Mother’s
Knitting
Psalm
139
His name was Barry and he
was assigned to the room next to mine in my freshman dormitory. He was a preacher’s son, and had grown up
with strict family rules that governed nearly every minute of his day and every
aspect of his life. Going to the movies
on a Sunday afternoon was forbidden along with most card games and other forms
of diversion. Sunday was for Church and
Bible Study. Since he came from a small
town, everyone knew who he was, so if he broke one of these rules, no matter
where he was, his father was sure to find out.
That was his life for eighteen years.
Then
he enrolled at Penn State University with a campus population of 30,000
students. No one knew his father. No one knew who he was. For the first time in his life he was lost in
the anonymity of the crowd. He could do
whatever he wanted to do without answering to anyone for his actions. Cloaked in this cloud Barry did things he
could never do at home. He began to
drink, and stay up to all hours. He began
to use words he never would have used at home.
It was almost as if he became a different person.
He
was not the only one I saw who seem to revel in this unaccountable
anonymity. Many young people go through
this same experience in their journey to discover who they really are and what
they truly value. There is a freedom
that comes from being lost in the crowd, but there’s a flip side as well.
Deep
down everyone longs for a community where “everyone knows your name”.
There is no ache deeper than to be lonely in the midst of a crowd. In that freshman year I saw more than one
student return home on Thanksgiving and never return to that campus because
they needed to be known by someone who cared that they were alive.
That’s
the tension within in us. We long for
the freedom that comes from anonymity which makes our words and actions
accountable to no one; but we also desire relationships that are so intimate
that the other can finish our sentences because they know who we are and what
we believe and how we think.
Psalm
139 describes both our fear and longing for intimacy with God. It challenges the fear and encourages our
deepest hopes. Let us pray:
Lord, you know us better than we know ourselves, so
as we know you we come to understand our own lives in more deep and profound
ways. So, “search us, and know our hearts;
try us and know our thoughts. Help us to
see the wicked ways within us so that we might receive your forgiveness and
begin again to follow the way that is everlasting. Amen.
This
Psalm of David is divided into three sections, which speak to three primary
characteristics we believe to be true about God. Verses 1-6 address the theological concept of
God’s omniscience. That means God knows
everything. Verses 7-12 describe God as being
omnipresent. That means God is
everywhere. Verses 13-16 portray God as
being omnipotent. That means God can do
anything.
Ask
the average person on the street if he or she believes these things about God,
and chances are they’ll say yes. They just
don’t live as if they believe God is everywhere and knows everything and can do
anything.
One
Bible scholar makes the point,
“Most of us accept the theological doctrine that God
knows everything, but we don’t apply that much to our own lives. We are not usually conscious of the fact that
everything we do or think is known to God.
Instead we suppose that somehow we can have secrets, not only from
others but from the Lord as well.[1]
So,
someone going out of town on business may behave in ways he or she never would
at home because no one will be the wiser. They tell themselves no one in Cleveland knows
who I am so who’s going to know if I invite someone up to the hotel room who
should never be there. Somehow we
convince ourselves that not only does no one in Cleveland know who we are, but
God probably may not even know where Cleveland is.
The
Bible says,
“O Lord, you have searched
me and known me! You know when I sit
down and when I rise up.”[2]
In
other words, not only does God know where Cleveland is, he knows the number of
your hotel room and who’s in that room.
If
and when we realize that to be true our response like that of David is, “Where can I go to flee from God’s
presence? If I go up to heaven, thou art
there, if I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there.”[3] If I go to Cleveland, thou art there. If I
say, “Let the darkness cover
me, and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to thee.”
Whenever
sinful nature is illumined by perfect holiness, our immediate reaction, our first
thought is to flee. Whenever our sin is
uncovered, our immediate response is to cover it back up.
However,
God is everywhere, and that can be a scary thought, especially if you are
trying to hide from God.
Since
running from God is futile, better we should just stop and acknowledge that God
knows who and what we are. The reason
God knows who and what we are is because God “formed our inward parts and knit us together in our mother’s womb.”[4]
I
never really appreciated the meaning of that verse until we had our first
child. I think we were only a couple of
months into the pregnancy, barely a month after we even knew Charlotte was with
child, when our obstetrician took a sonogram picture of our baby boy. Seven months before we could hold him in our
arms we saw his body forming – arms and hands and fingers, legs and feet and
toes, with a beating heart and yet unopened eyes.
When
we saw that picture, our reaction was the same as David’s when he considered
the miracle of life. He sang, “I praise thee, for thou are fearful and
wonderful. Wonderful are thy works.”[5] And that’s the way we felt about it. Although, creation of new life happens every
day and appears to be the most natural and routine of phenomena; when it’s your
baby - it is a miracle.
The more I learn about the miracle of life, the more
amazed I am at the intricacy created by the hand of God, and make no mistake, I
believe only God and God alone can account for the complexity of life. I think we see that in the advances made in
studying the human genome. I’ve read
recently that the genome or DNA structure of human beings has now been fully
mapped. I’ve also been told by someone
in the field that this is not quite so, but it still is an amazing feat of
science.
DNA
is pretty complicated stuff, but as I understand it, its main function is to
provide the instructions necessary to create life. There are over three billion base pairs in
the human genome. The instructions for
life that these contain would fill up the hard drives of a hundred computers,
yet somehow all of this information is squeezed into a human cell. Nearly everyone who works in the field has
the same reaction as David did when he considered how life comes to be and that
is “Wow!” This is truly is amazing.
When
David wrote in this Psalm, “Thy eyes, O Lord, beheld my unformed substance; in
thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there were none of them”[6], he is saying long before any David was born
God had a plan and purpose for him. George Buttrick, one of the preeminent
Presbyterian preachers of the last generation read this verse and concluded,
“While I was but an embryonic speck he took charge of me and knitted together
my bodily frame.” [7]
I believe
God does the exact same thing for every human life that is created. God is sovereign. God is in charge. Sometimes the purpose of that child greatly
affects many others. We find that in the
book of Jeremiah when God says,
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
And before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”[8]
In other words, God didn’t just see a problem and
then look around for the best candidate to address or fix it. Jeremiah wasn’t a last minute stop-gap
solution. God had a plan for Jeremiah
long before Jeremiah was even born.
Most times, though, this life plan may be quite
ordinary, but all the time it comes from God.
Not every life will have the impact of a David or Jeremiah or Lincoln or
Churchill, but every life will have an impact.
That is why every life is important.
Even Hollywood recognized that theme when it
created that well-known Christmas film, “It’s
a Wonderful Life.” You’ve all seen it. Jimmy Stewart played George Bailey, owner of
a small town Savings and Loan who comes to believe that his life is completely
unimportant and doesn’t matter. As a
result, when facing a crisis in his bank, he opts for a quick solution off the
middle of a bridge into a frigid December river.
An angel intervenes and shows George what life in
his town would look like if he never existed.
Everything and everyone is different.
George had far more of an impact than he ever imagined. His life did make a difference. His life was important – precious. It mattered.
God’s love is not in
question here. Ours is. So, David concludes his song,
“Search me, O God, and know my heart; Test me and know
my thoughts. See if there is any wicked
way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”[9]
David is no longer afraid
of what God might find in his life, not because David has somehow been able to
clean up his act so that God will now find no blemish. This verse doesn’t
contain the pride of a student who is turning in an exam with absolute
confidence that he or she has answered every question right.
David is no longer afraid of what God might find in
his life because he knows that God’s response to honest confession is and
always has been forgiveness. The grace
of God is one of those absolute truths about God that we can believe with utter
confidence. The reason we can believe
that today is hanging on the wall behind me.
The cross of Jesus Christ is God’s promise to you that God will “never leave you nor forsake you.” The
cross is God’s promise to you that “if you confess you sin, God is faithful
and just, and will forgive you sin and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.”[10]
To be aware that God knows everything about you can be
very disturbing, or it can be very comforting.
The degree of anxiety or comfort we may feel in this regard depends not
so much on the quality of your life and thought – for none of us can stand
before the judgment seat of God – but on whether that you have confessed your
sin before the Lord.
That’s
why David prays “Search me and know my
heart! Try me and know my thoughts.” He recognizes how easily we can fool
ourselves, how quickly we can rationalize how manner of evil. We can only recognize our sin when it stands
next to the completely unblemished life of Jesus Christ. Look to Jesus and you will see how far short
you’ve fallen. Look to Jesus and you
will see what you can yet be. That is the way that is everlasting.
My
old college friend Barry came to see that.
By his sophomore year, he returned from the “far country”.[11] Like the Prodigal Son, he saw that the anonymity of the crowd had given
him a freedom that comes from being unaccountable to no one also led to a sense
of loneliness. No one knew his name or
cared whether he lived or died.
So,
he joined a Campus Crusade Bible study and became accountable to group of
people who knew his name and cared about him.
He then read God’s Word not because his father commanded him, but
because he recognized some truth in it.
The most important truth he recognized was the truth he saw in
himself. He needed God.
So do
we all.
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