust God to seek the good of his people, and thus we can celebrate with David the truths about God we see in these verses. I want to point out three such truths.
First,
(1) You cannot escape his perception (vv. 1-6).
Verse 1 declares, “O LORD, you have searched me and known me!” These two words “search” and “know” are important, for they stand at the beginning and at the end of the psalm. They indicate a thorough knowledge, a deep digging into David’s heart and life. Then in verses 2 and 3 we have a figure of speech known as a “merism,” where parts of something are taken to represent the whole. In verse 2 David says, “You know when I sit down and when I rise up.” Verse 3 reads, “You search out my path and my lying down.” These two pairs of sitting/rising and path/lying down are representative of all of David’s daily activities. Whether he sits or rises, walks or lies down, including everything in between, God knows it.
So God knows, and takes a personal interest in, our actions. But more than that, God knows and takes a personal interest in our thoughts and meditations. The second line of verse 2 reads, “You discern my thoughts from afar,” and verse 4 says, “Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.” God’s knowledge of you is not limited to your external actions. He peers into the depths of your mind and heart. He sees your every thought, desire, fear, joy, and motivation. And then verse 5 says, “You hem me in, behind and before.” The verb David uses here is most often used of laying siege to a city. David is besieged by God on all sides! But this is not a cause for fear, because as he does so God lays his loving, guiding, sustaining hand upon David. Therefore, God’s exhaustive perception of David’s heart and life gives David cause for joy and praise, as expressed in verse 6.
These first six verses teach us that God is omniscient. That is, God is all-knowing. His knowledge is comprehensive and absolute. He did not come by his knowledge by dependence on anything outside himself, but simply knows all things by knowing his own decree perfectly. He has never learned a single fact. He has never been taught by anyone. He has never been surprised. He has never grown in knowledge. All things have always been present to his immediate perception.
The story is told of a group of boys who were at a Catholic school run by nuns. One day these boys were in for a special treat. Lunch had been prepared for them, with sandwiches and assorted foods lining one end of a table and cookies at the other end. As the boys lined up to go through the line buffet style, the supervising nun said, “You may take one cookie. And remember: God is watching.” As soon as she turned her back, one boy began cramming as many sandwiches as he could into his pockets. His friend behind him said, “What are you doing? You’re going to get in trouble!” To that the greedy boy replied, “No I’m not. God’s watching the cookies!” We recognize the obvious theological error in this boy’s thinking, the error of thinking that God is basically like us and is, therefore, limited in his ability to perceive and to know. I think the same kind of error is committed by a theological movement that has been around for a few decades now known as “open theism.” According to open theists, God knows everything that can be known, including everything about the past and the present, but when it comes to the future, there are things that God cannot know. He cannot know what his free creatures will decide to do, and thus much of the future remains unknowable to God. The perceived benefit of this theological viewpoint is that it seems to get God off the hook when bad things happen. After all, he didn’t know the wicked, tragic event that caused so much suffering was going to happen, and he is just as grieved about it as you. And so, by remaking God so that he becomes more like us, we are enabled to have a companion who can walk through the sufferings with us, experiencing many of the same limitations that we experience. But this is not the God of the Bible. This is not the sovereign Lord whom David praises here, the God who knows beforehand every single word David speaks. God is omniscient, and that includes all things pertaining to past, present, and future. You cannot escape his perception.
The second truth about God’s inescapable lordship that we are to know from this psalm is that
(2) You cannot escape his presence (vv. 7-12).
David poses a question in verse 7: “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?” David poses three possibilities in verses 8-12. Verse 8 says, “If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol [the underworld, the realm of the dead], you are there!” This is another merism. Whether you go to the highest height or the lowest depth, or anywhere in between, God is there. Verse 9 shifts from a vertical to a horizontal axis: “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” The wings of the morning stretch out from the rising sun in the east. David contemplates taking hold of those wings in the east and riding the entire circuit all the way to the west, to the uttermost part of the Mediterranean Sea west of Israel. So whether he goes as far east as he can or as far west as he can, or anywhere in between, God is there. And not only is he there, but he is there with his mighty right hand to hold David, to protect him, and to lead him. So if David cannot escape God going up or down, east or west, he contemplates the possibility of being hidden from God in the dark in verses 11-12: “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.” Even in darkness, when all human perception has been obliterated, you cannot escape from God, for he is Lord of all.
These verses teach us that God is not only omniscient. He is also omnipresent, which means he is present everywhere at all times. When I say that I do not mean that he is stretched out so that one part of him covers every point in space (“like butter scraped over too much bread,” as Bilbo Baggins would say). Rather, the doctrine of God’s omnipresence asserts that God is indivisible, and thus he is fully present at every single point in space. All space is fully and equally accessible to him, and every square inch of this universe belongs to him
This was a lesson that Jonah learned when he tried to flee from God when he didn’t want to travel to Ninevah to deliver God’s message, and so he tried to sail away toward Tarshish in the opposite direction. Apparently, Jonah was thinking like a pagan. He thought he was dealing with a limited deity who did not have jurisdiction outside the borders of Israel. He thought getting on a boat and sailing to Tarshish would put him out of God’s reach. But Jonah quickly learned that God has control over the winds, the waves, and the sea creatures that lie beyond the borders of Israel. There is nowhere you can go to escape from him.
The third truth about God’s inescapable lordship that we learn from this passage is that
(3) You cannot escape his plan (vv. 13-18).
Even before you existed, you could not escape God! He is the one who designed you and decreed every day, hour, minute, second, and nanosecond of your existence. Verses 13-15 are well-known to us. These verses focus on the creative work of God in the womb. They speak of God’s personal delight in the creation of each human being “in the depths of the earth,” as verse 15 says, which is a metaphor for the secret place of the womb. David praises God for the wonder of his work. Verse 14 says, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.” David celebrates in wonder the skillful work of God. But in our society we have sought to deny the lordship of God over the womb and substitute the lordship of mother and doctor at the abortion clinic. For forty-eight years we have tolerated an assault on the wonderful work that David celebrates here, and the body count continues to pile up, now above sixty million. God will not overlook this shedding of blood, this outrageous assault on his image bearers.
Verse 16 adds an additional dimension to the celebration of God’s creative work: God’s decree. “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 were none of them.” In other words, your days have been planned out in advance. God’s decree is exhaustive and inescapable. As the Westminster Confession says, he “ordains all things, whatsoever comes to pass,” and that includes every detail of every day of your life. The sovereignty of God over every detail of our lives is what assures us that the promise of Romans 8:28 will not fail, namely, that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. Only a God who is sovereign over each detail could fulfill a promise such as that one.
The total picture I get from verses 13-16 is what I would describe as the application of Jeremiah 1:5 to each individual. When God called Jeremiah to become a prophet, he said, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” And that is essentially what David says here about himself, and by implication, about you as well. God knew you before he created you, and he planned every detail of your being and life before he brought you into this world. So these verses teach us that God is not only omniscient and omnipresent, but that he is also omnipotent, or all-powerful. His creative power is without limit, and his plans never fail.
Verses 17-18 conclude this section by showing us that David is awestruck by God’s unfathomable ways. And then he says, “I awake, and I am still with you.” Commentators have proposed several different interpretations of this sentence in an attempt to show how it connects with what precedes. My view is that David is simply reflecting on the fact that whether he is waking or sleeping, God is with him. It is one final way of showing that God is simply inescapable.
Having meditated on God’s inescapable, sovereign rule and loving care for us, let’s now apply our theology:
It is not enough merely to confess that God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. You may be able to cross all your theological “t’s” and dot all your theological “i’s” and still have a heart bent on seeking autonomy from God. Therefore, it is imperative not only that you know these glorious truths about God but that you joyfully submit to him as a result.
What exactly is the issue that David addresses in verses 19-24? Some commentators have proposed that David was under attack. His life was being threatened by these bloodthirsty men, so he calls out to God to wipe them out and deliver him. I am not persuaded that that is what is going on here. David does pray for God to slay the wicked, but there is no explicit prayer here for David’s own personal deliverance, as we see in many other psalms. Also, the description of these wicked men in verses 20-21 focuses on their opposition to God, not David. And then I think verse 22 is very telling: “I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies.” If these men were lined up against David, ready to kill him, then he would have no need to “count” them his enemies. They would already be his enemies as a matter of course. But the fact that he counts them his enemies indicates that their animosity is not directed against David but against David’s God, and as an expression of dedication to God, David prays, in effect, “God, your enemies are my enemies.” I think what is likely going on here is that David has turned his attention to men who were not seeking to kill him but to corrupt him. If David wrote this psalm at some point during his forty years on the throne (which seems very reasonable), it would make perfect sense to see these bloodthirsty men as those who are seeking to gain personal advantage by weaseling their way into David’s favor with flattery and bribery. Those who hold power have always been targets of corrupt men who want to benefit from that power at the expense of justice. David seeks to protect his own personal holiness and that of his kingdom by expressing complete opposition to those who would corrupt both.
So, what does it look like for us to apply our theology of God’s inescapability? In these six verses we find in David two words of instruction. First,
(1) Hate all that opposes God (vv. 19-22).
Who are these men? David describes them as “the wicked,” and as “men of blood” in verse 19. They are blasphemers who speak against God and take his name in vain, according to verse 20. They are haters of God and rebels against him, according to verse 21. Their sin is both horizontal (toward others) and vertical (toward God). And that is always how sins are paired. If we are not rightly related to our Creator, we will not be rightly related to our neighbors, who are made in his image. These men are high-handed rebels against God, eager to trample over others for their own advantage.
And David hates them. He wants them dead! He hates them with a complete hatred! He loathes them! He counts them his enemies and sees that as a good thing. David’s hatred for the enemies of God is an expression of David’s love for God and commitment to holiness. This is instructive for us, for we need the Bible to teach us how to hate as Christians. Romans 12:9 commands us to hate what is evil. But Jesus commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matt. 5:44). How can we integrate all that the Bible teaches on this matter?
I think one way to approach this issue is to do so from different perspectives. We can view “the wicked” as men and women made in the image of God and summoned by the gospel to believe in Jesus Christ and so be saved from the wrath that is to come. Viewed in this way, we must love them and desire their repentance. But we can also consider “the wicked” from another perspective. David is speaking in his capacity as king, the one responsible for maintaining justice in the kingdom of Israel. In that theocratic setting, which points us forward to the kingdom of Christ that is yet to come in its fullness, there was to be no mercy for the bloodthirsty or for blasphemers under the Law of Moses. We no longer live in a theocracy. We live in a world where the holy people of God live alongside and among the unholy, and we have no authority from God to cleanse the world of the presence of the ungodly. But one day Christ will come and re-establish a theocracy, and when that day comes, “the wicked” as a category of people and demonic powers will be the targets of his judgment. And so when we pray, “Your kingdom come,” we are calling out to God to judge his enemies and deliver his people from their influence. Though we weep with tears now—and rightly so!—over the people we know who are outside of Christ, we will weep no tears for them on the final day. Our hearts will be so full of God that we will take delight in all that gives him glory, including the destruction of the wicked.
Notice here that David is not pursuing a personal vendetta. He is calling upon the Lord to act. His preeminent concern in this prayer is that God’s name would be vindicated over all who oppose him. So how might this work out in practice when you pray about concrete things? Here’s an example: you may have heard about Pastor James Coates pastor of GraceLife Church in Edmonton, Alberta, who was locked up in jail for 35 days for continuing to gather with his church to worship in violation of local, highly restrictive health regulations imposed by Alberta Health Services. After he was released, Alberta Health Services ordered the building belonging to GraceLife Church to be barricaded with fencing so that no one could gather there to worship. The church has been meeting since then in an undisclosed location. I never imagined that we would be speaking about the underground church of Canada, but here we are. I have prayed many times for Pastor Coates and for the church, and I have prayed against the authorities who are harassing them. When I pray against those authorities, I ask that God would humiliate them and cause this action to backfire on them politically. I pray that he would strip them of this power they have claimed for themselves to try to regulate churches. And I pray that the demonic powers that stand behind these human actions would be cast down. But I also pray that God would grant repentance to at least some who are currently oppressing his people. I pray that he would open eyes to the truth of the gospel. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” We must genuinely desire the repentance and blessing of God to be upon those who oppose us now, and we must seek it through prayer. But where there is no repentance, we pray for the vindicating justice of God for the sake of his name and the deliverance of his people. As Christians, we must not take vengeance for ourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to be embarrassed by God’s wrath. You can rejoice in it, for it represents the vindication of his holy name. We must hate all that opposes God.
And then a second word of instruction in our application is this:
(2) Lay all that is in you before God (vv. 23-24).
Note that the first five verbs in these verses all have to do with God knowing David’s heart: “Search me, O God, and know my heart!” These are the same two verbs from verse 1, which said, “O LORD, you have searched me and known me.” But then we proceed in verses 23-24: “Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me.” Why does David pray for God to know his heart with this depth of knowledge? Doesn’t God already have this knowledge? David is not praying for God’s benefit but for his own. He is asking God to test his heart and expose to him any “grievous way” in it, that is, any hidden motivation, desire, or sin that would be offensive to God. David has clearly aligned himself with God and with a desire for holiness, as is evident from vv. 19-22, but here we see David’s recognition of the fact that he cannot know the full depths of sin in his own heart. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
And so the climactic request comes at the end of verse 24: “and lead me in the way everlasting.” In contrast to the “grievous way” that may lurk in David’s heart, David prays to be led in the “everlasting way,” the way of holiness, covenant loyalty, and eternal life. And he knows that if he is to follow in this way, he must have the gracious guidance of the Lord. It is not enough to oppose sin that is outside of us. It is not enough to hate the wickedness of the world. We must also turn our most intense opposition toward the sin that dwells within us. In Romans 8:13 Paul writes, “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” We are to “put to death” the deeds of the body, slay them and walk away from the corpses. As John Owen put it, “Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.”
Now the question may be raised: “How can David express such hatred for those who oppose God and yet acknowledge that there is sin lurking in his own heart? Isn’t he being a hypocrite?” I am reminded at this point of the time Jennifer Knapp appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live some years ago. Jennifer Knapp is a woman who was in the Christian music industry for a number of years, but about a decade ago she announced that she was living in a lesbian relationship. She still claims to follow Christ, and she believes that she can do so and pursue homosexuality at the same time. Larry King had her on his show along with Bob Botsford, a pastor who was there to express an opposing view. And one of the arguments that Jennifer made against this pastor basically went like this: “Bob, you acknowledge that you are a sinner, so how can you condemn me for what I have chosen to do?” So many times, that kind of question has made us stumble. How can we express opposition to sin when we know that we too are sinners? But the question ignores a major difference between Bob Botsford and Jennifer Knapp. Bob Botsford is not living in unrepentant sin and calling it good. Jennifer Knapp is. So while both may be sinners, one is a repentant sinner, and the other is not. And that makes all the difference between heaven and hell. Don’t think that the fact that you are a sinner prohibits you from opposing sin in others. You are only a hypocrite if your opposition to the sins outside of you is not matched by an equal or greater opposition to the sin within you.
It is striking to me how amazingly gracious our God is! When Adam and Eve had begun the human quest for autonomy and had violated the Lord’s command, they ran away from God when they heard him walking in the garden. They hoped to find some place to hide from the inescapable God. David is the exact opposite. Acknowledging the real possibility of sin in his own heart, David does not try to cover up anything. He runs straight into the arms of God and asks him to expose all the evil that lies within him. He knows that God is Lord of all. He knows that he cannot escape from God, so he entrusts himself to the mercy of God.
The inescapable lordship of God can be either a deep and abiding comfort to you, or it can be terrifying. Some two hundred years after the time of David, the prophet Amos proclaimed a message to the rebellious people of Israel that deliberately echoes the ideas in David’s psalm. Amos 9:1-3 reads, “Strike the capitals until the thresholds shake, and shatter them on the heads of all the people; and those who are left of them I will kill with the sword; not one of them shall flee away; not one of them shall escape. If they dig into Sheol, from there shall my hand take them; if they climb up to heaven, from there I will bring them down. If they hide themselves on the top of Carmel, from there I will search them out and take them; and if they hide from my sight at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent, and it shall bite them.” You cannot hide from God. If you have never come to Christ in faith to be joined with him in his death and resurrection for you, so that your sins remain unforgiven before God, I want you to be warned that the wrath of the inescapable God hangs over you. Do not wait another day. Come to Christ now. Turn from your sins and embrace by faith the one who died and was raised to save sinners from the wrath to come
If you are in Christ, then take delight in the inescapable lordship of God. Do not flee from him as Adam and Eve did. Flee from evil and run into his arms, seeking the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. And know that holiness is not something you can attain by your efforts. It is a gift of divine grace given to sinners who lay hold of Christ. So come to this table, a table Christ has set for sinners, and once again confess with your eating and drinking that the only reason you are holy before God and will continue to progress in holiness is because his body was broken for you, and his blood was shed for you. Amen.