Psalm 139 is often read at weddings, and I understand why, and I think it is a strange choice.
Because in the middle of it there is a man running.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.Psalm 139:7-8, King James Version
Whither shall I flee. That is not a man luxuriating in being known. That is a man checking the exits.
And then he makes a list, and the list is exhaustive on purpose. Psalm 139:7-12 goes through the options one at a time: up, down, east, and dark. Four attempts, and every one of them ends the same way.
Up: heaven. Thou art there.
Down: the grave, the deepest place he has language for. Behold, thou art there.
East and west: If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea. The wings of the morning is the light coming up over the horizon, moving at the speed sunrise moves, and the uttermost parts of the sea is the far edge of the known world. So: as fast as light, as far as there is. And the answer is the same.
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:10, King James Version
Then the fourth, and it is the one he takes most seriously.
The one he really means is the dark
Here is the fourth attempt, and notice that it is the only one he gives two verses to.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:11-12, King James Version
Surely the darkness shall cover me.
The other three were geography. This one is not. This one is about being hidden, which is a different project entirely, and it is the one every honest person has attempted.
He is not saying he wants to travel. He is saying: if I could just not be seen doing this. If there were one hour, one room, one part of my life that had no light on it.
You are not somewhere He cannot see, and Psalm 139 puts that beyond argument by trying the four hardest options in a row. The written word takes heaven, the grave, the far sea and the night and dismisses all four, and it is the Holy Spirit who reads that list over a real address instead of leaving it in a poem.
Now, everything depends on how you hear the answer, and I want to be careful here.
The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
A person can hear that as a threat. There is nowhere you can go where you will not be caught. There is no room dark enough to do it in. And plenty of people were taught the psalm exactly that way, with a finger pointing.
Read the sentence before it and you cannot hear it that way. Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. The hand in this psalm is not reaching to seize. It is leading and holding. Those are the two verbs, and they belong to a guide and a parent, not to a search party.
You have a hand described as leading and holding in the very verse people quote as a warning. Psalm 139:10 gives both verbs plainly, and the same Spirit who preserved them is the reason this psalm is a comfort and not a threat.
And then there is the detail I find most tender in the whole passage, and it is grammatical.
Look at verse eleven again. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.
He does not say the darkness covers me. He says if I say. He is quoting himself. He is repeating a sentence he has said before, probably more than once, and the psalm holds it up rather than pretending it was never said.
The Writings do this constantly and it is why this shelf exists. The Psalms are not tidy. They keep the sentence a person said in their worst hour and put it in the songbook rather than editing it out.
You were allowed to say that sentence, and the psalm records it without a correction attached. Psalm 139:11 preserves the wording rather than removing it, and it is His Spirit who makes that permission real for somebody who has never dared say theirs out loud.
There is one more thing, and it is what makes the fourth attempt fail so gently.
The night shineth as the day.
He does not say God has a light strong enough to get into the dark. He says the dark is not dark to Him. It is not that God overcomes the darkness in this verse. It is that the category does not apply where He is. Darkness is a fact about eyes, and the psalm quietly says His are not like ours.
You have been hiding inside a category that does not exist on His side of the room. Psalm 139:12 says both alike to thee, and the same Spirit who put that line in a songbook is the reason it lands on a particular hour of a particular night.
So stop working out whether the distance was too far.
You have been running a calculation about distance, and the psalm does not deal in distance. It deals in four directions and it closes all four in six verses, and it does not close them by warning you. It closes them by describing a hand.
You are led and held in the exact place you assumed you were out of range, and both verbs are in Psalm 139:10. The written account gives the leading and the holding in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the reason that reaches a car in a parking lot and not only a reader in a study.
You have been found in a category that does not apply to Him, and that is a mercy and not an exposure. Psalm 139:12 says the night shineth as the day, and the same Spirit who kept the man's own sentence in verse eleven is the one who did not attach a rebuke to it.
And I will not put one ounce on you: the eighteen months are not a charge against you. David is not corrected anywhere in this psalm for having tried the exits. The song simply follows him to each one and finds God already standing there. What God does not scold, nobody gets to, and He has never once required a person to come back into the light before He would sit with them in the dark.
Declare this over yourself
- Room I have kept the light off in, you are not out of range. Psalm 139:12 says the night shineth as the day, and His Spirit was in there before I ever turned the switch. I am not somewhere He cannot see.
- Belief that I went too far to follow, get out, in the name of Jesus. You have told me distance is the thing that decides it, and the written word closes heaven, the grave, the far sea and the dark in six verses, which finishes you, and his Spirit has kept that clause in the account for exactly this. Where He already is, I cannot arrive alone.
- Lord, You are the God whose hand leads and holds in the same line, and You are doing it here. Scripture keeps the sentence I said in my worst hour and never attached a correction to it, and Your Spirit reads it back to me without one. I am done calculating the distance, and I am sitting here with You in it.
Psalm 139:12
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