 |
To download the text and/or audio file for this week's sermon, please go to the "Sermon Archive" page and follow the instructions you'll find there.
For a study guide to prepare for next week's sermon, please click HERE
No Back Door
Psalm 139
July 22, 2007
Rev. Libby Boatwright
In the recent movie, Evan Almighty, a young newly elected Congressman, Evan Baxter, boasts a campaign slogan that he will “change the world.” And God, taking his words seriously, wants him to build an ark. But Evan is desperate to begin his career as a junior member of Congress and tries to avoid God. And Evan makes hilarious attempts to get away from the Creator, but he can’t; God is everywhere he looks. Evan races to his car to escape, God’s in the back seat; God’s the pedestrian crossing the street, the man on the sidewalk waving to him, the man sitting next to him in the Congressional meeting room. There is no escape from the Father of heaven and God’s mission for his life. And many have found themselves in the same situation in the Bible. Adam and Eve hide from God in the garden assuming God can’t see them; Jonah certainly isn’t happy with his assignment for Nineveh, and attempts to board a boat headed in the opposite direction; Moses flees to the hinterlands to hide in the nomadic tribes of the dessert. Yet all are within God’s knowing gaze and each one eventually hears from God to change their course. King David spent many months on the run from his enemies, his accusers, and in this psalm the writer looks back on his life and considers that he never had to run away from God, for his omnipresence and omniscience was a constant. This psalm is not meant to spell out dry doctrine but to see God’s love in the context of a personal relationship with his creation. God knows and cares for each one of us because God himself fashioned and designed us. Hear, then, the words of Psalm 139 (NIV)
O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. 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, O Lord. You hem me in-behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. 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 you hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 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. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for 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. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you. If only you would slay the wicked, O 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 rise up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. Search me, O God, and 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 everlasting.
The Word of the Lord!
The psalms, actual songs sung in worship, were a way of expressing many different facets of life — joy, sorrow, regret, wonder, and knowledge of God’s power to overcome the evil and warring factions of the world all in the context of history. And with the exception of Psalm 88, God is always triumphant, always benevolent in the end. Psalm 139 is really like a song in four stanzas or sections of questions answered, with a strange interlude. How does God know me? How near is God to me? How does God reveal himself? And how can I remain constant with God? In each instance the psalmist answers his own question, for God” is but a touch away.”
How Does God Know Me?
The first stanza is about knowledge. In fact, the word “know” is mentioned seven times, a number of completeness. We are fully and completely known by God. The word for “know” here means to dig — God really digs us! (Sorry for that 60’s pun…) You dig me and therefore you know me. He knows when we rest, when we get up. God knows every thought, every journey, all the habits and choices, for he is acquainted with all our ways — even the ones we don’t want him to know about. God understands our language and communicates with us. And he’s active; behind us in the past, before us in the future, and he lays his hand upon us in the present. His knowledge about us is beyond the most powerful search engine known, for despite the vastness of the universe, God knows every detail of our lives.
How Near is God to Me?
So then the psalmist asks, if God knows me so well, how near are you to me? And God’s answer is, “I am inescapable. There is no back door. If you head up to heaven, God will be there, if you plummet to the depths of hell, the creator will be there too.” Why? Because God created both places; he owns and runs the universe. The difference is that in heaven we will know the full love, compassion, glory, and warmth of the light of God. In the depths, as it’s called, will be the absence of all those things, literally the dark side, the wrath of God, his negatives, full separation.
But then the psalmist asks, “What about this separation? Can we find any distance from God?” And again, the answer is “no.” The ‘wings of the dawn’ is a wonderful poetic phrase, for it represents the rays of a rising sun shooting across the heavens at the speed of light to reach the farthest bounds of the horizon — the herald of the day. It’s really saying, “if I could travel at the speed of light and try to reach the outermost parts of the sea, your hands would still scoop me up, and your right hand, the hand of power and justice, would hold me fast. This reminds me of a remarkable place in Honolulu called Magic Island, where hundreds of people line the shore every evening to watch the sunset, hoping to see what they call the “green flash,” a split second of color that bursts across the horizon. But it often escapes the eye, for God’s speed is much faster than the human eye or mind can conceive. So from the top of the universe to the bottom, to the farthest edges of the earth, the psalmist now questions whether darkness would be a place of escape. And once again the answer is still “no.” Darkness is as light to God, for darkness is not dark to the Creator; the night is as bright as the day. When I hear this I am reminded in John 1 where it says that “...in Him, Christ was life and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it;” and in Revelation 22, when we are reminded that heaven “does not have a temple in the city, for the Lord God almighty and the Lamb, Jesus, are its temple. And the city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it.” Light is the common denominator of God’s glory, his splendor, and there is nothing, not kings, nor principalities, nor powers of the dark side that can even compromise the light. It’s as if God had the largest search light, a spot light with more watts than we could count that overcomes any fear, any darkness we might know. For as Romans 8 reminds us, “nothing can separate us from the love of God.”
How Does God Reveal Himself?
So after the psalmist has answered the questions about God knowing us and being near to us, the question is, “How do I know you love me this much?” And then God reveals his design for our bodies, in the dark secret place, the depths of the earth — figurative language for the womb — stressing the hidden and mysterious operations that occur there. The pregnant woman is a vehicle within whom God is at work on a human soul. So here “dark and secret” are good places. It is in God’s amazing laboratory of the thousands of miles of veins and ventricles, and muscles that he forms us in our mother’s womb, for we are fearfully and wonderfully made. The frame is the foundation of the body, the bone and muscular system. For we are intricately wrought; and the Hebrew word here actually means “embroidered” or woven together. I have the great pleasure of watching quilters and knitters and crochet folks get together here at our church, many from our own Chancel Guild. Some are creating banners, others prayer shawls for our hospice members, some knitting little caps and outfits for our children in Mexico, some simply producing amazing works of art with intricate detail and color. And I think of God creating and embroidering each one of us at birth — the color of our eyes, our skin, our hair, endowing us with a brain, and long, slender fingers to play instruments — others with long frames to play sports, still others with large hearts to offer compassion, and listening ears to hear the needs of others. Whatever way we are made, we are very special to God, for our DNA and our genetic bonding make us one of a kind, every one of us unique. And God knew us before we were born; he beheld our “unformed substance.” Here the Hebrew word means, “rolled up substance” . Many theologians suggest this is the embryo waiting to reveal God’s glory in creation, for he already knows us and he knows the calendar of our days before we live them, but is allowing us the free will to live them out.
We cannot possibly come up with a human design on our own, although we’ve tried many times. Scientists are continually working on their own models to conceive new horizons in anatomy and function. But no matter how much we try, God’s design is always perfect, intricate, and too wonderful for words. Dr. John McIntyre of Texas A &M University noted that the thing that impressed him most about the Christian faith was the fact that the Bible was the same kind of cohesive system as nature — that the more one examines the Bible, the more complex it appears, and the deeper and more unfathomable are its thoughts. Consider the following from two other scientists, Clayton and Jansma:
“We now know that a single cell with a nucleus is the microscopic equivalent of an entire high-tech, industrialized city. It is surrounded by a wall armed with a tight security system, selectively allowing raw materials to enter and manufactured products to leave. The city contains a factory in production around the clock, tied to a trillion other similar factories by a mysterious communications network that dictates repair schedules and keeps track of all inventory. A special library within each city is filled with detailed blueprints for every piece of machinery and maintenance equipment it uses. In living organisms, this information includes every minute characteristic of the organism. Directions for all this activity are encoded in DNA, the genetic material of each cell, which is wound into the shape of a double helix within the microscopically small nucleus. Two meters of DNA can be found in every human cell, each packaged with 46 chromosomes in an infinitesimal nucleus.” When you hear the words, “fearfully and wonderfully made,” do you ever consider the details of what God has created?
So what happens when we get to the ends of the earth, when we’ve discovered all the knowledge we think there is? God is still ahead of us. He is always ready to reveal even more of the sum of his vast universe — more than the grains of sand. And even after this dream, this reverie, even if you come to the end of your wits, God is still more. He knows all our thoughts, but we still cannot possibly comprehend God’s thoughts.
It would seem that after these multitudes of platitudes on the greatness of God, the psalmist would say, “thanks,” and end the song. But we know all those who belong to God and who try to live as God intends will always be opposed by those who oppose God. And so we find a strange interlude to the song. The psalmist hates those who hate God, and asks that God destroys them. So even though this sounds like the psalmist wants revenge, it’s really a request that God set things right in the world, “thy will be done.” He opposes those who oppose God and asks that God takes care of them in His justice. Psalm 1 predicts the “wicked will perish” and we have to assume that God will carry out that prophecy. Once his heart is set right, assured that God will handle that, the psalmist moves into his final stanza, an oath of loyalty; to ask God to search and test and see all these inward parts and then lead us into his kingdom.
How Can I Remain Constant with God?
So the challenge today is to take the key words in the final stanza seriously. We need to ask God to search us every day — to search our heart, which means we need to be in dialogue with God in prayer — and we need to check in and tell God what’s going on, because it’s his job to test, to try out those thoughts, and make sure they are pure and undefiled. Then he’ll probe the depths, see if there is any “grief,” for the word is actually synonymous for “wicked” here, anything emotionally left over; resentments, anger, hatred that would stop us from doing his will. And as we pass through all these purification processes, then we are ready for God to take us to the final step — lead us to the way everlasting. The end takes us back to the beginning. God has already searched, tested us. He sees everything we are and still loves us for we are his creation. The difference is to remain constant as he is constant with us. We can’t just check in with him on some days and check out on others. You may have come here today confused, bewildered by what’s going on in your life and God seems like a thousand light years away, or maybe you feel God doesn’t love you anymore and you don’t know if he’d ever spend time with you. But friends, God loves every inch of you, because you are his perfect creation, and He’s right here’s, sitting alongside you in the pew, walking alongside you, riding in the back seat of your car waiting to hear from you. And even if you are trying to hide from God, you can’t. It’s like the little child on the front of the bulletin; we can’t crawl under the covers or hide in a closet, and pretend that if we don’t think about things that they will just go away. I was reminded of this recently with our son Floyd’s trip to Europe. Floyd’s a bit of a free spirit, living his life half in the hallowed halls of a financial planning firm and the other half in the wild and wooly rock band he leads in San Francisco. So when he chose to head for Pamplona, Spain to run with the bulls, I was a mite concerned. I had nightmares with him impaled on the top of a bull’s horn dragged through the streets. And the nightly newscasts didn’t help, with reports of people landing in hospitals and hostile snorting bulls taking on more backsides than ever. So when Frank and I didn’t hear from him for days, I found myself on the “wicked” side of grief — angry, resentful, and a little frightened that our son might have become a statistic. I prayed for God to find him, and rescue him, to bring him home safely. And then I just prayed the whole thing would go away. But I shouldn’t have worried. God had his search light out for him from the beginning. He was never far from the safe gaze of God. I was the one who tried to run away. And of course our son had the last word. “Yeah mom, I came back with all my limbs. I’m intact!” Insert a sigh of relief. Nothing can hide us from God’s presence.
The late Ray Steadman, a wonderful Pastor from Peninsula Bible Church, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for many of the ideas in this sermon, offers a profound prayer that sums up this psalm well. “Lord, I don’t understand what’s going on around me, and my solutions may be quite inferior — may even be wrong. But Lord, I’ll trust you to lead me. Reveal the wickedness that may lie undetected in my own heart, and guide me in the way that leads to the fullness of life.” God is but a touch away. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
|
|
