(Psalm 139; John 20:30-31, 21:20-25)
The genesis of this sermon was in a social media post I saw briefly weeks ago and have never been able to find again. I think it was on Threads, since that app does this to people routinely, but it doesn’t really matter. Whoever the poster was, they told a story about a physicist who gave a presentation on Christianity and science and how their scientific work supported and enriched their faith in Jesus and the Bible as historically understood by the Christian church. In the question-and-answer session after the talk, someone in the audience went up to the mic and asked, “How can you believe a God who’s that big could possibly even notice individual people?” The scientist quietly answered, “My God is bigger than you think.”
I wish I could find the source, if only to give credit wherever it may be due, because that’s absolutely brilliant, and absolutely spot-on. If for some reason you needed to summarize Psalm 139 in a sentence, that would do. As Derek Kidner, whom I’ve referenced a few times in recent weeks, puts it, “Any small thoughts that we may have of God are magnificently transcended by this psalm; yet for all its height and depth it remains intensely personal from first to last.” In that spirit, though it would be easy to dive deep into this psalm—there’s a lot here—I want to take the 30,000-foot view and look at the ways Psalm 139 shows us that God is bigger, with some echoes from the end of the Gospel of John.