Bob Buford wrote a great book entitled Halftime. No, it’s not a football book. It’s a book about finding significance in life. Bob Buford was a business man who had spent the first half of his life searching for success, and came to realize his real search was for significance. Searching for significance. Isn’t that what we’re all really doing? Dealing with the significant questions of life is exactly what the Psalmist David was doing as he penned the 139th Psalm. “Who am I?” “What am I doing here?” “What should I be doing in life?” These are serious questions to which I believe God wants us to know the answer. They matter because they have to do with our personal identity and our eternal destiny. How we answer those questions determines how we will live and order our lives. This is a song about the meaning of life.
The 139th Psalm is my favorite. As we walk through the psalms this summer, I wanted to take a week to share my favorite. Three things David reveals in this Psalm that make it my favorite psalm: 1) God is personal, 2) God is present, and 3) God is pursuing. What I discover about God in this psalm helps me understand who I am, and when I know who I am in relation to God, then I begin to understand a little of my own significance.
God is so much bigger than I can understand. Just about the time I think I have God all figured out, I realize I don’t. The more I learn about God, the more I realize I have still yet to learn. I discover the closer I get to God, the further I still have yet to go. We often think of the vast expanse of the cosmos. We are told that there are one billion stars in one galaxy, and one billion galaxies in the universe. That God is not only aware of every star and planet, but is the Power which keeps each one operating is beyond our ability to understand. He knows each star by name. I can’t understand how God can create the universe, or dare I say, the universes, and still be able to count the numbers of hair on my head. I can’t understand that God is my God, and yet, somehow, I understand it. Yet, this God who is greater than my mind can fathom, comes to me to be my God, to have a relationship with me. God knows us personally. David wrote, “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.” God is very personal to David, perhaps even too personal. God searches him and knows him perfectly. There is nothing hidden from the knowledge of God, so that there can be no excuses, justifications or fabrications. This is an important truth to understand. There are those, I suppose, who think that because they have hidden something from others, they have hidden it from God. Nothing could be further from the truth. The prophet Isaiah says, “Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord, who do their work in darkness and think, ‘Who sees us? Who will know?’” (Isaiah 29:15-16).
David went on to say, “You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.” Not only everything he thought, but everything he did was known by God. Everything David could think of was known by God. He said, “You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.” God is familiar because God created us.
Think about this for a moment. Dr. John Medina, a genetic engineer at the University of Washington noted the intricacies of the human body. Medina said, “The average human heart pumps over 1,000 gallons a day, over 55 million gallons in a lifetime. This is enough to fill 13 super tankers. It never sleeps, beating 2.5 billion times in a lifetime. The lungs contain 1,000 miles of capillaries. The process of exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide is so complicated, that it is more difficult to exchange 02 for C02 than for a man shot out of a cannon to carve the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin as he passes by. DNA contains about 2,000 genes per chromosome — 1.8 meters [nearly 6 feet] of DNA are folded into each cell nucleus. A nucleus is 6 microns [one millionth of a meter] long. This is like putting 30 miles of fishing line into a cherry pit. And it isn’t simply stuffed in. It is folded in. If folded one way, the cell becomes a skin cell. If another way, a liver cell, and so forth. To write out the information in one cell would take 300 volumes, each volume 500 pages thick. The human body contains enough DNA that if it were stretched out, it would circle the sun 260 times. The body uses energy efficiently. If an average adult rides a bike for 1 hour at 10 mph, it uses the amount of energy contained in 3 ounces of carbohydrate. [So lay off the donuts.] If a car were this efficient with gasoline, it would get 900 miles to the gallon.”
We have a great Creator who has intimately made us and knows every part of us. But he not only knows our bodies, he knows the secret place of our minds. It is an awesome thought to realize that nothing I do or think is hidden from God. When I do the right thing, but do it from the wrong motive, he is aware of that. And I must give an account of my attitudes, my actions and reactions to him on the final day. Yes, God is personal. So sang the psalmist.
God is not only personal, but God is also present. I like this psalm because it reminds me that God is with me, even when I can’t feel him with me. Sister Rosemary’s words stick with me through the ups and downs of life. Whenever God feels absent, I simply remember her words, “Perhaps he’s so close you can’t see him.” If he’s present, he knows my heart, and yet he loves me still. He knows me when I’m angry. He’s present there. He knows me when I’m prideful. He sees me, then. He knows when I’m overjoyed. He knows me when I think dark, evil thoughts, yes, his light is present and he drives out the darkness. Yes, we all have dark places. “An ever present help in time of trouble” (Psalm 46:1). We can’t hide anything from God because he is always there.
Sometimes the thought of God’s knowledge of every hidden thing I do or think is a bit overwhelming. I would like to get away from him sometime. I want to shut the door a lock him out at times. But just when I think I am getting away from him, I find myself running into him.
When David wrote this Psalm, it was commonly assumed that there were many gods, and each one was confined to a particular locality. There were the gods of the hills and the gods of the plains. The God of Israel could not possibly exist in other countries. But David knew that even if he went to the farthest ends of the earth, he could not get away from God. He said, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.”
Speaking of running away from God, do you remember the Old Testament prophet Jonah? God go a little too close for comfort, as far as Jonah was concerned, so he thought he would simply run away. God told him to go to Assyria, Israel’s enemy, and preach to them so they could be saved. Jonah wanted them dead, so he took off and boarded a ship to parts unknown. He knew that God was in Israel, but he did not think God lived in countries far from Israel. After all, they did not know him there and he was not worshiped there. He was the God of the Hebrews, but not the God of other nations. But God surprised Jonah, and met him on the far side of the sea. Then he sent him even farther away to preach peace with God to a people that Jonah felt were beyond God’s grace and care. God who is personal, is always present. He is Immanuel—God with us. But, we have to be looking before we find something. Only those who ask are answered. Only those who seek find. And only those who knock find the door opened to them. God is everywhere, but we have to be looking for him to find him.
I love this psalm because it captures the essence of who I am. I am one who would chose to run away from God. I don’t like conviction. I like my freedom. But God pursues me, even in those dark places. What David discovers is a God who is gracious and merciful. In Luke 15, we find a picture of the pursuing God—in the woman who searched for the coin, in the shepherd who searched for the ONE sheep, and in the father who was seeking his son, God searches for us until he finds us because he desires a relationship with us. We Wesleyans call it prevenient grace—God searching for us long before we realize it, or know it. That’s one reason we baptize infants. It is our acknowledgement that God is pursuing this child, and every child of his. God pursued us all the way to the cross. Jesus came running to us, and he ran all the way to the cross.
John Donne was an English priest and poet who lived his adult life in the early 1600’s. King James I appointed him the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. In 1623, he became ill and felt he was dying of the plague. While recovering, he wrote his book Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. It was a book about his struggle with death and human relationships. Interestingly, a Broadway play was written based on Donne’s works. Margaret Edson, a kindergarten teacher, received a Pulitzer Prize for the play she entitled Wit. HBO released a movie version of Wit, starring Emma Thompson. It’s a film about Vivian Bearing, a literary scholar who specialized in the works of John Donne. Bearing soon discovers that she, like Donne, is struggling with a life-threatening illness. The film is a personal journal of her struggle with cancer and death, and how she faces it with humor and wit. In a moving closing scene, she is visited by her old literature professor, Dr. E. M. Ashford. Dr. Ashford is on her way to her grandson’s birthday party, but stops by the hospital to see her former student. Vivian is in the throes of death, and in need of human warmth and compassion. Her old professor takes off her shoes, lies down next to her and put her arms around her. She inquires if Vivian would like her to recite something, and asks if she would like to hear something from John Donne. Vivian shakes her head, “No.” So Dr. Ashford pulls from her bag a book she had bought for her grandson’s birthday. She starts to read from Margaret Wise Brown’s children’s book The Runaway Bunny. She begins reading softly, “Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, ‘I am running away.’ ‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.’ ‘If you run after me,’ said the little bunny, ‘I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.’ ‘If you become a fish in a trout stream,’ said his mother, ‘I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.’” Then, thinking out loud, Dr. Ashford says, “Look at that. A little allegory of the soul. No matter where it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian?”
The message in the philosophy of John Donne, the story of the runaway Bunny and the heart of the Bible are the same: “You just can’t get away from God.” If you run from him, he runs after you. If you run to him, he embraces you. But wherever you are, and wherever you go, his eyes of love will follow you.
The 139th Psalm is the psalmists’ confession that God is personal, present and pursuing, and that is just all beyond his comprehension. That is the story of my life, and all I can do is respond in faith, and exclaim with the psalmist, “Such knowledge to too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand!”
Thanks to Rodney Buchanan for the basis of this message.
