Sunday School Lesson
November 24
Lesson 13 (KJV)
God’s Promised Presence
Devotional Reading: Exodus 33:12–23
Background Scripture: Psalm 139
Psalm 139:1–12
1 O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me.
2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.
3 Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.
4 For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.
5 Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.
7 Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
10 Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
11 If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.
12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
Key Text
O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me.—Psalm 139:1
Worship in the Covenant Community
Unit 3: Psalms of Thanksgiving and Praise
Lessons 10–13
Lesson Aims
After participating in this lesson, each learner will be able to:
1. List the things that God knows based on Psalm 139:1–12.
2. Explain the imagery of light/dark and God’s sight in this psalm.
3. Create a nightly reminder of God’s loving care.
How to Say It
Ignatius Ig-nay-shus.
merism mare-izm.
omnipresence ahm-nih-prez-ence.
omniscience ahm-nish-untz.
Introduction
A. Human Limitation
The progress of technology has facilitated an interconnected world. The sheer volume of information that is available thanks to the internet is staggering. But the wealth of knowledge also serves as a reminder of humanity’s limitations in experiencing every corner of the globe within a single lifetime. Visiting every country might seem possible. But with approximately 4 million cities and towns across the globe, we realize that just seeing a country will not give us the experience of all those varied places—let alone lightly or uninhabited regions.
Moreover, humanity has only begun to explore the vast expanse of space and the depths of the oceans. In this regard, when we consider the smallness of our plot of land on earth compared to the vastness of space and the oceans, we are reminded of humanity’s limited ability to explore. In today’s lesson, the psalmist offers insight into this.
B. Lesson Context
Although one ancient manuscript ascribes Psalm 139 to a man named Zechariah (not the prophet) sometime in the 700s–600s BC, most scholars accept the traditional attribution to David. According to Scripture, David was a man who sought after the very heart of God (1 Samuel 13:14), exemplified by his demonstration of faith when he faced Goliath (17:47). He was a man of integrity who chose to trust in God when presented with an opportunity to kill Saul in a cave (24:8–10). Even after conquering his enemies and receiving the promise that his kingdom would be established forever, David remained humble (2 Samuel 7:18; see commentary on Psalm 139:5b, below).
Several difficulties confront us when reading this psalm. First, there is no reference to a particular historical circumstance. This means that a specific historical context, even in David’s life, cannot be determined. Context is a great help in interpretation, so the questions presented below reflect to some degree the question of the context of this psalm’s being written. Second, a thorough examination of Psalm 139 reveals complexities in its structure that complicate a straightforward interpretation of David’s intent.
To analyze the psalm’s content, some scholars have proposed dividing it into sections of praise (vv. 1–18) and lamentation (vv. 19–24) based on the initial expressions of gratitude followed by anguish. These can further be broken into four stanzas of verses 1–6, 7–12, 13–18, and 19–24. These issues also prevent this psalm from fitting neatly into conventional categories of psalms, which, when clear, can also aid in understanding ancient texts.
And finally, the text assumes that David was beset by wicked adversaries opposed to him and to God. These individuals harbored animosity toward God, profaned His name, and spoke maliciously against Him (Psalm 139:19–22, not in our printed text). Furthermore, David implored God to probe his innermost being and guide him toward eternal life (139:23–24, not in our printed text). But the connection between the verses we will study today (139:1–12) and these opponents is unclear, and how early lament or protest begins is also hazy.
I. Unsearchable Knowledge
(Psalm 139:1–6)
A. Complete Awareness (v. 1)
1. O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me.
This verse introduces a central theme of the chapter, which is further emphasized by its near repetition in the conclusion of this psalm (Psalm 139:23, not in our printed text). God’s complete knowledge, often referred to as His omniscience, is the attribute that encompasses His infinite awareness and understanding of everything that has ever happened, is happening, or will happen. He is entirely aware of all things. But David did not set out to write a doctrine of God’s knowledge. David assumed God’s omniscience as fact and did not make an argument to convince others. David’s intention was not to teach about God’s infallible, complete knowledge, but instead to marvel at it in awe and perhaps even in fear (see 139:7–12, below).
We might think of this verse as beginning a courtroom drama, with the Lord trying the evidence of David’s character (thou hast searched me, and known me). The Hebrew word translated searched is the same expression employed to describe a cross-examination in a judicial context (Proverbs 18:17). God is the judge who has meticulously scrutinized and comprehensively understood all the evidence required to judge the heart’s motivations.
What Do You Think?
How do you feel knowing that God knows you?
Digging Deeper
How can acknowledging the sinful parts of yourself that God already knows prepare you to grow by the Spirit’s leading?
B. Complete Insight (vv. 2–3)
2. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.
The psalmist employs the terms downsitting and uprising to convey God’s knowledge of an individual’s entire day (see 2 Kings 19:27; Psalm 44:21; Ecclesiastes 12:14; Hebrews 4:13; 1 John 3:20). The two extremes point to God’s total knowledge; nothing is left out. (The literary device of naming opposite ends of a spectrum to indicate everything in between is called merism.) Jesus’ knowledge of people’s inner lives is one marker of His divinity recorded in the Gospels (examples: Matthew 12:25; Luke 5:22; John 4:16–19).
3. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.
The psalmist emphasizes that God possesses knowledge of both public and private aspects of one’s life, from their travels (my path) to their rest (lying down). The Hebrew term translated compassest in context is an image of sifting grains to separate the grain from the chaff (compare Ruth 3:2; Isaiah 41:16). This suggests God’s metaphorically sifting David’s life to separate chaff from wheat. A helpful analogy to clarify this notion involves likening the process to a gemologist who scatters an array of gemstones across a table, enabling the individual examination of each specimen for quality (compare Jeremiah 17:10; see Psalm 139:23–24, not in our printed text).
C. Complete Understanding (vv. 4–6)
4. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.
In human communication, the potential for misinterpretation looms large. This is perhaps especially apparent in text-based media when we realize how much of comprehension comes down to non-verbal cues, such as tone and body language. Even when face-to-face, myriad factors can create misunderstandings no matter how carefully words are selected—not least the words themselves, which can have wide variations in meaning and are highly context-dependent. Given the perils of communicating even when both parties are acting truthfully, the risk of being deceived by a bad actor is always high (consider Romans 16:18; 1 John 4:1). In stark contrast, God possesses an unparalleled ability to comprehend every word even when it is mere thought or intention. No context or body language confuses His understanding.
What Do You Think?
What other verses point to prayer as a gift to us rather than a need of God’s?
Digging Deeper
What value can you discern in intentionally allowing prayers in the Bible to shape your prayer life?
Talk to Someone
As clients express themselves, counselors carefully listen to their words, observe their body language, and assess their emotions. Therapists’ training and experience allow them to pick up on subtle cues and anticipate the direction of the conversation. By utilizing their well-honed intuition, insight, and expertise, counselors can help their clients make sense of their experiences, uncover underlying issues, and start on a road to healing and growth.
Therapists and counselors exemplify how we can strive to know and understand those around us more deeply. But even a well-trained therapist or counselor could be fooled; after all, they’re still human! In contrast, Psalm 139:4 emphasizes the all-knowing nature of God, who is aware of our every thought and word before we even speak to them. God knows us intimately, including our deepest thoughts and emotions. What comfort can you find this week in speaking to the Lord who knows you and loves you? —O. P.
5a. Thou hast beset me behind and before.
Here David’s focus shifts from the pure fact of God’s knowledge to the action He takes with this knowledge. Beset is multifaceted, indicating an act of confinement, binding, or encircling. This can have positive or negative implications, depending on context. Most frequently, it denotes the plight of a city besieged by hostile forces (Deuteronomy 20:12, 19; 1 Samuel 23:8; Daniel 1:1; etc.). In one instance, however, the word is used by the beloved’s friends: “If she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar” (Song of Solomon 8:9). A similar concept, though with a different word entirely, is used to describe God’s protection of Job: “Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side?” (Job 1:10). The evidence suggests David was experiencing God’s presence behind and before as a hindrance of some kind.
5b. And laid thine hand upon me.
The metaphor of God’s hand might shed some light on the context of “beset.” Although God is an immaterial being and does not possess physical appendages such as hands or feet, the writers of Scripture were constrained by the limitations of human language in their attempts to depict God in a way that would resonate with their audience. There is precedent for desiring God to turn His attention to someone else, as communicated here with the metaphor of His hand. For instance, after eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, the last thing Adam and Eve desired was an audience with the Lord (Genesis 3:8)! Job asked God to withdraw His hand (Job 13:20–21). And Ezekiel described God as striking His hands together to punish Judah (Ezekiel 22:13). Later, John the Baptist uses a winnowing metaphor to describe Jesus’ hand at work in judgment (Matthew 3:12; see Psalm 139:3, above).
We should not discount that David could have experienced God’s attention as being too intense for the man to bear (compare Psalms 25:7; 32:4). This psalm has no confession of sin—and, in fact, it asserts David’s blamelessness. But one wonders if God’s nearness was bringing to light what David would have preferred to leave in darkness. We might think of the time between his transgressions with Bathsheba and her husband and Nathan’s confrontation; David seemed to be living in denial of his sin (2 Samuel 11:1–12:13; contrast Psalm 51 [lesson 6]). This or a similar incident could account for wanting some space from God’s knowledge and presence. Far from experiencing God’s presence as an unmitigated blessing, David seems at least to struggle with the experience, if not to outright struggle against it.
6. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.
This verse effectively conveys the profound distance between the positions of God and humanity (compare Job 42:2–3; Isaiah 55:9–11). After contemplating the inscrutable nature of God’s mind, David concludes that God’s knowledge is far beyond the grasp of human comprehension. Rather than succumbing to despair, the psalmist portrays this phenomenon positively, evoking a sense of awe and amazement toward God. Furthermore, this reality leads the psalmist to acknowledge that he is “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14, not in our printed text).
II. Unavoidable Presence
(Psalm 139:7–12)
A. In Space (vv. 7–10)
7. Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
This verse marks the beginning of Psalm 139’s second stanza. This pair of questions can be read as an escape attempt (compare Genesis 3:10; Jonah 1:3) or as an oblique acknowledgment of sin (compare Isaiah’s cry in Isaiah 6:5), praise, and adoration for God’s constant presence (compare Psalms 16:11; 21:6; 51:11 [see lesson 6]; etc.), or some mixture of these. If the above reading of David’s having found God’s presence to be heavy is correct, then the first sense is most likely in view. David might have found God answering the king’s questions with some questions of His own: “Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth?” (Jeremiah 23:24).
But even after fleeing from God, Jonah found relief in God’s ability to save even from “the deep,” considered to be the furthest place from God’s heaven (see Jonah 2:2–6). So we might assume that, though David felt God’s scrutiny too much, in the end, this would be a relief compared to a reality in which God was absent.
The portrayal of God’s omnipresence (presence everywhere) within this psalm is unique in the context of the ancient Near East. Most, if not all, other deities in the region were considered to have a limited, geographic sphere of influence (example: 1 Kings 20:28). They were not expected to be present other than in the place where they reigned. This highlights a key difference between those so-called gods and the Lord: He reigns over and is present in all places, not to mention the fact that the regional gods are entirely fictional, to begin with! This understanding substantiates that David’s writing stemmed from a deeply personal and intimate understanding of God rather than a mere appropriation of general religious concepts from nearby cultures.
8. If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
The word if, found four times in the English translation of Psalm 139:8–11, indicates the hypothetical nature of the declarations that follow. The first two of those verses give examples of places where David could not physically go to flee from God’s presence (see Psalm 139:9, below). Heaven is obviously a no-go, as it is God’s home (1 Kings 8:30, 39, 43; etc.), and David couldn’t get there on foot in any case. In ancient Israel’s understanding of the world, multiple levels of heavens existed above the earth (see Deuteronomy 10:14; 2 Corinthians 12:2). This suggests that the contrast of heaven with hell is another merism, where a combination of two contrasting parts refer to the whole. In this case, considering that the place of the dead was believed to be under the earth (example: Numbers 16:30), these two places are as far from one another as can be (compare Job 11:8; Isaiah 7:11; Amos 9:2; etc.). David’s presence in either would not hide him from God.
What Do You Think?
How would you counsel someone who wants to trust God but struggles with the fact that He does not always intervene to prevent evil from occurring?
Digging Deeper
What assumptions about God and the world need to be confronted to face that question honestly?
9. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.
In contrast to the vertical imagery of the previous verse, David shifts to horizontal imagery. Wings of the morning is a poetic reference to sunrise, which happens in the direction east. The sea refers to the Mediterranean Sea, which lay to the west of Israel. Taken together, we see another merism as David describes going as far east as possible and as far west as was known. Hence, the depicted imagery expresses God’s abundant presence, extending as far as the distance between the east and the west (compare Psalm 103:12). What David knew instinctively the prophet Jonah would find out the hard way when he was told to go east to Nineveh but tried to flee by going west to Tarshish (Jonah 1:1–3).
10. Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. Having established the hypothetical situations of the previous two verses, David identified two comforting actions linked to God’s omnipresence. First, David could be guided by the hand of God regardless of David’s location. This assurance was grounded in the understanding that one is never in a place where God cannot provide guidance (example: Psalm 23:4 [lesson 10]). Second, David asserted that one cannot be beyond the reach of God’s protection and salvation, as exemplified by the phrase right hand shall hold me (compare Psalms 18:35; 21:8; 63:8). This assurance brought comfort to David, who had in mind his adversaries who sought to do him harm (139:19).
What Do You Think?
In which current situations do you find God’s presence in your life comforting?
Digging Deeper
Do you find His presence alarming in others? Does this suggest that a new course of action would be wise for you?
To Be Known by God
Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) was the prominent founder of The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). He authored a book titled The Spiritual Exercises, which focused on spiritual development. The book emphasized the importance of respecting and serving God as the sole Creator and supreme Lord of the universe.
Ignatius’s teachings on the omnipresence of God were encapsulated in a section of his book called “Principle and Foundation,” which serves as the fundamental basis for the spiritual exercises. Ignatius drew insight from Psalm 139 regarding this. His interpretation of this passage is that our purpose in life is to be known by God, who is present in every situation. We relate to God in (at least) three ways: as our Creator, Ruler, and Redeemer. God is omniscient (all-knowing) and omnipresent (present everywhere) in these aspects of His nature. What behavior or thought process do you need to change personally to better acknowledge this fact? —O. P.
B. In Darkness (vv. 11–12)
11a. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me.
David introduces another conditional statement; the darkness here is figurative (metaphorical). Darkness characterizes the time when thieves are prone to operate (Job 24:16). Thus, this “if” statement fits David’s previous questions about attempted concealment.
11b–12. Even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
These conclusions all speak to the futility of trying to hide anything from God. Even opposites such as darkness and light make no difference to God’s knowledge of David’s physical and spiritual locations and status. The metaphor of God’s illuminating presence is continued in the New Testament and is ascribed to Jesus Christ (see John 1:4–5; 3:19–21; etc.).
What Do You Think?
What darkness would you like reassurance that God sees through?
Digging Deeper
What difference does it make that Jesus has been revealed as the light of the world, which the world cannot understand (John 1:5, 9–10)?
Conclusion
A. God’s Presence and Knowledge
The vastness of the world’s information and the multitude of places yet to be explored can be exciting and terrifying; God’s boundless wisdom and presence provide solace to believers in either and all cases. Even if humanity were to one day journey to the surface of Mars, God’s omnipresence ensures that He is already there. For those who trust in Him, the omniscience and omnipresence of God offer a sense of security and salvation. It is essential to recognize that God did not create the universe only to abandon it to its own devices. Rather, He is actively involved and present in every aspect of creation. There can never be too much to know for the infinite God.
David acknowledged his inability to comprehend all knowledge, which underscores the incomprehensibility of God’s omniscience. And it’s uncertain whether, in the writing of this poem, David was reassured or troubled by God’s full knowledge and relentless presence. But these characteristics certainly did comfort David in other cases.
Like David, we might find ourselves in a situation when God’s knowledge and presence make us uneasy. Or we might unreservedly embrace these attributes as comforts in our present circumstances. In either case, we can strive to know God better and to praise Him, offer Him our confusion and anxieties, and ask Him for help against all the evil we confront.
B. Prayer
All-knowing and all-present God, we lift our hearts to You. May we take comfort in knowing that You are always with us and will never be surprised by anything we think, say, or do. Help us glorify You in all things so that Your presence and knowledge are a comfort and not a warning to us. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
C. Thought to Remember
Take comfort in God’s unsurpassed knowledge and presence.
Standard Publishing. KJV Standard Lesson Commentary® 2024-2025 (pp. 295-312). David C Cook. Kindle Edition.