Daily Devotional • September 13
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, 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.
Meditation
In his Confessions, St. Augustine writes, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Some have offered the image of a “God-shaped vacuum” that exists in each human soul, a void that can only be filled by God. With this hungry need lying at the core of our being, we want to know God, and every little bit of such knowledge that we attain only makes the hunger more intense. The more we know of God, the more we want to know. We are insatiable. “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”
But if the knowledge of God is something that we “cannot attain to,” are we not in a maddeningly self-defeating quandary? The more we know God, the more we want to know, but the less we are able to know? Where is the escape from this endless loop? The Psalmist—and one might assume St Augustine got his inspiration not only from his own spiritual experience, but from this Psalm—offers us a plausible way out. The key to knowing God without being caught in an eternal vortex of desire is to realize that, before we know God, we are known by God. “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.”
This is how the Psalm begins, and the majority of the entire text is a variation on the same theme, a slow unpacking of the notion that God not only knows each of us intimately, but has been aware of us even long before we were aware of ourselves. “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”
Each of us can say to God, in effect, “You’ve known me since I was a gamete, and I can’t really know you at all, except through your knowledge of me.”
The Rt. Rev. Daniel Martins is retired Bishop of the Diocese of Springfield in the Episcopal Church.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Episcopal Diocese of East Carolina
The Diocese of Olympia – The Episcopal Church
The Rt. Rev. Daniel Martins is retired Bishop of the Diocese of Springfield in the Episcopal Church.
