A little movie trivia. I want to see if anybody remembers a movie that was filmed in 1966. A movie called “Fantastic Voyage”. It starred Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch. I think I even found the movie poster. This movie was filmed during what they would call the Cold War Era. We weren’t getting along with Russia, and unfortunately we still don’t get along real well with the Russian government. Anyway, the plot is quite simple. It is about a scientist that has figured out how to miniaturize people to make them microscopic. The Russians are nervous that if the Americans get ahold of this technology they might use it against them. The scientist is making his way back to the United States and these Russian assassins come after him and shoot him and critically wound him in his brain and developed into some sort of inoperable blood clot. These doctors agree to be miniaturized to be injected into his body to try to repair it. This starts this fantastic journey through the human body into the brain. I actually found a movie clip, the trailer from that movie. (Trailer played here.) Awesome visual effects. It has been well over 50 years and they have yet to figure out how to miniaturize people. I don’t know about you, but that is perfectly fine for me because I don’t want anybody getting inside my body. There are too many people already in my head. I don’t need you in my body too.
The good news is that, as we find out in Psalm 139 today, God doesn’t need to get in a little miniature submarine and be injected into our body. To God, we are transparent to him. God has the ability to isolate any problems in our body, soul, or spirit pretty quickly and to deal with that impurity before it tends to affect our walk. You may recall we have been in the summer of the Psalms. Today is actually the last Psalm we will be looking at before we head towards the fall and begin to look at some of our vision and our values for the church. We looked last week at Psalm 8 which is about the majesty of God. The title was “What is Man?” In other words, what is man in light of this great, grand universe? What is man that you would consider him? We went on to talk about that man is very significant in his universe. Both man and woman bear the image of God and have a distinct purpose in this world to oversee God’s creation. We talked about the whole idea that God made man. Today, we are carrying on a little bit of that theme. Not only did God make man but God knows man in a very intimate way. In fact, we will find out that we are pretty much an open book before God. If we open ourselves to him, if we allow God to search us out, God will identify any of those impurities, any of those things within us that may be affecting our walk with him. We are going to read through the entire Psalm 139 and then as usual we will go back and highlight a few key verses. Starting at Psalm 139:1. (Scripture read here.)
Hopefully, with reading through that Psalm, you get the initial understanding that God knows us very well. He knows us inside and out. In fact, there is an attribute of God that theologians refer to. It is called his omniscience. Omniscience basically means the attribute that denotes God’s knowing all things. Omniscience means that all events are present to the divine mind. That is God has direct cognition of everything in creation. In short, he knows us. He knows us completely. We all have friends and family members that know us pretty well. I have two good friends. I have a good friend on the East Coast, Jose, and I have a very good friend on the West Coast, Brian. They know a lot about me. They have been out here to visit. Of course, my wife Debbie, she knows quite a bit about me. She can pretty much predict how I am going to react to certain circumstances during the week. She knows pretty much what I am going to want to eat. If we go to a restaurant, she knows what I am going to pick from the menu. She knows the clothes that I am going to pick out on Sunday morning, and then she proceeds to tell me what to wear like any good wife because men don’t know what to wear. All kidding aside, God knows us. Even though our spouse knows us, even though our friends know us, even though our family knows us, no one knows us like God. The Psalmist goes on to pretty much spell that out. He says “You know when I sit and when I rise. You perceive my thoughts from afar. 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.” He knows us. He knows where we are going to sit down and when we are going to rise up. He knows when we are going to sit down on the couch and watch TV. He knows whether we are going to sit on a bar stool with a Jackman Inn or someplace. He knows that. He knows when we are going to rise up. He knows what is going to cause us to get up from that seat. Whether it is to pick up the remote control. Whether it is to pick up another slice of pizza or possibly pick up the stranger across the room. He knows that. He knows us completely. He not only knows when we are going to rise up and sit down, he knows the exact moment that we are going to wake up on any given day. He knows the exact moment that we are going to go to sleep at night. He knows who we are going to sleep with. He knows a lot about us. He knows the words that are going to come off of our tongue before they go off of our tongue, which is a scary thing for guys like me who tend to put my foot in my mouth occasionally. Some of you know I like to preach without notes. That is very freeing, but at the same time it is very scary because sometimes I don’t know what I am going to say until after I say it. They say words are like toothpaste. It is easy to get out of the tube but try putting it back in. It is the same with words. It is very difficult once they go out. God knows exactly what is going to proceed from our mouth. He knows whether we are going to say a word of blessing such as God bless you or thank you or whatever or a word of cursing such as the heck with you or around here it could be worse. He knows those exact words that are going to come out of our mouth before we even say them.
The thing that is also interesting about this or a bit intimidating is not only that he knows us but we cannot escape that knowledge. There is a second attribute of God that is called his omnipresence. His omnipresence is basically the attribute that refers to God being present everywhere in creation at the same time. As a result, there is nowhere in the universe that lies beyond the cognition and care of God. He is everywhere. That is what the Psalmist says. He goes on to say “Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee you 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.” Basically he is saying north, south, east, and west. As high as I want to go into the heavens or as low into the earth. If I start out at the dawn on the east and go all the way to the ocean on the west, God is with me. I know we struggle with that. I personally struggle with it. We leave the church on Sunday and it is almost like we feel like we have left the presence of God, but he has never left us. It is hard when we leave church or we leave our natural environments. When we get out into the world, we begin to feel kind of distant from God.
We are all especially vulnerable to it when we are on vacation. You go on vacation and it is so easy to get out of your normal routine. It is easy to slip up on your prayer time, your quiet time, your worship time because there are so many distractions. I think I have shared before that we have been blessed to go on a cruise. I just love a cruise because it is all encompassing. I’ll tell you what though. I get on the cruise and I change a little bit. I become a whole different person. Has anybody seen those commercials where you have the Carnival Cruise line and you have the teenage girl talking to her mom and saying dad is acting a little weird? Dad is down at the disco doing Saturday Night Live stuff under the disco ball. What is up with that? Dad is acting a little weird. That is me. I get out there and all of a sudden my hair lets go and I don’t even have that much hair to let go. That is just because I am out of my normal environment. I was thinking about this. I was reading a book. Some of you have read the book “The Practice of the Presence of God”. It was written by a monk named Brother Lawrence. His sole goal was to spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in the presence of God just trying to live in the constant awareness of God’s presence. I read that book about a week before I went on the cruise. I am thinking I am going to practice the presence of God. God showed me quickly how difficult it is. When you are on a cruise you are not in the presence of God. You are in the presence of everything else. You are in the presence of 24-hour entertainment. You are in the presence of a guy walking around selling Mai Tais and margaritas. You are in the presence of the slot machines. You are in the presence of a smorgasbord available to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is difficult to practice the presence of God. I was thinking about the name Carnival. If you think about, the word Carnival comes from the word carnal, which means flesh. Really a Carnival Cruise line is basically a ship that is floating around catering to our flesh. That is the reality of what a Carnival Cruise line is. It is difficult when we are on vacation and we get out of our context, we get out of our comfort zone, and we get out of our familiar presence and we think maybe God is not around. Maybe we can escape his presence. Maybe he won’t know what we are doing out there. The reality is we can’t escape from his presence.
There is actually a passage in Jeremiah that speaks of this. He says “‘Am I only a God nearby,’ declares the Lord, ‘and not a God far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him?’ declares the Lord. ‘Do not I fill heaven and earth?’ declares the Lord.” He says I am everywhere. Some of you are thinking surely he can’t be everywhere. Surely he can’t see us in the dark. Wrong. The Psalmist goes on to say that. He says “If I say surely the darkness will hide me and the light becomes night around me and even the darkness will not be dark to you. The night will shine like the day for the darkness is as light to you.” Do you ever think about why a lot of immoral activity and criminal activity happens at night? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist. It is because it is dark and you can’t be seen doing it. The reality is that is when a lot of things happen. Criminal activity. Immoral activity. People out there feeding their addictions. People are attracted to the darkness. The people that want to engage in the fleshly desires are attracted to the darkness. We just finished a week of Vacation Bible School. It was just a great week. The theme was chasing the light. Chasing after the light of Christ and the importance of that. As Christians especially, we need to know that we need to chase after the light. Why? Because it says in Colossians 1:13 that “He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Once you are a born-again Christian, you are to go away from the darkness, go away from the domain of the enemy and go towards the kingdom, the light of the Son. We are supposed to do this.
You think is there any way to escape God’s watchful eye over us? Is there any way we can get around that? The reality is no because he made us. He knew us even before we were born. The Psalmist goes on to say “For you created my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. I know that full well.” He gets that. If there is a consistent theme in the Psalms, it is the idea that God created us. There is no doubt that God created us. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. He says he knitted us in our mother’s womb. The reality is that he didn’t knit us but it is the idea that he knows every single part of us. He knows our eyes, our ligaments, our muscles. He knows our bones. Everything within us. He knows us inside and out. I was thinking of my sermon this week and I was thinking about how I could have focused just on this one passage that speaks about the idea that we are fearfully and wonderfully made because the human body is an amazing thing. I thought I will give you a few quick facts about the human body that you may or may not know, so I went on the internet and looked up some quick interesting facts. Did you know that the human mind has the capacity to hold not one library full of information but ten libraries? The mind has the capacity to hold that much information. At least that much information. Did you know that the eyes are so good that some people can discern the light of a candle 14 miles away? The light of a candle. Our nose can sense up to 50,000 odors or scents. The one I really like, the one that I think is really cool, is that in our lifetime, we will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools. Two. We are indeed fearfully and we are wonderfully made. If anybody would just pick up a basic anatomy book, it is very difficult to say that we are a mere cosmic accident. It is impossible to look at the human body and say we are just an accident. It is just a random act just like the universe like we talked about last week. It is not there. What the Psalmist is saying is God I know that you know me. I know that you know everything about me. You know me better than I know myself. I know that you are everywhere and that I cannot escape from your presence. In other words, I know that I am an open book before you because you have made me.
For some of us, that would invoke fear or anxiety. For David, it seems to invoke praise. He says I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. He goes on to say “How precious to me are your thoughts, oh God. How vast is the sum of them. Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of the sand. When I awake, I am still with you.” He is excited about that whole presence. He is excited about that. He is excited about the fact that God is hovering over him 24/7. Like a parent that hovers over their children. Any parents out there that are hovering parents? Come on raise your hands. I know some of you because I am one of them. I am one of those parents who wants to know exactly what my kids are doing and when they are doing it. I have a daughter, Natalie; she is going to be 21 in December. She calls me and she says is at her girlfriend’s house and I still want to talk to the mom to see what they are going to watch on TV. True. Kristin knows it. You laugh but you are all like that. We do. We are hovering. God is kind of a hovering parent is what he is. He is watching over us. It is not a bad thing because David knows he does it because he cares for us. He wants to make sure that we don’t mess up. He is okay with the fact that he is an open book before God. If you are an open book before God, it means you have nothing to hide. All your blemishes and everything are open and exposed. What it does is it creates then the opportunity for God to begin to search you out and to begin to repair the broken things, the impure things in your life. That is what David does in the last few verses 23 and 24. He says “Search me out.”
Before we look at those, we have to address these four strange verses that are towards the end. He says “If only you would slay the wicked, oh God. Away from me you bloodthirsty men. They speak of you with evil intent. Your adversaries misuse your name. Do I not hate those who hate you, oh Lord, and abhor those who rise up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them. I count them my enemies.” Where does that come from? He is talking about all these wonderful things about God and he throws this in there. Really we don’t know. In fact, some commentaries totally ignore this. Really what I think is going on here, it is speculation. We don’t exactly what the context is, but we know David was a king. We know he had a lot of friends but he had a lot of enemies. He had people that were trying to kick him off the throne and that were trying to insult him and trying to slander him and even slander his very God. It is like David is going through this thing and saying you know me Lord. You know me inside and out so you can proclaim my innocence before the enemies. You know my heart, Lord. If I am innocent then go after those guys and kill them and slaughter them. This is very difficult. This is one of these passages we just like to pass over because we don’t like them. Because we know in the New Testament Jesus talks about the whole idea that we are supposed to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us so this doesn’t fit. The reality is we cannot take a New Testament concept and try to push it back and apply it to an Old Testament character because it wasn’t the same time. It was a totally different time.
We don’t know what prompted David to write this. Whether he was seeking vengeance. Whether he had impure thoughts or whatever. But we do know about David that David loved God. David wanted God to deal with anything in his heart. David, if he had anything, he had self-awareness. He knows about himself. He knew that he was prone to failure. We saw that in Psalm 51. We saw that when he confessed the sin about Bathsheba. We saw that. He goes on to say “Lord, search me, oh God. Know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me to the way of everlasting.” What he is saying is I am an open book. Put me on that operating table. Put me out there and do that exploratory surgery. Look for the things that may be hindering my walk and may be offensive in me and begin to deal with them, expose them, bring them back up to the surface so they can be dealt with and pulled away. That is what he is saying here because David was a man after God’s own heart. He didn’t want anything affecting that relationship.
In conclusion, think about ourselves. This whole Psalm really is an application to ourselves. We too, whether we want to admit it or not, are open books before God. God knows all of our ways. He knows everything about us. The stuff that we don’t even know about ourselves he knows. We know that God’s presence is everywhere. We can go anywhere we want. We can go on vacation. We can go down the street. We can go anyplace we want in the world. God’s presence is still there even though we may choose to ignore it. Even though we may choose to even run away from him. Like David, I think we also know that our hearts are not always pure. We have some unchecked attitudes deep within us. Maybe we have some fears that are deep within us. Maybe we have some anxieties. Maybe we have some pride issues within us that, if not dealt with, what happens is they begin to bubble up and they begin to manifest themselves in very unhealthy ways. Maybe it is an off-color comment or a criticism of somebody. Maybe it is an email that we send before reading it without thinking about how somebody is going to receive it. Maybe it is a prejudice that comes out in some environment. Maybe it is an unhealthy behavior, unhealthy relationships, maybe an addictive behavior, or maybe even criminal activity. Those things, if they are not dealt with, they bubble up. They are going to come out somewhere. We don’t even know what the root cause is. We can’t figure it out. I have said something and say where did that come from? I have thought something and thought where does that come from? We don’t know but God knows. God can get to the root of those things. We are transparent. He can zone in on those things and begin to deal with it before it hinders our walk with him. Thinking about the movie “Fantastic Voyage”. A little submarine with little people that would be injected into someone’s body to go up to the brain and begin to heal that or destroy the clot or whatever was going on there. As I have said before, God doesn’t have to do that. The God who created the universe, the God who created every star in those 500 billion galaxies out there is the same God that created you and me in his image. He is the same God that knows us inside and out and consequently he has a vested interest in our lives and making sure that when we are broken down, he is going to restore us back up to wholeness. He is going to help us retain the very image that he has given us. In order to do that, we simply have to learn to come before God in an attitude of prayer, openness, humility, and say God search me out. Let me know if there is any offensive way in me and please isolate that thing. Bring it up and bring it forward to me so that I may begin to deal with it. Just like the Psalmist says “Search me out, oh God. Know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.” Let us pray.
