Three times in my life I have heard sermons on Psalm 139 that skipped verses 19-22. Preachers read through verse 18 and say, “Now let’s go down to verse 23.” The shunned verses are a paragraph where David talks about how much he hates bad people and wishes God would just kill them. He writes,
Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God! O men of blood, depart from me! They speak against you with malicious intent; your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies.
I can see why preachers like to skip that.
I should say that I believe it is perfectly legitimate to preach from isolated parts of this psalm. It is a rich prayer-poem with several units worthy of focused contemplation. But if you are going to take the psalm as a whole and try to discern its meaning and pattern and application, then I think it is a big mistake to cut out verses 19-22. David’s rant about hating bad people and wishing God would kill them is, I believe, a tent pole that holds up the whole psalm. Ultimately it makes this prayer compelling, convicting, and righteously frightening in a personal way.
The first and last paragraphs of this psalm seem (at first glance) to be out of order. If I were David’s scribe I might have pointed that out to him. I would say, “Your Majesty, you may have goofed the arrangement there. Let me fix this for you.” I will explain what I mean. David begins verse 1 by saying to God, “You have searched me Lord, and you know me.” And then he goes on at length about how perfectly God knows him. God's knowledge has no conceivable gaps. Verses 2 and 3:
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.
God’s knowledge never needs to be updated or refreshed, and never needs to respond to unforeseen circumstances. Verse 4: Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely. God knows not only what you have said, but what you are going to say, and what you are going to think. You know my thoughts from afar. God knows your past and present and future.
In the past, David says to God, you created me. Verses 13-16: 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. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body;
God not only saw you, he made you - he fashioned you bit by bit. Before there was a “you,” before there was anything that could call itself a person, you existed in the mind of God. We could compare this to the way a house "exists" in the mind of an architect before any brick has been laid or a single line has been drawn on a blueprint.
So, God, you know my past. You know my present –whether I’m standing up or lying down, going out or coming in. As for my future (or that which is future to me), verse 16b: all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
God knows us from before we were conceived until after we’re dead. It is all in his book. Maybe we can get some feeling for this when we read a biography. Recently I read a book about Jonathan Edwards. In this moment I can open that book to page 33 when he’s 12 years old, or to page 239, when he’s a 37-year-old pastor, or to page 493 where he is the 54-year-old president of Princeton and about to die of smallpox. That is, I can open up the story of Jonathan Edwards to any point in his timeline of history because I stand outside the book of his life which I hold in my hands. In a roughly analagous way, God can do the same with us because he stands outside the book of universal reality. He is outside, above and beyond a universe (or multiverse) that is structured in space-time. And because he stands outside of it he can see it all at once.
And there is more to God than that. David emphasizes that God is not only omniscient (knowing everything); he is also omnipresent (existing everywhere). You cannot escape him, you cannot hide from him. Here David engages in a kind of thought-experiment where he tries to imagine getting outside the range of God’s perception. Verses 7-10:
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.
In David’s day there were silly people who thought that God had a realm of jurisdiction beyond which he could not go. In 1 Kings 20, for example, servants of the king of Syria tell him why they just lost a battle to the Israelites. It was a matter of terrain - the Israelite god must be a god of the hills. So, if you just get off the hills and get on to the plains and valleys, then Yahweh wouldn’t be able to do anything – he would become superman on kryptonite. They were wrong of course. God has no boundaries. His jurisdiction is all reality.
And nothing can cloak us from him. David suggests that God has (as it were) x-ray vision that pierces through every cover – including the cover of darkness. Verses 11-12: If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.
Sometimes people speak of “searching for God.” And I grant that that can be a legitimate way to describe a spiritual quest. The Bible itself speaks of searching for God: Jeremiah 29:13: You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. Isaiah 55:6 Seek the Lord while he may found, call upon him while he is near. When St Paul addressed Greeks in Athens he said that God arranged human history in such a way that “people would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him.” But then Paul is quick to add, “though he is not far from anyone of us. For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:27-28)
Though we may speak of "looking for God" and trying to find him, the fact is God is always there. He is right next to you now. How do you feel about that? Are you comforted by that thought or terrified by it? Many people should be terrified. In C. S. Lewis’s spiritual autobiography Surprised By Joy he writes: “Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for a cat.”
Honest people throughout history have regarded God’s nearness has a horrifying prospect from which they would run if they could. Poet Francis Thompson wrote,
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind;
and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Thompson was saying, “I did everything I could think of to hide from God. But he chased me down.” In one part of that poem he writes, “Fear wist not to evade as love wist to pursue.” “Wist” is an archaic word that means “know how.” So that line means, “My fear did not know how to evade God as well as his love knew how to find me.”
In sum, what we have in Psalm 139: 2-18 is a thorough, logical, poetically imaginative discourse on the knowledge and presence and sovereignty of God as applied to the individual. God is everywhere, and he knows everything. Nothing about his presence is bound by space, and nothing about his knowledge is restricted by time. He stands outside of time and space and matter because those are things he created. Therefore he knows all our days from beginning to end and all our thoughts before they have occurred to us. So, when David says in verse 1, You have searched me O Lord and you know me, the next 17 verses can be understood as an unfolding of that statement – all that it means and implies.
And that is what makes the very end of this psalm so puzzling. In his conclusion in verses 23 and 24 David writes, Search me, God, and 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.
This is where, if I were David’s scribe, I would come to his rescue and explain how he could make his psalm better. I would say, “Your Majesty, what you need to do is start with verses 23 and 24. Begin with a prayer that says ‘Search me O God...’. And then you rhetorically slap yourself on the forehead and say, ‘Wait a minute. What am I saying? Stupid me. God, you don’t need to search me. You have already done that! You have searched me, Lord, and you know me [Verse 1]. You know everything about me - my past, present, and future. You know my thoughts before I’ve thunk them. You know everything I’ve done, including the things I’ve tried to hide from you. You’re everywhere. You made me from scratch, and you’re perfectly informed.’ Etcetera. Then, Your Majesty, you conclude with the verse you actually started with: ‘You have searched me, O God, and you know me.’ Amen. The end.”
Is that better?
One thing I have managed to do in this reconstruction is cut out those troublesome verses about how much David hates bad people and wishes God would kill them. If you frame the psalm my way you can banish those nasty verses and plunk them down in another psalm where they belong.
But at this point I can imagine David looking at me and shaking his head slowly and saying, “I think you have missed what I’m trying to say.”
As David celebrates God’s wisdom and knowledge and omnipresence and timelessness in verses 2 to 18, there arises, I think, a troubling thought that won’t go away. There is a piece of the puzzle that does not fit, a background noise that rumbles louder and louder and must be addressed. It is this: with God’s perfect knowledge and complete control, his flawless vision and inescapable presence – why in the world are there still wicked people? Why are there these awful people running around wreaking havoc and creating misery? They ruin it for the rest of us! They even mock God in the process. Things would be great if it weren’t for them.
God, O God - you know everything, and you see everything, and you have power over everything – so, why do you let this wickedness go on? That I do not understand. These people are violent and destructive. They contaminate reality. I hate them, I really hate them. I know you see what they're doing - why don't you stop them? If only you would kill them! Could you please get rid of the wicked so that the rest of us could live in peace?
If that thought does not resonate with you at some level, I might have cause to wonder to what extent you have had to confront true evil, to witness its effects, to be victimized by it yourself or see how people’s lives – children’s lives! - have been brought to agony and grief through the malice, selfishness, greed, neglect, and rapaciousness of others.
And if you yourself have not been the target of such evil, all you have to do is open your eyes and read the news. Even if I limit myself to things I read in the past 24 hours, the news is bad enough. Last night I read about yet another megachurch pastor (is it all megachurch pastors??), Tavner Smith, who enriched himself to a lavish lifestyle by defrauding churchgoers and then (of course) committing adultery with a married church employee - destroying at least two marriages in the process and wrecking a church. Then I read a report on the crimes of Bill Cosby, who drugged and raped dozens of women for decades going back to the 1960s - all while maintaining a wholesome image as America’s Dad. And then I read about 2 very young cops in New York, just in their 20s, shot by a creep. One cop is dead, and the other barely clinging to life. And so on and so on.
A few days ago I heard from an old college friend. His son's life was in disarray because his wife had just left him to go pursue lesbian relationships. Somehow I have found myself to be a go-to guy for these stories of woe. Three very close friends of mine, colleagues in full-time ministry, left God and deserted their spouses in order to pursue same-sex relationships. So - did I have any words of wisdom to share with my friend? No, not really, I'm sad to say - just the brutal observation that some people are selfish and unfaithful and wicked. They defy God, they transform themselves into wrecking balls of pain in the lives of others, and they just don’t care. They feel no guilt, they seek the company of those who laud their cruelty, and they leave the rest of us to pick up the pieces as best we can and endure the misery and simply trust God.
I can understand why David hated wicked people. I can also understand why he had trouble reconciling his understanding of God’s knowledge and presence with the galling fact of constant, devastating human wickedness. How can these things co-exist in our reality?
But that prompts a further thought, a thought which perhaps too few people are willing to entertain - a chilling and brutal thought which we hardly dare face and would gladly suppress.
What if I’m one of those wicked people?
Is that possible? What if my hatred of the wicked and desire for their death is legitimate and justifiable – but also true of me? What if I’m wicked and don’t know it? What if I myself have not felt that guilt which I know others ought to feel? Could it be that while I have been alert to other people’s depravity I have been ignorant of my own? What if – horror of horrors! - someone is praying the awful prayer of verses 19-22 about me?
This is not just a hypothetical for David. He actually experienced it when the prophet Nathan told him about a rich man who was evil incarnate – a man so monstrously wicked that he stole the sole prized possession of a poor man. David was outraged - rightly outraged - and said, “That man must die!” And Nathan floored him by responding, “You’re the man.”
I’ve had the idea of writing a short story someday from the perspective of the father of Uriah the Hittite – that is, the father of the man whom David murdered so he could steal away his wife whom he had impregnated. I imagine Uriah’s father mourning his son in bitter grief, and praying earnestly to some Hittite god (Tarhunt perhaps) to avenge his son’s death. The distraught father cries out, “My son, my son! My dear son Uriah! He was worthy and noble and honest and brave. And David – that depraved Hebrew despot! - raped his wife and had him slaughtered in cold blood. May the name of David perish from the earth! This cursed wretch has dared to write love poetry to his god Yaheh, and some even call him ‘a man after Yahweh’s own heart.’ May his poetry perish with him! May no one ever sing his songs again! O Tarhunt, Tarhunt, why do you allow this foul fiend of darkness, this damned Hebrew wretch, to go on living? He pollutes every square cubit of the ground on which he steps! I hate him with a perfect hatred. Tarhunt, please, please, if only you would slay him as he slew my son.”
Can you see how David’s prayer in verses 19-22 could be applied to him? Rightly applied to him?
Could it be applied to us?
In the Bible, the finger thrust in outraged accusation against wicked people is never allowed to be pointed in that same direction for long before it curls back on itself and dares to ask, “Am I guilty too? Could I be the object of the indignation that I feel?” And I’m afraid the answer is, “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, much more than you would ever know.” A goodly proportion of our depravity consists in the fact that that it is hidden from our eyes. We blind ourselves to it. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9). Well, a man cannot know it unless God enlightens him. For that reason it is good for us to pray for that enlightening. We pray for God to search our hearts because we are so bad at doing it ourselves.
When David concludes his Psalm by saying, Search me, God, and 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, he has the order right after all. God does not need to search us in order to inform himself of something he does not know. But we need him to inform us of what he knows, and reveal to us that to which we have been so blind. We need that in order to repent of the wickedness that till this day, to our discredit, has provoked no guilt within. We must seek forgiveness for those sins which never landed heavily on our conscience, and for which God might justifiably lump us together with the wicked and the damned.
I conclude by taking you back to the 1750s, to a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Imagine a young individual chained and fastened to a wooden board in the darkness of the cargo hold, surrounded by stench and a few dead bodies, wondering if he will survive the trip - and also wondering, given what awaits him, if he even wants to survive. What curses might fill his prayers as he contemplates the captain of that ship? I can see him praying as David prayed: "If only you, God, would slay the wicked!" God, why don't you strike down that evil man?
Only God knows the full answer to that question. But I do think we have a piece of the answer. Rather than destroying the wicked as they deserve, God would rather search their hearts, and reveal to them the results of that search so that they might be moved to sorrow and repentance, and so that he might bestow upon them an extraordinary, unmerited grace that gives some hint as to the depth and breadth of his love. (If God can forgive such a wicked man, whom might he not forgive and restore?) That is in fact what happened to David, and it also happened to the evil slave-trader I just referred to. He was a man so wicked that he once boasted that there was no sin he had not committed. But God searched his heart and broke him, and filled him with remorse, and kept before his thoughts his many murders, and eventually turned him into a crusading abolitionist. God also gave to him, John Newton, a special measure of grace to pen the words we love to sing,
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.
Let us pray.
Lord God, you know everything about us. But we don't know everything about ourselves, and truth be told we're afraid to look. Search us, O God, and know our hearts. Try us and know our anxious thoughts. See if there be any wicked way in us. And lead us in the way everlasting. Deliver us from the evil that we know about and from the evil to which we must be awakened so that we can repent of that too. Conform us to the image of your Son Jesus, for he is the way, and the truth, and the life, and we have no hope of pleasing you apart from him. Amen.
Psalm 139:
1 You have searched me, LORD, and you know me.2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. 4 Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely. 5 You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. 7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. 13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. 17 How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand— when I awake, I am still with you. 19 If only you, God, would slay the wicked! Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty! 20 They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name. 21 Do I not hate those who hate you, LORD, and abhor those who are in rebellion against you? 22 I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. 23 Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
