Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Psalm 139

Sermon text for today is Psalm 139. And there is a handout today. And if you have that, you can just read along on that page or you could use your own Bibles or you could just listen to the word of God as found in Psalm 139. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Psalm 139. For the Chief Musician, a Psalm of David. Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue. But behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You have hedged me behind and before and laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain it. Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there. 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.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,” even the night shall be light about me. Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from you, but the night shines as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to you.

For you formed my inward parts. You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed and in your book they all were written. The days fashioned for me when as yet there was none of them.

How precious also are your thoughts to me, oh God. How great is the sum of them. If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I awake, I am still with you. Oh that you would slay the wicked, oh God, depart from me. Therefore, you bloodthirsty men, for they speak against you wickedly. Your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate them, O Lord, who hate you, and do I not loathe those who rise up against you?

I hate them with perfect hatred. I count them my enemies. Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Try me and know my anxieties. And see if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we bless your holy name for your word, for the loveliness of this particular psalm and the incredible truths that are found in it. Help us to be led today, Lord God, in your way. Bless us by the gift of your Holy Spirit that he might illumine this text to our understanding. Be light to us, Lord God, through this text. Shine upon us and transform us that we may be your light-bearers in this culture. In Christ’s name we ask. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, ineffable, wonderful—and as wonderful as this psalm is to us, so it is a cause of great consternation, dread and fear and revolt to others. We meet here again this year as we’ve done thirty years celebrating—not celebrating, but liturgically celebrating—and asking God to turn back the decision of Roe v. Wade in our country. So we meet together specifically on this Lord’s day to engage in prayers to God that the murder of pre-born children would cease in our land.

You know, I’ve never preached on this particular text for what we call Anti-Abortion Day of the Lord. You know, most churches have for many years called it Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. And I wasn’t, you know, I kind of thought, well, we’re really sort of anti-abortion, right? So, Anti-Abortion Day of the Lord. The Day of the Lord is when God comes with his people and judgment begins to move into the culture. So, that’s good. But, you know, studying Psalm 139 and particularly its center as we’ll see in today’s text gave me a renewed appreciation for the name Sanctity of Human Life Sunday and I’ll have to explain that as we go along.

What it doesn’t mean is that human life is somehow sacred and sanctified in and of itself. That’s the difficulty with the name of that, calling it Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. People have moved from that to say then that the persecution of those that God’s capital God would say should have capital punishment put on them would be wrong as well because human life has sanctity to it. So we don’t go into that but there is a sense in which Sanctity of Human Life Sunday is in today’s text and we’ll see it as we go along.

Now today we’ve got a couple of handouts on the table in the foyer for you. And additionally on the back of your orders of worship again this week are the pledge forms for missions work and benevolence work. And specifically, one of the lines in the benevolence work is for assistance to moms who are pregnant and you know who may be in a situation where they’re considering aborting their child. There are two agencies that we’re working with these days. The primary one is the Pregnancy Resource Center and on the table today there is this handout from them as something they do every year, as we meet in remembrance of the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. So their flyer is back there.

There’s also a group now in Oregon City called Hope 360. And I think there’s a couple of posters up with tear-off contact information that you can get as you walk around the church today. And that is a local agency that’ll open its doors in February with ultrasound equipment. You’ll see, if you look at this PRC flyer, that I think ninety-five percent of women who get an ultrasound done at the PRC clinics, of which there’s one in Clackamas, ninety-five percent of women carry their child through to full term. They don’t abort. So it’s a very significant ministry and it’s through deeds of loving love and kindness that the kingdom and its manifestations happen in the context of these women’s lives who otherwise may be tempted for whatever reasons to abort their children. So it’s a very important ministry. Ask that you consider it and the other things that are listed on your forms as well.

Now we’ve got another handout on the table. It’s called “Why Wait?” And it’s another one put out by Rose Publications. One of these fancy pull-out sort of things with all kinds of reasons talking about why wait for sex until you get married. Now I bring it up because one of the statistics that’s kind of interesting is that one in three pregnancies that occur outside of marriage end in abortion. One in three. So for every thousand live births, there’s roughly five hundred abortions. So out of fifteen hundred pregnancies, a third abort. Now if people are married, only one in sixteen pregnancies that happen in the context of marriage ends in abortion. So, you know, tremendous difference.

And so from one perspective, you could say, well, maybe one tactic that we would have is to promote marriage and just really try real hard to get people to move away from cohabitation and casual sexual relationships and get into marriage. And we would end most abortions probably through that mechanism. But it doesn’t work. It would fail. Why? Why would that fail? In fact, why are we actually sliding the other way? Why are more and more even Christian people making decisions to cohabitate rather than enter into the covenant and the bond of marriage? Particularly so because it increases the odds of abortion as we know.

So this easy fix to the abortion problem in America would be to get people to get married and statistically that means we would cut back on a whole bunch of abortions in our country. But people don’t want to do that. Why don’t they want to do it? Why don’t they want us to encourage them to do that?

At the root—and what makes what makes the modern person in America today take the very verses that we just read that provide such comfort, assurance, blessing to you and I—why is it that those verses are so troubling to people today? And you may never have even thought about the impact of these sorts of verses on the modern or what we might call the postmodern mindset. But as we go through some of these attributes of God that are listed for us in this psalm in a few minutes, if you think about them from their perspective, it’s horrific. Why? Because there are at least two, but the two significant values that fight against us in what we’re trying to accomplish are freedom and privacy. Freedom to do whatever people want to do. Freedom is the ultimate value, some would say. And in connection with that, privacy has this tremendous significance.

The Supreme Court found it where it wasn’t, you know, a mystery passage that somehow they read into our constitution a right of privacy that was, you know, extended in every kind of direction. And so sexual activities now are seen as private affairs and of no public consequence. Well, the public consequence is that as I said, the fleeing from marriage and having sex outside of marriage really is responsible for most of the abortions in our country, and that’s a societal impact.

But freedom and privacy are the two great factors that will, as we see as we go through this psalm, produce a rebellion against the God of the scriptures. Now if what we just read—and we know it’s all true and it’s, you know, it’s sort of obviously true—that God who is both transcendent, right, he’s not restricted to us, he’s above us, but he’s also totally immanent, so he’s close to us, right, he’s right in the midst of our lives, that this psalm talks about is both his transcendence and his immanence, his being God and not like us but in the same hand being tightly in the context of the reality of our lives every moment of every day. So this transcendence and immanence, how could people ignore this? How could someone that you meet on the street tomorrow say no, this is not my experience? How could they not know this? How could we not know a God who is so close to us? Do you understand what I’m saying? You get it?

I mean, if he’s as close as this psalm asserts and that we confess with a belief in the scriptures, whether or not our experience may line up with it, if this is what the scriptures say, that God is so close to us, formed us in the womb, knows all of our thoughts, knows all of our words before we speak them, has determined our path—that kind of comprehensiveness of God’s involvement in our life, how can people ignore that and ignore what he has to say then about sexual morality, about marriage, about abortion, about a whole host of other issues? How can we ignore it?

Well, if you think about it, how does that happen? Romans 1: men suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. Now, we normally think about that in the natural revelation. We look at trees and they reflect God’s image and we reject them. But if we think of Psalm 139, that suppression of the image of God, of God’s truth and his reality, has to happen very interior to the human psyche. And think about it.

A child born, right? He’s born if he’s born into a non-Christian family who aren’t teaching him the scriptures, causing him to rejoice in the presence of God in his life, exposing him to the scriptures, hopefully meditating upon them, memorizing them, brought into a culture such as the church that reinforces the knowledge—if he’s not in that setting, what is he going to do? He’s going to be suppressing the truth of God in unrighteousness. Right? That’s what we are in our fallen state.

Now, every second God is present with us. So, every second the human psyche has to suppress the truth that this psalm asserts. Every second, every minute that passes, every hour. Hours turns into days, days turn into weeks, weeks into months, months into years, years into decades. And what you have by the time you go out there on the street and talk to someone who’s not raised in a Christian home and is raised instead in the secularist culture of America today is someone who for twenty or more years has practiced the art of suppressing the truth of God in unrighteousness. That’s the only way you can, you know, not understand God’s presence in the midst of your being and that he formed you and made you and is with you and is going along on your path with you.

That’s what we do in our fallen estate. We suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. And we get very good at it because it’s the most important thing in our lives is that rebellion against God to suppress that truth so that we can have freedom and we can do what we want in our private area. To do that, we’ve got to suppress that truth. And that’s what we do all day long. We are well practiced in the suppression of the truth of God.

So the question really is no longer you know, why, how is it that people can ignore this ever-present God in their lives. Now the question becomes, how come we are not ignoring it? How could we possibly come to faith in Jesus Christ and an acceptance? Because we’re so trained in our fallen state to reject and suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. You see, how does that happen?

Well, this psalm sort of answers that question. You know, there’s a poem, “The Hound of Heaven.” It’s kind of based on this psalm, right? And the idea is that God in his mercy and his grace and in his compassion continues to pursue us and is with us and breaks down that suppression of truth by his grace, by his Holy Spirit, by bringing us into relationship with him. There’s a great story—1940s a children’s book, “The Runaway Bunny,” right? The Runaway Bunny. I think I’ve read it from this pulpit once before. It’s used most effectively in the movie “Wit,” about a woman dying of cancer. And the Runaway Bunny—you know, the idea is you got a mom bunny rabbit and her bunny and the bunny says well I’m going to run away and the mom says well if you run over here then I’ll run after you and the bunny says well I’ll become a bird and I’ll fly into the trees and the mom says well if you get into the trees, I’ll come after you and I’ll fly into the tree and I’ll be with you there.

And so, wherever the bunny goes, the mom tells him, “Well, wherever you go, whatever you do, I will come after you. I will seek you. I will still pursue you. I’ll still have relationship with you.” And finally, by the end of the story, the bunny says, “Well, in that case, I’ll stay home.” And then he had a carrot. So, this is what you know, from one perspective, Psalm 139 is the “Runaway Bunny” story, right? It’s God with us, pursuing us, breaking through that suppression of truth.

So it’s these kind of words from the Bible that we’re to use to break down the suppression of truth. The person who has practiced for twenty, thirty, forty years suppressing the truth that he’s a creation of God, it’s in there still. And we need to speak to that truth in their life and to remind them of the attributes of God specifically in relationship to who they are.

So, so let’s look at this. Let’s look at the text and we’ll just work our way through it briefly in a kind of an overview sort of way, not settling on any one thing particularly except the middle. So, what do we have here? Well, you know, first of all, the way I’ve laid it out, most people would lay it out in four stanzas. You sort of end up with the same kind of thing, but I think I’ve tried to, as I work through the text myself, I kind of broke it down this way and you know, I’m kind of partial to these sorts of structures but everybody knows, you know, most commentators will talk about how the first three sections have to do with the attributes of God, right? So we begin with omniscience.

Now this is really important. Greek thought is penetrated Christian theology. We were birthed—together, two years ago the Christian church was raised in the context of Greek thought and philosophy and so it tends to permeate who we are. And I think one of the big things that God is doing in the world—you always wonder what is God doing? Well, I think one thing he’s doing is, you know, just knocking the heck out of that Greek stuff to get it out of the church, out of our way of thinking.

We tend to think of God’s attributes and in this in this first instance, his omniscience. That means everything—science, knowledge—God knows everything. And we tend to talk about that in an abstract sense. We talk about God’s omniscience. He knows everything. His omnipotence, he’s all-powerful. His omnipresence, he’s everywhere present. Okay? And we make these kind of Greek virtues out of it that sort of detach it from our lives. But notice how this psalm and typically the Bible portrays what we can glean out of it. These abstract concepts, for instance of omniscience. The Bible says this is a very personal attribute of God.

So let’s look at the text. Now I’ve got that first line in italics because that’s kind of a summary. “Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me.” So I think that’s a little header there. You’ve searched me and known me. Okay? And then he talks about more specific ways in which the searching and knowing him develop. And by the way, this searching reappears at the end of the text. Don’t know if you noticed that. If you look down in that last, the seventh line, what does the psalmist say? He prays that God would search him and find out his ways because he wants to be led by God.

This psalm begins with these discussions, these wonderful assertions of who God is in relationship to us. And it ends with a couple of prayers, two prayers at the very end. Don’t know if you noticed it or not. And in the middle, there are these verses that are traditionally used by many churches on Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, asserting the presence of God in the womb, making the child in the womb. And so it’s, you know, a verse that’s pressed into duty on as we fight abortion. Properly so. Properly so.

But, but as the psalm moves on, it ends up in two prayers. The first prayer is that God would destroy the wicked. And in the context of that prayer, David says, “I hate those who hate you. I hate them with a perfect hatred.” Now, that’s uncomfortable stuff for the modern church. Right? And I do think we have to remember as we’re reading that verse, those verses, they’re every bit as much of the word of God as the Beatitudes we just sang. And the Beatitudes we just sang are every bit part of the word of God as this text is.

And in the scriptures there’s no difficulty, from God, for God to you know, hate his enemies and yet at the same time encourage us with these Beatitudes, these manners of blessing. The blessings make no sense, by the way, unless there’s curse on the other side which we affirmed earlier. So the point is two prayers end this psalm. The conclusion, the application is to pray for God’s judgment on the wicked and that’s what we do every Anti-Abortion Day of the Lord. We ask for God to bring temporal judgments upon men and women who are killing unborn babies. Now, we hope and we pray that those judgments lead to their repentance and their salvation. We hope that the sort of sacrifice that they become in response to the prayers of God’s people are living sacrifices. Right? But if that is not going to happen, we would also pray that God’s temporal judgments would stop them from doing what they’re doing, that he would at times remove them, slay them, you know, bring his execution, not ours, not by the hand of any man except maybe the civil state in some ways, certainly so, but that God would bring temporal judgments to stop the slaughter, to stop the killing of unborn babies.

George Schumann told me earlier that I think he said one and a half million people have been killed in all the wars, maybe the twentieth century, I don’t know, some statistic like that. Fifty-five million babies have been aborted in this country, killed in the womb. So we want that to stop. David wanted it, wanted it to stop the sort of any kind of evil like that strikes out at the image of God. That’s his first prayer.

His second prayer was that God would search him and know his ways. Right? And that’s actually you know, the climax of this psalm. Our proper response in that in response to the great God and his love and his knowledge of us is to ask that he would continue to search us that we might be led in his ways. So he’s looking for God to search him and reveal to himself his own sins that he might repent of his sins and be changed.

So there’s an example of how I think this psalm begins and ends with a book end. And the book end is this searching. Well, in any event, so God’s omniscience is talked about here. His knowledge of David. Okay. So he says, goes on to talk about specifics. You know, “my sitting down and my rising up” and “you understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down.” So you kind of got a little chiasm there. Sitting down and rising up, and rising up and sitting down. It means his actions or when he’s sleeping or at rest, lying down. And in the middle of that the statement is that he knows our thoughts. He says, “You understand my thoughts afar off?” Now this is wonderful news to us, right? That God knows us that intimately, right? It means we are known by someone and it’s someone who loves us and who has relationship with us.

He says, “There’s not a word on my tongue but behold, oh God, you know it altogether.” That’s interesting. That as I read the text, that’s where this knowledge on God’s omniscience relative to us ends is with our word. Significant. We are image-bearers of God by speaking. Okay? And speaking happens as a result of thought and actions which God knows altogether. And so he also knows our words before they’re spoken. But the point here is, you know, a couple fold. One, that God’s omniscience is not presented as an abstract theological truth. God knows everything about you, about me. Okay? His omniscience is highly personal, which is a great comfort to us.

But now think of it. What did I say was one of the two great values of our culture? The right of privacy. The right not to be known. The right not to have your thoughts invaded. To a person who is told, as they’re told in this country over and over and over, that you have a right to privacy and nobody can disturb that right, right? What’s their response to a God who invades your thoughts? That is not a happy, you know, consideration for pagan men. Now, it’s particularly an unhappy consideration because he knows that his thoughts are evil. He knows that, too. And he’s suppressing that truth.

So, but what we have to do is help break through this supposed ultimate value of privacy as it relates to God. and instead present God’s knowledge of us, that kind of knowledge, an invasion of our privacy as his blessing to us. We want to be known. We don’t want to be ciphers in the universe being able to fool people. We want to be known.

But that’s the problem with this text. It’s a great comfort to us. It’s a great horror, you know, to people who hold as an ultimate value the right to privacy. The right to privacy. Now, what happens when people reject God’s knowledge of them to embrace some sort of right of privacy? Well, there’s a thing that God does called lexalion, the law of the talent. He brings compensatory judgment against us in relationship to our sin for desiring to hide ourselves from our Creator. God then brings along, couple of presidents, a terrorist attack, and he develops the NSA. And the NSA is going to know everything about you. You see, I believe it’s a specific judgment of God. Now, I don’t believe it’s good. I believe, you know, we should fight against some of that. But the point is God is using it to bring the kind of judgment to people to let them know, look, you can either be fully known by me or you will create by your rejection of me autocratic states that will desire to fully know and to see you and to observe you at all times as a restraint on you. You choose.

The second attribute of God is found in the next few stanzas and this is the attribute of his omnipresence. But again, here this omnipresence is specifically very personal and accountable to provide protection in relationship to us. Look how it’s put. “The Lord protects me. You have hedged me behind and before and laid your hand upon me.” Okay, again I think that’s kind of a summary statement. What is going on there? Well, there’s a bit of a shift. You know all about me. You know my thoughts, my words, whatever it is. And now he says, “You’re hedging me about. You’re before and after me, and you have your hand on me.”

Now, again, to us, this is wonderful news. God is a hedge to us. He’s a protection for us. His hand is upon us, protecting, guarding, guiding, and loving us. It’s his loving hand. But if you’re Mr. Pagan out there, you know, the last thing you want is God’s hand upon you because you know it’s going to be a hand of judgment, right? So, it’s very frightening. God’s omnipresence now is another dreadful thing to fallen man.

Now it’s interesting how David then moves on to specifics in terms of this omnipresence. First of all, he utters an interjection. “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain it.” So David’s response is, this is great stuff. It’s wonderful. It’s beyond my ability to understand. But what I do understand of it creates wonder for me and love for God and thanksgiving. And then he goes on to the details of God’s omnipresence.

“Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? Isn’t it nice that if we decide to get away from God and run away somehow, he’s not going to do it? He’s the Runaway Bunny’s mom. We can’t get away from him. And that’s a good thing because we’re stupid. And sometimes we want to get as far away from God as we can. And what would we find there? We’d find destruction. We are made by God for his purposes. And to run away, you know, if you think of it, I was thinking about, you know, you write software code, right? And what if a line of code decides to run away from the program, right? And he decides to do whatever he wants to do. Well, the whole thing is a mess, right? And he’s not happy. He’s out there doing something that doesn’t accomplish anything in the program. Or if a piece of your car, the spark plug, you know, decides not to give spark. He wants to do something else. Or the oil pump decides to just luxuriate in the oil, you know, and not pass it on to the rest of the system, you know, when you act that way, that kind of desire to be on your own and do what you want to do, you know, human freedom and then let me be to do this thing, the car bust, the program won’t work, nothing works.

We’re made for this relationship with God that’s being described here. So, it’s good that we can’t get away from him, right? Then he says, “If I would ascend into the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me.”

Remember what I said a couple weeks ago when we were talking about Psalm 138, right? God will perfect that which concerns us. He’s exalted his word above his name. And you remember that, you know, the fifth book of the psalter is a composition, you know, it’s like a Bruce Springsteen album, you know, well, instead of—except for his latest one, the latest one does. He broke the mold, right? But usually a Springsteen album has a theme and the songs all sort of are related to a particular theme. You know, if you’re into classical music, you understand this better than you know other people, that there is this classical music that has together a whole piece of different stuff going on, but it’s moving, right? It’s all a piece together.

Well, the fifth book of the psalter is that way. It’s a piece. And we’ve described this—Psalm 137 is this great piece of Christ, is in the midst of otherwise exodus being fed by God’s word, praising him as we go up to serve him, etc. That’s the whole movement of the fourth book. And then we have this, you know, cold water in the face of exile. Now David never went into exile in the sense that you know, going to Babylon, that was many years after he was dead and gone. But when the psalter was put into its present form, they took what he had written and applied it to the exile experiences that they knew of.

And so, what’s the answer to going into exile? What’s the answer for going to Portland every day to go to work, right? What’s the answer to living in the sort of culture that’s a neo-Babylonian, maybe neo-Assyrian if you’re in Moscow? You know, pick your poison. We’re rich and luxuriant here, but horrific and evil, you know, what do what do you do about that? Well, one is, you know, God’s word is still with you. Right? So, that’s one. And the other is God is with you wherever you go. Right?

Oh, I think Jesse maybe made this comment on a thread that him and I were disagreeing about a little bit on Facebook this last week, but you know what he says is wherever you go, you witness. And you see, that’s because this is true. This thing right here that even if we’re sent into exile, whether we run away or whether people take us away and now we have to live in the context of a very pagan rebellious, wicked Portland, keep it weird culture. And in either event, God is with us. God is with us in that place. And so it’s okay for Daniel and his buds, right? We have God’s word and we have God’s presence with us. We can’t get anywhere away from him.

He talks about hell, right? As opposed to heaven. Heaven would be where the temple was. Hell is where the temple ain’t. So, the furthest reaches away from it. And he talks about going to, you know, the uttermost parts of the earth. You know, this could clearly be read, you know, post-exile or post-being taken into captivity as that kind of thing. So it’s a tremendous comfort—God’s presence with us—to know that whether we try to get away from him or people try to take us away from him, they cannot do it.

“Even there, your hand shall lead me. You’re leading me. You’re guiding me. Right? God’s presence is a positive presence protecting us and more than that leading and guiding us. Your right hand shall hold me, keep me safe.”

In other words, “If I say surely the darkness shall fall on me, even the night shall be light about me. Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from you, but the night shines as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to you.” Little kids, right? Got one in our environment who few weeks ago all of a sudden got afraid of the dark. And it’s a common thing with little kids. David says, “I don’t got to be afraid of the dark because no matter how dark it seems to get around me, right?” And adults, we don’t have to be afraid of the darkness of the spreading darkness from Mordor, Portland. Right? We don’t have to be afraid of the darkness because there is no darkness to God. There’s no night there where God is, right? And when creation finds its consummation, there night is done away with completely. But even now David says that the night is light to you. And what he’s saying is it’s light to me too. That way you’re with me in the darkness. I don’t have to be afraid of what’s under the bed or the things I can’t see or the bug crawling across the floor toward me or the little rats that are going to went the wrong way getting them scared. No, we don’t have to be afraid of the dark because God is present with us.

But once more, you know, if your goal is privacy and doing what you want to do, this isn’t comforting. But if you don’t have this, what is in the dark with you? When you go through the darkness of trials, travails, difficulties, you know, you don’t—you’ve self-conscious, you’ve for decades suppress the truth of God that he’s with you. And so, you know, you don’t have this comfort. And we can tell people that we can tell them the nature of God’s omnipresence and its relationship to comfort or fear.

Third, “The Lord made me in the womb—Practical Omnipotence.” You’ll see as we read through this—creation allusions, you know, I always think of what’s it called? “2001: A Space Odyssey,” right? And that baby, you know, at the end of the movie and that big whatever it is, I don’t know what’s going on, but you know, the idea is that in this text, God draws this connection to who we are in the womb being formed just like God formed the created order, right? It went from formlessness to form, right? And he says that explicitly here that God is making us in the womb. God’s powerfulness to create a human being, right? To bring it to maturation and development. This is portrayed in this section.

“For you formed my inward parts. You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise you. For I am fearfully and wonderfully made. The power of God. Oh, who can make a flower? No one but God. It’s true. Oh, who can make a flower? No, not me or you. Or however the song goes. And who can make a person? Well, my son-in-law thinks he can do it through robotics and code. But God says no. God says he can make a person. And that’s it.”

His omnipotence, I think, is the attribute that’s being described there. And David’s response to God’s power and ability to create a whole new world. And that’s kind of the imagery here based upon his creation of the world itself. His power, his omnipotence—the response to that on our part is “your works. What you do now, right? Your thoughts are marvelous. Your works are marvelous to me. What you do is marvelous. Right? I praise your holy name. I thank you for this. I’ll praise you. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works that my soul knows right well.”

Now, if you’re a pagan though and your deal in life is to have the freedom to do whatever you want, now you got a competitor. Now you got the knowledge of a God who has so controlled you. He’s actually made you the way you are. He formed you in your womb, in your mother’s womb. Right? So what does the pagan do in response to that? Well, no. I’m going to reject what he made. I’m a girl, but I’m going to call myself a guy. I’m a guy. I’m going to call myself a girl. And we are at a point in this culture where in California and another state’s considering the same thing and you get some first grader boy who decides to be a girl that day and if another boy says no you’re a boy, they can be disciplined and kicked out of school that day because we exalt this value of our omnipotence to create ourselves in whatever image we want.

We reject these very texts. The giveness of our gender, the giveness of our situation, the giveness of what God has made us to be with all the attributes and differences that make you different than me. This is what God has done. This is his omnipotence toward us. And to us, it is wonderful. Praise God. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. But to those we talk to in our culture, God is the great rival.

Now, one of the reasons for that is our fault because we have so exalted God’s power and abstracted it again in Greek abstraction, right? His omnipotence is different from his love. And if all we’ve got is a God who is all-powerful and wants to do whatever he wants to do, he’s Mr. Selfish. He’s going to decide what everything’s going to be like. You see, if his nature is selfish and an arbitrary will of power, well, of course, that’s scary to us, right? But that results from our abstraction. The psalm here says that God made me. He created me. Praise God. It’s a cool thing. It ties his omnipotence to his love and to his care for us. And when we present an omnipotent God and get, you know, push back, you know, we got to make sure that we’re talking about an omnipotent God, you know, who uses his omnipotence for the love of his people, right? That it’s not a bad thing. It’s a wonderful thing that God is that powerful.

“The Lord made me to be his tabernacle. So, the way I see it, this is kind of the center of the thing, right? My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed—creation imagery. And in your book there were written of me the days fashioned for me when as yet there was none of them. So his omnipotence extends to all of our lives, not just our creation.”

But this word that I was “skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth”—now that’s a word that refers to a particular kind of weaving or cloth making. And it’s a word that the only other occurrences—if you do a search in your Strongs or your Greek word dictionaries, the other occurrences of this word are found in Exodus and they’re found about weaving things in the context of the tabernacle. You know, for instance, the tabernacle has an entry, but there’s a curtain stretched across it and that curtain was done in this particular way. There are other rough weavings there, weavings that had embroidery of angels. That’s more fine weavings. This particular weaving is a fine weaving. It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have cherubim embroidered on it. Right? So it’s a particular kind of weaving. And in God’s word, that particular kind of weaving is found in the context of his tabernacle.

What is God telling us with that? Why is he using that word about us? Because the most incredible piece of knowledge that this text tells us is that God is with us in the womb preparing a house for him to dwell in. We’re referred to as his tabernacle essentially through this term and other indications in the text. Now, that’s astonishing and maybe you’re like, well, I don’t know about that. But, you know, of course, we know this from a lot of other scriptures. You are referred to in the New Testament as the temple of God. You’re the dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. That’s what he’s saying here.

So, what we see—God is present. This is why Sanctity of Human Life might be an okay term if we keep this in mind. Why? Because when people kill a baby, they’re not just striking at an image-bearer of God. As bad as that is, they’re striking at the temple. They’re striking at the place where God says his special presence will be. They are committing sacrilege. They are attacking something where God’s dwelling itself is. And that is in the Bible, is an absolute no.

You commit murder, you got civil courts, you take care of it, you execute him. You commit sacrilege, you bust into the temple of God for your own purposes and bam, right? Fire comes and burns you up or bam, you get leprosy all over you, right? Met if your intentions were good, the temple is sacred. That’s holy ground. Okay? And that holy ground is extended here to the creation of a person in the womb, to God’s presence in the womb.

Now, this is wonderful. I mean, it’s great that God knows everything about us, right? And can handle us and take care of us. It’s great that God is all-powerful and made us. It’s great that God is with us everywhere to protect us and guide us and protect us even from our own sinful fleeing from him. All that’s great. But this truth that God dwells in us, that we are made specifically for relationship with God, for him to be dwelling in the midst of who we are. This truth, I think, is the center of the text. This is what kind of leads to the subsequent sections and things start to change.

Now, now we see not that you know my thoughts, but the next text tells us, “How precious also are your thoughts to me, oh God.” See, we got this going on. Now, it’s not just about God knowing us. Now, we know God’s thoughts. You see, “How great is the sum of them”—we delight in the thoughts of God, right? Because we have relationship. The center has told us that we’ve been made in this relationship. We’re to be the dwelling place of God himself.

Kids on that coloring sheet, right? You look at yourself, you’re wonderful. You are wonderful, right? Fearfully and wonderfully made. But as you look at that drawing and as you think of yourself in the mirror, you should think to yourself all week this week, parents, help them. “I’m the temple of God. I’m the dwelling place of God. That means things. It’s cool. It’s wonderful. I’ve got relationship with him. But it means too that I want to be holy. I don’t want to, you know, violate God’s holiness. I want to be very, very good because I’m made for this relationship with God. And I want to thank him and praise him whenever I do.”

You look at yourself in the mirror, you’re wonderful. But you’re wonderful because you’re a dwelling place for God. And when you kick God out, you’re not wonderful anymore, right? Not in that same sense. This is it. And we as a result of us being made in that relationship, the Puritans said, “You have a triangle-shaped hole in you.” That’s where God is going to dwell, right? And this is where he is in his tabernacle in us. And as a result of that, we know his thoughts. “If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I awake, I’m still with you. I’m thinking God’s thoughts.”

How do we know what his thoughts are? It’s in his Bible. It’s not in our emotions or what we might suppose or tea leaves. God reveals his thoughts in the Bible. And that’s what we’re reading here. This is why we know this stuff. So, we can know God by knowing his word and we know him in a very real sense. His presence is with us by the Spirit. And then “I pray the Lord will honor his name. He defends me”—that’s earlier the B section. And now, “God, I want him to defend his name. I want him to do these things, things that we’re going to pray for in a little bit about those that commit abortion.”

“Oh, that you would slay the wicked, oh God. And hopefully that’s a death under resurrection through conversion. But if not, we want them gone. Depart from me, therefore, you bloodthirsty men, for they speak against you wickedly. Your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate them, O Lord, who hate you, and do I not loathe those who rise up against you?”

So David is saying, “It’s not that they’re my enemies first and foremost. It’s your enemies. And because we’re in this relationship with God, our heart should be to glorify God, to honor him both in terms of fear of our own sinfulness, as David moves on to say, but we want God glorified and honored wherever we go. And when we go to the city like Paul, we should be stirred up, troubled. We shouldn’t like it, right? When we see all kinds of pagan things going on, idolatrous things going on. No, Lord God, we don’t like those people that mock your name. We’re going to count them enemies. Now, you may not feel like they’re your enemies, but David says, “I count them enemies, right? Because of their hatred of you, because of them trying to attack you, the abortionists who want to attack not just an image-bearer of you, but the dwelling place of where you’re at in the human heart.”

That temple is what they want to attack. People that would do that, I’m going to line up with you, God. I’m going to hate those people with a righteous hatred. Now, I’m going to want to save them. I’m going to want to see them converted, right? And it’s not because of the persecution that I’m going through, but it’s because of your holy name, Lord God. I ask you to vindicate your name. I ask you, Father, to not let them attack you over and over and over. I’m on your side, and there is a side here. There’s a judgment to be entered into that happens here. And it happens when we understand where the dwelling place of God.

And then finally, the psalmist asked to be led to know his own sins, that he would change, that he would repent, that he would change. “Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Okay, so they’re wicked, but so am I. G.K. Chesterton said, “What’s the problem in the world?” You know what Spurgeon’s answer was? Two letters. M E. Problem is me. My own sin, right? I’m part of this mess. I don’t always speak up for God. I let things go on. In fact, sometimes I like him. Some I do want to get away from God. Sometimes I don’t like it that he won’t leave me alone in my room or whatever it is. I’m the problem.

So, David concludes this with his prayer. “Help me, Father. Know me. Search me, God. You’ve already searched me. He’s acknowledged that in the first verse, but now because I’m your dwelling place. Because you tabernacle with me. Search me, God. Know my heart. Try me. Know my anxieties. See if there is any wicked way in me. To what end? And lead me in the way everlasting.”

David wants to be led in the way everlasting. And to that end, he asks God to increase his knowledge of David so that he can reveal that knowledge to David. And as a result of that, David can change. He can repent of his sins. And he can move in the context of righteousness.

Brothers and sisters, we have tremendous texts today from the holy word of God. Texts that are filled with wonder, incomprehensible things really, but texts that should fill us with a tremendous gratitude for life itself and for the gift of life and for God’s care for us, for his always being with us, for him loving us enough to know who we are and to help us to realize that love that we long for—to be known by another—is fully realized and can only be fully realized ultimately in the person of God. But it is realized there, brothers and sisters. You have someone who knows you, loves you and has taken up residence in the context of who you are. This is the great blessing of this psalm.

And may we at the end of the day love God enough to count his enemies our enemies. And may we love God enough to want to know what ways in us need further transformation, need what wickedness in us—that’s the word he uses—needs to be repented of and changed. You know, there was a guy named Linnaeus. Carl Linnaeus. And the science types here know all about this. I really don’t. I had to go to Wikipedia to find out who he was. Although I have heard things about Linnaeus. He was the guy who developed the modern system of classification of biological plants and that kind of stuff. Right? I don’t know what they’re called. Phylum? I don’t know what they are.

Anyway, he but he came up with all of that. Brilliant man, devoted Christian man, scientist. Now, his—by the way, his system of classification, I found out a couple years ago in a magazine article I listened to, is actually under attack from those who really don’t, in part maybe have some legitimate scientific concerns, but in part it seems like it’s more of this suppression of the truth of God in unrighteousness. Linnaeus is under attack long after his death. He died in 1776. But he came up with that modern system of classification. He just loved to consider the world that God had made. He was filled with awe as he went through his classifications of different sort of plants and species and types and varieties and looking at them, classifying them, and gave us really the underpinnings for our modern knowledge of botany.

Well, Linnaeus was so impressed by the thoughts that we read here in Psalm 139 that over the doorway of his office he had these words inscribed. I’m going to slaughter it. I don’t know that. “Deus creavit, vivite mundum, adest.” Okay. He had that over his doorway. So that every time when he went to work, whenever he did the stuff, when he went about his daily work and calling from God, he had this slogan that he would see.

In translated, it says, “Live innocently. God is present. Live innocently. God is present. May the Lord God give us that over the doors of our houses when we go out and when we come in and are lying down and are getting up and are walking in the way and in our resting. May we recognize the presence of God amongst us. May we embrace it and may we recommit ourselves to be led in his way through repentance.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we bless your holy name for the wonderful truths that are found here. Help us to continue to understand how to teach these truths to the culture round about us, to whom they are so threatening, so repulsive even. Lord God, help us to be communicators of these truths in ways that are winsome and lovely, that we might break through that practiced suppression of your truth and your presence in their lives.

And bless us, Lord God. May it start with us. Bless us this week that we may be more committed servants of you, knowing your presence in and through us. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.