"The Inescapable God"

Rev. Marietta Smith August 10, 2003

Scripture: Psalm 139

The choir has already sung the text, but not the whole text, and I am going to read the whole psalm. Psalm 139

The Book of Psalms is the great prayer book of the Bible. Whenever Christians need to pray and can’t find the words to say, the Book of Psalms provides the ways to express God’s ways in our hearts. If we have praises to offer, if we have confessions to make, if we have petitions to ponder, we can find a psalm to fit the need.

The text for today’s sermon is, as I have read to you, Psalm 139. It is my favorite psalm, actually, more than The Lord is My Shepherd or more that God is My Refuge and Strength, or more that Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord, though these are beautiful, wonderful, worshipful psalms.

I love Psalm 139 because it tells me how great God is. It contains twenty-four verses, and I tried to memorize it at different times, but I can’t ever get past about six or seven verses before I begin to get it mixed up. One day when I was meditating on the Psalm it seemed to fall into four sections: Verses 1 through 6 tell me there is nothing God does not know. Verses 7 through 12 tell me that there is nowhere God is not present. Verses 13 through 16 tell me there is nothing God cannot do. And verses 17 through 24 tell me about my relationship with God--that I am God’s child.

First, God knows. I found a little couplet yesterday when I was working on this sermon, that says,

He knows the eternal story of every grain of sand.

He knows how many grains of sand there are at the beach, or wherever there is sand. He knows how many stars there are in the sky, and He knows each of the billions of people in this world, individually and intimately. He knows us perfectly, far beyond our knowledge of ourselves. He is aware of our every action. He sees our every undertaking. He notices the manner in which we pursue them, and our motives in doing them. He even knows our thoughts before they are crystallized, our words before they are uttered. This intimate knowledge of us is not judgmental or condemning, but protective and helpful. As verse 5 puts it in the New Living Translation, God has both preceded us and followed us and has placed his hand of blessing upon our heads. In other words, the Psalmist is saying that God has surrounded us with his protective love. I remember years ago, there was an advertisement on television for a particular brand of toothpaste that was touted as providing an invisible shield of protection from the decay-causing bacteria that are in our mouths. And as the advertiser was expounding the virtues of this particular toothpaste, all of a sudden a baseball hits right square where the man’s face is, but it doesn’t hit the man’s face because there is an invisible Plexiglas shield that the people can’t see, but the man knows is there. And so he is protected from being hit in the face with that baseball, and that is the way the toothpaste protects the teeth from decay. Well, I like to think about God’s love as being that invisible shield. Now, it doesn’t keep harmful things from coming to us, but harmful things come through that invisible shield of His love and take a lot of the stinging out of the things that happen to us. Were it not for that invisible shield, we probably could not handle much of what life has to dish out to us.

That’s the protective love that the Psalmist is speaking of: Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, he says.

It staggers the imagination. It is beyond our human capacity to do anything but accept it by faith. Not only does God know everything, but God is everywhere present.

Verse 7 asks the question: Where can I go from Your spirit or where can I flee from your presence? One of the other translations puts it in a statement of fact: I can never escape from your spirit. I can never get away from your presence.

No, there is nowhere that God can be escaped. Not in the highest of heavens, not in the lowest depths of hell, not in the farthest expanse of the dawn, nor the distant most reaches of the sea. Even there, God will guide us and His right hand will hold us fast. There is nowhere in creation that God is not present.

And just as creation can hold no hiding place from God, so it is that even darkness is as light to Him. ^{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.}

A footnote in one of my Bibles about this verse says that this is no abstract doctrine of omnipresence, but an awed confession that God cannot be escaped. The question that comes to my mind here is: Why would we want to escape from God? Why do we try to shut Him out of our lives? As St. Augustine said, “There is a God-shaped void in each human soul that only a close relationship with God can fill.” Our problem is, we try to fill that God-shaped void with human-shaped things and ideas that just simply will not fit. We try so hard to live our lives on our own wave length and go in our own strength, and then wonder why we fall flat on our faces sometimes, and why our ventures aren’t very successful.

The Psalmist continues to speak of God’s greatness and he proclaims that God can do anything that God wants to do or needs to do. And here he speaks of the glorious creation of the human body. You formed my inward parts, the innermost center of emotions and moral sensitivity, that which God tests and examines, searching the hidden character that nobody sees but God.

In the public school system, a while back, we were told that we needed to be teaching character lessons. I have to confess I hooted at that, just a little bit, because I am a firm believer that more character is caught and more religion is caught, than taught. But we had character lessons, nevertheless, and I would talk to the students about the difference between reputation and character, reputation being what they think you are, character being what you really are when nobody is looking, except God is always looking.

The Psalmist continues to say, You covered me in my mother’s womb. That can be translated: You wove me together.

I am fearfully and wonderfully made, he said. And that can be translated: I am an awesome wonder. I want you to say that with me. Say it now: I am an awesome wonder.

This human body that is created from that tiny little sperm and that tiny little egg, all the days of that life are already there. The personality is already there. The little fingernails, and little toenails, and the little fingers, and the little veins and arteries, and joints and sinews, and bones and teeth—all of it is already there, created by God. It just has to grow. It’s awesome to realize that the life of a person, the length of that life, the structure and meaning of that life, are all established by God at the very beginning.

Again, as the Living Translation puts it: Everyday of my life was recorded in Your book, every moment was laid out before a single moment had passed.

Chuck Swindoll says that in today’s terms this great psalm writer might say, “How valuable, how mighty, and vast your thoughts and plans. They are magnificent, O God. You carefully and meticulously formed me in the womb. You arrange and appoint my days so that each twenty-four hour period does its part in shaping me into the person You want me to be. In grace heaped upon grace, when death invades, I’ll wait in Your presence, still with You.”

So the Psalmist has acknowledged that God knows everything, that God is present everywhere, that God can do anything God needs to do, and now the Psalmist is confessing that his great desire is to be a person after God’s own heart.

Oh, that you would slay the wicked. The Psalmist desires a world in which there is no more evil, a world in which there is no more distraction, a world in which there is no more destruction. The enemies of God are the enemies of the Psalmist. His life and his thoughts are closely tied to the Lord. He asks God to search his heart. Up to this point, he has been looking outward at creation and considering what a mighty God he serves, but now he is looking inward. He invites the Lord to take a look deep inside his soul. In the first verse of the psalm the writer has used the word search. You have searched me and known me. The Hebrew term that lead to that translation originally meant to explore. And sometimes it conveyed the idea of digging into or digging through something, kind of like an archeologist goes out and digs and sifts through the soil and tries to find artifacts. Now here is that word again at the end of the psalm:

Search me, O God. Dig, probe, examine, explore. The Psalmist wants God to penetrate his outer shell and dig down deeply within him. He unveils his inner being, down where the unspoken thoughts dwell and the unstated motives hide out in secret. He invites God’s search light.

Then the Psalmist asks God to go farther and test him to discover if there is any distraction. In other words, “God, I invite you into the innermost depths of my being, into my thoughts, into the motives that guide my actions and my words, to find out what I am doing or saying that leads me away from that deep intimate fellowship with You. Show me, so that I can understand them and their effect on my walk with you, Lord.”

The desired result of this probing that the Psalmist invites is to see if there is anything in his character that causes God grief or pain. It’s not that God needs to know the results, but that the Psalmist needs to know what God has discovered. If you or I were having exploring surgery, we would not be having it just for the sake of the surgeon’s knowledge of what was going on inside our body, but we would want to know the findings ourselves. And this is what the Psalmist desires: search me, probe me, examine me, scrutinize me and know my heart. Try me, test me, and know my thoughts and my anxieties. See if there is any offensive way in me. See if there is anything in my character that offends God. Examine me and see the integrity of my devotion, because I want to walk in the way of everlasting fellowship with God.

Now I am going to quit preaching and go to meddling just a little bit.

You know that story about the woman who wanted the preacher to preach on sin. “I just want you to tell them off. I just want you to preach on sin.”

And so, he preached on sin, and when he began to get into her life and to mention her sins, she said, “ Now preacher, you’ve quit preaching and gone to meddling.”

So, I am going to meddle just a little bit. I said to some people after the 8:45 service, “I don’t ever preach a sermon to any congregation that I am not preaching to myself.” So I have to ask the question this morning: “Do we want to be people whose walk with God is intimate and deep? Let’s be honest; is our Christianity just fire insurance or is it the very root and foundation of our life?"

Is this business of Bible reading and study, and prayer and Church attendance, and Baptism and giving our tithes and offerings, and witnessing, and the Lord’s table, and the singing of hymns just something to calm our guilt and occupy our Sunday mornings? Or has God, through Jesus Christ, got a solid grasp of our will, so that we have become genuinely serious about spiritual things; so that we will take the truth of these verses of the psalm and allow it to take root in our lives? Becoming Godly people takes time. But along the way, it includes occasions when we expose our entire being to God’s searching and we welcome the insights He may give us, regardless of the difficulty we have in facing what comes out.

I had a little character surgery at Duke Divinity School this summer. I came to realize that I wanted the glory of preaching in Chapel more than I wanted to glorify God by preaching in Chapel. And when I began to feel bad, I called the lady who was in charge of scheduling the daily preaching and I said, “Gail, you probably need to find somebody else to do this; I don’t think that I can handle it.” And, I started not to go to Chapel that day. I thought, “Well, I’ll just hide out in the lounge until Chapel’s over.” But I went. And I realized as I listened to Marguerite Matthews preach, that she was the one who was supposed to preaching that day, anyway, not me, and she preached words that I needed to here, and the rest of us needed to hear. Because along about that time in the course of study — this was the third week — and papers were due, and exams were looming, and we were all tired from the intensity of the schedule, and we were getting on each other’s nerves, and we were biting each other’s heads off, and she was telling us that we needed to get along, that we needed to recognize God’s power in our life, and that each of us was a person of worth because God loved us. And so, that character surgery was painful. But, by and by, we say to the Lord, “I’ll gladly open the rooms of my life, every corner, so that You, my Lord and my God, may probe, and examine, and search, and scrutinize my thoughts and my motives; show me what needs attention; reveal to me what brings pain to you in my life, and lead me in the way of everlasting fellowship with you.” For after all, friends, that’s what we are created for: is to have everlasting fellowship with God. That’s what Adam and Eve were created for and they were put in that perfect place and they had the choice, and He said, “There’s only one restriction I am placing on you. There is a tree over there that you need to leave alone.” And when He left them, what did they do? Went straight to that tree and ate of the fruit and we’ve been tainted ever since and we’ve been trying to go on our own way ever since when God says, “I want to call you my children. I want to be your father. I want to bless you with blessings that you can’t imagine if you will just follow me. If you’ll just take my son, Jesus, you will have that fellowship with me that will last through eternity.” And not going to Hell is a fringe benefit. That’s what the Psalmist is talking about: The inescapableness of God. Praise Him and thank Him that He is inescapable. Amen, halleluiah, and thank you, Jesus for providing the way for us to have fellowship with the Father that lasts through eternity.