Psalm 139: Pt. 1

For the past 6 months or so I've kept returning to Psalm 139. One of the reasons, I think, is that it's so familiar but I keep seeing new things in it. Bruce Waltke in his notes for the January class Judges-Poets had some comments on it that precipitated some of my thoughts. The thought that I've found most refreshing in my readings and re-readings of the psalm is that the psalm is very intimately written. It’s often said that this psalm teaches three omnis: God’s omniscience, God’s omnipresence, and God’s omnipotence. While each of these doctrines under-gird David’s understanding of God as he writes, it doesn’t seem that these formal concepts were in the forefront of his mind as he was writing—he’s not so much concerned that God knows everything or that God is everywhere or that God can do anything. Rather, he’s concerned that God knows everything about him, that God is everywhere he goes and could go, and that God has done everything in his own life. There’s an intensely personal flavor to this psalm as David walks us through his existential sense of God’s self in his life—the divine ‘you’, here, is as significantly real as the human ‘I,’ as one commentator put it. In this way, the theology of the psalm is applied theology.

Over the next few days I think I'll post some of my thoughts on the specific sections of the psalm.