I became a thief at the age of 5. I went into a grocery store and my mother was busy making sure that the tomatoes were just right. When she wasn’t looking I saw the bright shiny little box. At the time the words on this shiny box said lemonheads, and at the time it seemed like the best words in the world. I looked at this little yellow shiny box and wondered what the candy would taste like. Would they be sweet like honey or sour like real lemons? I took the candy and put it in my pocket. After a while we walked out of the store. My mother put me in the car seat in the back of the car.
When we got home I hid in my room and I started eating my candy. After finishing the candy, I did not feel right. My mother came in my room and found the empty little box. I wanted to hide and I could not look at my mother in the eye. She knew immediately what I had done. She knew me. I tried to lie, but she could see right through me. My mother told me, “Don’t hide what you did, the grocery store clerk told me.” I was scared and I started to cry. My mother held me. She did not yell and she did not punish. My mother then said, “Don’t worry I paid for it.” My mother paid the price so that I would not have to hide from her.
People of God, in the same way, Jesus paid the price of our sins so that we would not have to hide from God. We fall short and we feel like we want to hide from God. Intimacy can be both something scary and uncomfortable we wish to hide from. But intimacy also affords something grand.
Psalm 139 strikes us in our hearts in intimate areas with the rawness of beautiful truths. David’s Psalm speaks to the marrow of our bones to the innermost parts of who we are. He is not speaking of theological jargon from an academic institution and he is not addressing us on the basis of his research. He is not reporting to us his philosophical thoughts. Instead, we are being invited to an intimate conversation between David and God.
This Psalm strikes us because it reflects an experience, a living and breathing representation of an intimate relationship with God spoken through an intimate theology. The Psalm strikes us because it is theological truth spoken through an intimate prose depicting a romance. The Psalm is striking because it is intimate, but also because of the audacity we hear in it. We hear the words “You know us in our innermost being” and we stop and think about both the beauty and surprise of it. We think, “ Well of course, God knows me. He knows everything about me”, but with awesome wonder and some shock we now enter into the uneasiness of being known. Being completely known means we feel exposed and we feel vulnerable, we have no privacy.
One day I was reflecting on this passage with a young married man who was not yet a Christian. We’ll call him Mike for the sake of this story. Mike wondered about his relationship with God and his wife. Mike began to tell me about how uncomfortable he feels about being known, about being vulnerable because it seems unmanly. He reasoned that our American culture teaches us to not be vulnerable because it means we are in a position of weakness and vulnerability. He said this is not just true of men, but of women too. He mentioned that any idea of intimacy is hard for him. He wanted to be close to his wife, but did not know how. Mike then said, “If I don’t even feel comfortable in my own skin, with who I am, with my sins and with all the darkness inside how can I be intimate with God. If I can’t be intimate with God, how can I be intimate with my wife?” Mike wanted to hide from God and he wanted to hide from his wife. Mike was not a believer.
People of God, we are made for intimacy, but we struggle with being intimate. In the story of the Fall, Adam and Eve sinned and they hid from God. Adam and Eve lost their intimacy with God when they sinned and they hid from God. Since the fall we have hid ourselves from God, we have lost something, have forgotten something of being intimate with one another and with God.
Human beings tend to hide who they are from one another and we try to hide who we are from God. We want to be known, but don’t know how to be known. We struggle with the thought of anyone knowing us fully, because how can someone ever want to know the deepest parts of us? How can anyone ever look into every part of us, the good and the bad and still love us? We fear the rejection that might come from being vulnerable, the rejection that may come from being intimate, we fear being rejected for who we are. Being known as the text says can be a vulnerable and intimate thing that some of us struggle with, it is hard and scary for us to understand and live with.
When we sin, our natural inclination is to want to hide from God. The guilt we feel is a weight that seems unbearable, it seems like something so terrible about us that we do not want to share it with anyone else, including God. We struggle to believe that a Holy God could ever accept us. We are left alone with the intimate awareness of our own lack of holiness and our own lack of self-acceptance. In sin we are left alone with the list of inadequacies that we have piled up.
When we enter the poetry, prose and story of Psalm139, we see that though we are known fully, faults and all, we come face to face with a Lord who though knowing us, loves us nonetheless. David is professing to the wonder filled joy and uplifting reality of being a covenant child in the palm of a loving God. Verse 13 proclaims that God formed our inward parts, that he wove David and all of us while we were still in our mother’s wombs. There is wonder filled intimacy with God. But how can we be in this intimacy with God?
In the Gospels, we learn that God becomes flesh. In John 3:17 we learn that Jesus entered the world not to condemn it, but to save it. Sin keeps us from God, pushes us away from God and makes us hide from God. But at the cross, Jesus goes where no one wants to go. The Apostles creed and the Heidelberg Catechism say Jesus descended to hell. Jesus experienced the hellish weight of our sins. Jesus took all our inadequacies and all of the darkness that keeps us from God. There is intimacy at the cross, all our sin exposed there in the crimson of red dripping to the floor, with the stripes exposing the raw frailty of human life, with the nails stinging with pain and with mother Mary crying for her son. The darkness that David talks about in the Psalm is nailed there on the cross for all to see. The world runs from intimacy, but at the cross Jesus took the hidden things of our lives upon himself so that we would not have to hide.
In Christ we can take David’s words as our own saying, “the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” We can claim these words as our own because the darkness of our pasts in Christ, the light of the world has overcome. Christ the light of life has overwhelmed the darkness so that in Christ there is no darkness in us. In verse 12-13 we find that we may fall into the darkness of sin, but in Christ the light of God’s grace shines upon us and consequently on others through us.
So one day I was taking the bus to go downtown and I sat in the back of the bus with another person and there were no seats left. On the ride there, the bus came to a stop where there was a woman pushing a shopping cart. The cart was full with two big bags with cans with them. The woman’s clothes were tattered and I could tell that this long dress was once a beautiful white gown, but now an unkempt piece of rags grey, wet and dirty like her hair. I noticed that her big hat. Every now and then she would check to make sure that as much of her hair was hidden under her because her hair was dirty and tangled like a spider web. Her hard was something she did not like about herself.
As the woman got on the bus she sounded course with bitterness in her voice as she complained to the bus driver for the high prices. Then she looked out to a sea of uncaring eyes. Although there were seats open, they were open next to people who would place there belonging in the open seat as she came near. She huffed and breathed with contempt. Her stench was overwhelming and I watched as people squirmed in their seats. She could find a place to sit or a place to hold onto. The woman looked down at the floor, as if wanting to hide. When she lifted her head everyone would turn away. No one wanted to be near her, no one wanted to smell her, no one wanted know her or talk to her. In the middle of a crowd of people she was alone.
The woman held onto her bags tightly as the bus began to move and then something peculiar happened. A man in a really expensive looking suit stood up and asked her to sit. She answered in an angry voice, “I don’t need your pity or your sympathy.” The man assured her that he just wanted her to sit because he had an extra seat. He convinced her and she sat down. Then something more strange happened because the woman was not expecting the man to sit with to her.
I overheard their conversation. The woman started crying. The man asked why are you crying and the woman answered because you sat with me. It was shocking and almost suspicious for the woman for a person to be this good and nice to her. The man then began to speak in very simple words, “I figure Jesus loved me and I figure if Jesus loved me I can be here with you.” That woman was grateful and wanted to do something for him, but she had nothing to give. The bus came to a stop and then the man said to her, “I’ll take you to lunch, come with me.” He put his arm around her and they walked off the bus together. As they walked off the bus she took off her hat.
That was a Jesus moment full of intimacy. The words spoken were soaked with Jesus. The presence and actions of the man preached a life lived in intimacy with God. He was a living, breathing representation of Jesus. When no one wanted anything to do with her, except to gawk at her, the man came near to this woman. The man stepped in to sit with her, looked at her for who she was, talked to her and walked off with her. The man in the suit made the message of grace in Jesus an intimate part of who he was and expresses that intimate relationship with Jesus with this woman. It is because of how Jesus touches this man’s life that he is able to put his arm around the bag lady. It is because of the grace of God that the bag lady felt comfortable enough to take off her hat and be herself without judgment.
The woman left knowing she is not invisible, but known. Being known by God is a beautiful intimacy that speaks to us because in Christ we do not remain hidden in sin. Instead Colossians 3:3 says we are wonderfully and mysteriously hidden with Christ because of his death.
Because of Jesus, we can say with the Psalm, “Search me O’God and know my heart… and lead me in the way everlasting.” In a world filled with loneliness we will never be alone with Jesus. With Jesus we are led to the life everlasting because Jesus is the way everlasting.
We do not have to feel like hiding from God like Adam and Eve did in the Garden. Do you know what happened next? Afterward God did something that is very intimate. In finding Adam and Even he made clothes for them and clothed them. God knew the exposure and shame they felt and clothed them not just with physical clothes, but with grace. Just like Adam and Eve in the Garden we are clothed in the grace of Christ.
Christ went to the darkest place, He was forsaken for our sake, He took our place and paid the price for our intimacy. God does not view us for the dirtiness of our sins instead when God looks at us He sees us as Jesus. God has forgiven our sin. We then have an intimate relationship with God because in Christ we are fully known. Jesus went to the cross so that we would not have to hide from God.
In Jesus we can say these words from verse 17-18, “How precious to us are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were we to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When we awake, we are still with you.” --- Praise be to God, our sins do not separate us from the loving relationship we have in our Lord Jesus Christ. God is with us and knows us in a way that does not condemn us, but in a way that showers us with grace. How precious are these thoughts, we do not need to hide, but are fully known in Jesus. Amen.
