Psalm 139, part 5: The Personal Love of God

¹³ For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
¹⁶ Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.

¹⁷ How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!

¹⁸ If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand.
When I awake, I am still with You.

This is an incredible passage to help us understand the love of God.  Beginning in verse 13 we see the Psalmist acknowledging that God formed his inward parts, which can be  translated created.  More specifically, the second line in verse 13 tells us that God “wove” me in my mother’s womb.  This word wove means knit together and it is an excellent word to understand the great care with which God created the human race. When we consider what it means to knit, there is a skillset that requires precision, coordination, vision, and steadfastness as what is being knit together often requires the consideration of size, tension in the thread or yarn, design, and the coordination of colors to product an embedded design within what is being crafted.  It is also noteworthy that in the field of psychiatry, doctors recognize that knitting can be helpful for patients as an ideal craft to engage in, because it requires so many parts of the brain working in concert to produce the desired end result.  So, in these human terms, caste that picture back into the great care in which God created us humans.  We are made up of ten systems, skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, lymphatic, respiratory, digestive, urinary, and the reproductive system.  These are complex systems and often require other systems to be operational in order to work properly, contingent dependencies that require outside intelligence in order to exist.  The interfacing of systems within the human body is an example of irreducible complexity, meaning that God crafted these systems to work together and their codependence demonstrates the need for a Creator. 

In verse 14, we see the humility of Psalmist proclaiming being fearfully and wonderfully made.  This statement is a praise as well as a recognition of our creatureliness, which includes the recognition of our soul, or body-soul dualism.  This recognition is carried over to verse 15 where we read that our frame or skeletal system was formed by the Lord, then we move back to the craft of knitting.  To be skillfully wrought can be translated as one who does weaving or embroidering with colored thread.  It carries the idea that the Master Weaver is using colored thread to adorn or make a vibrant, lovely design. 

In verse 16, we see God as sovereign over our lives, appointing our days and the destiny of our human existence.  Here we have a recognition of vulnerability as the creature, yet when woven from verse 14 and 15, we receive the sense that the colored thread by which we are adorned also crafts our life.  We see this vulnerability in the prayer of Hezekiah (Isaiah 38:10-20) in which he pleads that he not be deprived the rest of his years, a desperate plea in contrast to Psalm 139, but the same recognition that we are not in control, but we have a loving God who is in control.  The good news is the precious thoughts of God towards us.  This is a proclamation of how deeply, richly and weighty is the love of God towards us.  The loving thoughts of God towards us would outnumber the sands, they are with us all day and stay with us through the night, and we do not have enough years to count all the ways in which God has love and affection for us.  The word precious in verse 17 means one of the greatest rarity and the most highly esteemed.  In consideration of the love of God in our finite state, if we can see past our sin, our flaws and within the limits of human thinking, we can still see that we that God first imagined us, then God carefully created us, God made us uniquely beautiful, God created us in His image, God planned a life for us, God gave us a unique ID in our fingerprints, and God made countless individual people to engage in community for love and support. On top of all of this, God has an eternal kingdom planned that will be more than we can ask or imagine.