(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.
First, it’s easy to affirm that God sees everything, since he’s present everywhere and all that, but not really think that through or put a great deal of weight on it. After all, I see everything my eyes are pointed at, most of the time, in the sense that my eyes are reporting all that information to my brain, but that doesn’t mean my brain pays attention to all of it. I have seen all of you this morning, and I’m seeing you now, but if you had me close my eyes and try to tell you what any given person was wearing, I wouldn’t have the first clue. I know you all are wearing clothes, but more than that? Not really, no.
God is not just big enough to see everything, he’s big enough to really see everything, and to see through and behind and all around everything. David lays this out vividly in verses 1-4: “God, you know when I sit down, when I stand up, and when I lie down; when I go out, you see me everywhere I go.” That would be impressive enough, but there’s more—God doesn’t just see the outside, he sees all the way to the heart of us. He knows every single thing about us. He sees everything we plan and everything we think, and he knows everything we’re going to say before we say it. He sees us and knows us better than we do—far, far better.
Second, it’s easy to affirm that God is God, but not so easy for our understanding to get too far past “the big man upstairs.” Our mental images of God are necessarily small enough to fit in our minds, and that’s not a limitation we can really fix. J. I. Packer told us a story one time in class, which he said he’d found in C. S. Lewis’s correspondence, of a woman who struggled to pray. She finally asked God why, and found herself thinking back to herself as the child of parents who took the commandment against making images of God so seriously, they raised her to have no mental image of God. Or, at least, they tried. She discovered that this had left her, not with no image of God, but with the vague image of God as an infinitely-extended rice pudding. (Dr. Packer told us this, then paused expectantly. We waited in silence while he peered out at us with a puzzled expression. He finally said, “You aren’t laughing. That must mean you’re not familiar with rice pudding. I don’t like rice pudding.” At that, we all cracked up.)
We can’t avoid forming mental images of God, but we have to keep challenging them and blowing them up. God isn’t just big enough to match our mental images, he’s far bigger—he’s big enough to be God. He’s big enough to blow our minds, and far too big for us to wrap our minds around. This is something we need to reckon with, because there are parts of the historic Christian faith which are too big for us to fully understand. The doctrine of the Trinity is probably the biggest one; many of the beliefs which the church has identified as heresy over the centuries have been efforts to explain the Trinity in a way that is comprehensible to our limited minds. Another one—how can Jesus be both fully human and at the same time fully God, 100% each and all one person? Or take one that’s less well known, John Calvin’s doctrine of dual causation. We have free agency, we are free beings with wills of our own who make our own choices about what to think, believe, and do, and at one and the same time God is sovereign at every point and every moment and everything happens because he wills it to happen. How are both those things true at once? All these doctrines exceed our understanding, but that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Jess Ray captures some of this, and some of the significance of it, in her song “Too Good,” which has been a favorite in our house for years now, so I wanted to play that for you.
Now, if God is that big, if he’s always paying the closest of attention to us, that can be comforting, and it can inspire wonder and devotion—and then again, depending on your life and your mood, that might freak you out and make you want to run. David clearly knew the feeling, looking at verses 7-12. It’s easy to say we believe God is big enough to be everywhere at once, but we seem to keep thinking we can find somewhere to run that we can actually get away from him. That’s the third point, then: as David makes clear, God is big enough to be “Yeah, even there.” If we could climb to the highest heaven, we would probably expect to find God there, and so he is; but what if we go the opposite direction? What if we could descend all the way to the realm of the dead? We might think we could get beyond God that way, but David would agree with Corrie ten Boom: “There is no pit so deep but Christ is deeper still.” It’s a truth captured by the Italian sculptor Guido Galletti in his statue Christ of the Abyss, which stands on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Italy. However deep we could ever go, we would find Christ there waiting for us.
Similarly, David says, even if we could hitch a ride on the sun at dawn and take it all the way across the sky to where it sets beyond the sea, God would be right there with us every moment. Or if we could find a place so dark that even the light is black as midnight, we would find God could still see us perfectly; to him, that darkness would be bright as midday sun. No matter where we go, no matter where we could ever go, he’s already there, he’s still God, and he’s still with us, holding us, every moment and every step.
Fourth, God isn’t just big enough to make every one of us, he’s big enough to know each of us intimately. I think we actually see this first in verse 5. It’s not the standard English translation—the ESV, for instance, reads, “You hem me in”—but the scholar Robert Alter argues for the more common meaning of the verb here, “to shape” or “to fashion.” Add that to the second line of the verse, “and lay your hand on me,” and verse 5 shows God shaping and forming us like clay in the potter’s hands. Then verses 13-16 picture God as craftsman in a different way, knitting and weaving us together from the very beginning of our existence in the womb. He knew every moment of our lives, start to finish, from before even one of them had come to be.
That’s a lot to be going on with, but I think there’s even more here than we usually see. If you look at the ESV footnote on verse 14, you see it notes an alternative translation, one for which Alter argues as well. The common translations assume the Hebrew verb here is an alternate spelling of a verb meaning “to wonder.” The other option is to take it as the normal spelling of a verb which means “to be set apart” or “to be distinct”; and that actually fits quite well here. If that’s correct, David is celebrating the fact that God created him as a distinct, particular, unique person with his own identity and sense of being, not as a generic human for a generic life.
Fifth, not only is God big enough to fully know all our ways, David makes it clear God is big enough that we can’t say the same in return. Not only is he bigger than our ability to comprehend, so are his thoughts and ways and plans. We see this in John 20-21 as well, as the beloved disciple is trying to come to some sort of summary statement of Jesus’ ministry, and he can’t quite do it. He can give us a purpose statement, the last verse of chapter 20, but Jesus’ ministry was far too big to ever be fully captured. 20:30 tells us Jesus did far more than John was able to write down; 21:25 takes it further, declaring it would take more books than the world could hold to record everything Jesus did. Is that hyperbole? Yes, for the best of all reasons: because the only way to get us to feel how much Jesus did is to overstate it.
Because God is so much bigger than we can comprehend, and what he’s on about in each of us is so much bigger than we can comprehend, we need to stay in our own lanes and read our own mail. This is something we’ll be talking about later on this year when we’re going through Ephesians, and it’s a point Jesus makes firmly to Peter: you concern yourself with what you’re being told to do—that’s far more than enough to keep you occupied—and let God and the other person take care of what he’s saying to them. God isn’t going to tell us what isn’t our business and what we don’t need to know. We can know what we need to know. God will be with us to lead us wherever, whenever, however, whyever—we just need to follow. We can fall asleep in peace, knowing that we will wake to find we are still with him; and given the cosmic sweep of this psalm, I think we can safely say that’s not only true of each night’s sleep. Hamlet to the contrary, we need not worry what dreams may come in that sleep of death, for we will wake from that sleep, too, and find we are still with him—and then it will be forever.
Finally, it is easy for us to affirm, and believe, that God is big enough to see everything we do wrong and punish us for it—or if we find it not easy to affirm, it’s certainly common and easy to believe that this is what the Bible and Christianity have to say about God; but David gives us a much larger and far better vision in verses 19-24. People often drop these verses—as the Sons of Korah do, for those of you who listened to their setting of this psalm—or skip from 18 to 23. I get that, as the sudden drastic change in tone and emotional temperature from 18 to 19 is more than a little jarring, and the language of hatred seems to clash quite badly with what has gone before. It’s worth noting here, however, that hatred is one of those concepts where Scripture draws some distinction between the emotion and the action. We are told not to give in to the emotion of hatred, but revulsion at evil and injustice and emotional recoil from those who hate God should power us to stand in adamant opposition to those who call God their enemy.
The root here is love for God and trust in his character, which leads us to the sixth and final affirmation: God is not merely big enough to punish, he’s big enough to be perfectly just. Our attempts at justice are only approximations at best; we can’t know enough to get anything perfectly right, and we can’t do enough to make anything perfectly right. David is operating in the sure faith that God can and will do both. If we begin there, we can commit to God’s decree of justice with whole hearts, without reservation—and it’s critically important to note that David points that commitment in two directions. In verses 19-22, he addresses it toward the wicked and the evildoer in this world, trusting in God’s perfect justice; but he doesn’t end there. Instead, he concludes by turning to address the wickedness and evil in his own heart—and remember Psalm 51, which we considered last week: David was one who would and did plumb the depths of that wickedness and evil. David trusts wholly in the perfect justice of God against his enemies, and also against himself; and so can we.
I want to end with something a little unusual. One of the blessings of my association with Valley Springs Fellowship, both in the decade-plus that we attended there and in the seven previous years through my friendship with Kent Denlinger, who was pastor there, was the VSF Creed. This is a statement of belief which the founders of the congregation wrote together very early on, and as much as anything we do since the time of the apostles can be inspired by God, I believe it is. You’ll notice the opening and closing lines of each article are bolded; let’s all read those together, and I will read the “Therefore” statements in the middle.
“The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” Yayoi Kusama, “Infinity Mirrors” exhibit; photo © 2017 Adam Fagen. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic. Image cropped to fit.