DAY OR NIGHT:  WAKING OR SLEEPING

Psalm 139

“What can I say?  Just a few quotes and an outline is enough said.

“Nowhere are the great attributes of God—His Omniscience, His Omnipresence, His Omnipotence—set forth so strikingly as they are in this magnificent Psalm….Man is here the workmanship of God, and stands in the presence and under the eye of One who is his Judge.  The power of conscience, the sense of sin and of responsibility, are felt and acknowledged, and prayer is offered to One who is not only the Judge, but the Friend; to One who is feared as none else are feared, who is loved as none else are loved.”

The Book Of Psalms Vol. 2,  J.J. Stewart Perowne, D.D. pg 438

“Omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience are often used as expository language…But it must be done with care lest this conceptualization become a knowing God without a being known, accompanied, created and sustained by God.  Devotion and confession must not be reduced to metaphysics.”

Interpellations; Psalms , James Luther Mays, pg 427.

“The notion of God’s relation to the psalmist transcend the psalmist’s understanding what he knows, he knows he does know.  His knowing is an unknowing; its achievement is wonder, and its only certainty is ‘I am with you….

‘The second part of the Psalm (vv19-24) has always posed the sharpest problems for interpreters.  But…In the worldview of the psalms, the wicked and their dangerous threats to those who base life on God are an important part of the reality in the midst of which faith must live….the wicked do not seem a personal threat to the psalmist’s life.  They are described rather as the enemies of God. That is there!  They are a part of the society in which the psalmist lives who by their moral and religious conduct oppose and ignore God.  Ibid, pg 428.

“The way everlasting is the existence that is not shaken or brought to an end as the way of the wicked will be.  The psalmist wants God to be his judge so that god may be his shepherd.”  Ibid, pg 429.

Calvin writes on vs 17 “O God!  How great the sums of them.”  ‘To the same effect is what he adds that the ‘sums’ or aggregate of them were great and mighty;…The explanation made by the psalmist suggests to us that they were men not so dull of apprehension, or rather so senseless, they would be struck by the mysterious ways of God and would humbly and tremblingly set themselves before His tribunal instead of presumptuously thinking that they could evade it.”

Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol. II Psalms 93-150, John Calvin, pg 219.

PSALM 139  AN OUTLINE

Vv 1-6    The certainty of God’s foreknowledge and human responsibility are a mystery.

Vv 7-12  The Spirit of God is omnipresent in the world.

Vv13-16  Man is the perfection of creation.

Vv 17-18  God’s self- revelation is infinite.

Vv 19-22  God’s enemies are my enemies.

The poet is a fit close for me.

Be Thou My Vision

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;

Naught be all else to me, save that thou art –

Thou my best thought, by day or by night;

Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

            Ancient Irish poem, translated by Mary E. Byrne, 1905