Psalm 139:12

Psalm 139 is David’s prayer about who God is. It opens with God’s knowledge: the LORD knows David’s sitting down and rising up, his thoughts, his path and his words before he speaks them (Psalm 139:1–6). Verse 7 turns from what God knows to where God is, and the verses after it carry that thought through heaven, the grave, the sea and the night. The psalm then goes on to God’s forming of David’s own life (Psalm 139:13–16) and ends with David asking God to search his heart and lead him in the way everlasting (Psalm 139:23–24).

The two questions of verse 7 are David’s way of stating a fact with wonder. He is in awe at how far God reaches, and he asks so that the answer will stand out plainly: every place he could name is a place where God already is. The two verbs differ. The first, yâlak, is the everyday word for walking or going. The second, bârach, means to flee, to move in haste as a person does who is escaping danger. So the second question presses harder than the first. Whether David strolls away or runs for his life, he arrives before God.

He names God in two ways as well. “Thy spirit” is rûwach, God’s active and life-giving Spirit, who fills and sustains all that he has made. “Thy presence” is pânîym, a word that is plural in form, is used as a singular, and literally means “face”. God’s presence in every place is therefore personal: his face, his attention, is turned toward each place and each person. In Israel, to stand before God’s face was to meet him directly, whether for blessing or for judgment. Both words stand for God himself.

This set Israel’s faith apart. Among the nations a god was thought to belong to a certain land, temple or territory, so that a traveller who crossed the border left that god behind. The LORD fills every land. He says so himself through Jeremiah: “Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the LORD. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the LORD” (Jeremiah 23:23–24). Jonah tried the experiment when he took ship to flee from the presence of the LORD (Jonah 1:3), and the LORD was at sea with him.

Verse 8 begins the answer with the highest and lowest places David knows. Israel thought of the world in three parts: the heavens above, where God dwells, the earth where people live, and Sheol beneath. By naming the top and the bottom David takes in everything between them, a way of speaking called a merism. He is describing the reach of God’s presence, and he uses journeys that a man could only imagine to do it.

“Ascend” is nâçaq, to go up, and “heaven” is shâmayim, the sky and the heavens beyond it, which Israel knew as God’s own dwelling. That God is in heaven is the part David’s hearers would expect. The second half of the verse is the surprise, and David marks it with “behold”. The verb for making a bed, yatsaʻ, means to spread something out as a surface, and the phrase is an idiom for settling down in a place, or for lying down in death. If David were to lay himself down in the lowest and most forgotten place there is, the answer would be the same three words: “thou art there.” God is high above his creation and he is present within every part of it, and the verse holds both truths together.

David says “thou”, speaking to God directly, and that turns a doctrine into a confession of faith. The same heights and depths appear in Amos as a warning, where those who would flee God’s judgment are told that hiding places high or low will give them up (Amos 9:2–4).

Verse 8 measured the world from top to bottom, and verse 9 measures it from side to side. “The wings of the morning” is a picture of the dawn. The word for wings, kânâph, means a wing and also an edge or extremity, and it is used of a bird’s wing, the corner of a garment and the quarters of the earth. Morning light rises in the east and spreads across the whole sky in moments, as though the dawn had wings. To “take” them (nâsâʼ, to lift or take up) is to borrow the fastest thing David has ever seen.

“The uttermost parts of the sea” lies in the other direction. ʼAchărîyth means the last or the end of something, and the sea for Israel was the Mediterranean, the great water to the west that marked the edge of the world they knew. David imagines starting where the sun rises and flying to where it sets. Travel in his day was slow and hard, so a flight at the speed of the dawn is a deliberate exaggeration. He adds that he would “dwell” there, which means settling at the edge of the world for good.

Height and depth in verse 8 and east and west in verse 9 together cover every direction a person could go. Isaiah speaks of the same scale when he describes the immeasurable greatness of the God who made it all (Isaiah 40:12). The sentence of verse 9 is left unfinished, and verse 10 completes it.

Verse 10 is the turning point of the passage. Up to here David has shown that God is everywhere. Now he says what God is doing there: leading him and holding him. God’s presence is active, and for David it is the presence of a guide and keeper.

“Hand” is yâd, the open hand, which in Israel stood for strength, authority, action and a person’s own presence. “Lead” is nâchâh, to lead or guide, as one guides a traveller along a road he has never walked. David had only pictured himself running to the far edge of the world, and there he finds a hand waiting to show him the way. Scripture gives the same picture of the LORD as a shepherd leading his own (Psalm 23), and another psalm says that this God will be our guide even unto death (Psalm 48:14).

The second line says the same thing more strongly. The “right hand”, yâmîyn, was the hand of greater strength, skill and honour. A king held out his right hand to bless or to make a covenant, and a warrior carried his weapon in it. “Hold” is ʼâchaz, to grasp or take hold of, often with the idea of keeping what is held as one’s own. So God’s guidance is backed by God’s grip. He promises the same through Isaiah, saying that he will uphold his people with his right hand (Isaiah 41:10) and that he holds them by theirs (Isaiah 41:13). Moses told Israel that the LORD goes with them and will neither fail nor forsake them (Deuteronomy 31:6).

God is Spirit, so the hands of this verse are human language for his power and care, given so that we can picture what he does for us.

People ask whether “Even there” means that God is present only in hard places. The words point back to all the places just named, to heaven as well as to Sheol and the far sea, so they take in every place a person could ever be.

In verse 11 David tries a different kind of escape. He has run out of places, so he thinks of hiding where he stands, under cover of night. “If I say” shows that this is a thought turning in his own mind. It is a very human thought, because people have always used the dark to hide. Adam and Eve hid from God among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8). In Israel, where lamps were few, night made travel dangerous and gave cover to wrongdoing.

“Darkness” is chôshek, from the root châshak, to be dark. It is the ordinary word for darkness, and in Scripture it also stands for misery, death, ignorance, sorrow and wickedness. The verb translated “cover” is shûwph, whose root sense is to gape or snap at something, and so to overwhelm it. David pictures the dark closing over him completely. The answer comes at once: “even the night shall be light about me.” “Light” is ʼôwr, the word for brightness of every kind, and the very thing David hoped would hide him becomes bright all around him.

Verse 12 states the matter three times over. Darkness hides nothing from God. The night shines as the day, where “shineth” is the verb ʼôwr, to be or become light, and “day”, yôwm, is our own measure of clear sight. Darkness and light are both alike to him. To us a shining night is a contradiction, and it is resolved in who God is: “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). When Scripture says that God sees, it speaks in human terms of his complete knowledge, which depends on nothing outside himself. “The eyes of the LORD are in every place” (Proverbs 15:3).

The God whom David found in every place came to us in a single place and a human life. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), and his name is Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). In Christ all the fulness of God dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9).

Christ himself passed through the extremes of verse 8. He went down into death, and Peter applies to him the words “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell” (Psalm 16:10, quoted in Acts 2:27). He rose, and he ascended far above all heavens (Ephesians 4:8–10), where he sits at the right hand of God (Hebrews 1:3).

The leading and holding hands of verse 10 are his as well. He is the good shepherd (John 10:11), and he says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:27–28). Before he ascended he promised, “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20), a promise that goes with his people to the wings of the morning and the uttermost parts of the sea. He keeps it through the Holy Spirit, the Comforter who abides with believers and dwells in them (John 14:16–17), the Spirit of Christ (Romans 8:9). The Spirit from whom David could never depart now lives within God’s people.

Christ is also the light of verses 11 and 12. In him was life, and the life was the light of men, shining in the darkness (John 1:4–5). He calls himself “the light of the world” (John 8:12). He knew what was in man (John 2:25), and his coming showed up deeds done in the dark (John 3:19–21). Yet the one who sees us so completely has shared our weakness and was tempted as we are (Hebrews 4:15), and he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). Because of him we can come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16). The end of the story is the fulfilment of this psalm, when the dwelling of God is with men and he lives among them for ever (Revelation 21:3).

These verses give us a God who is already present wherever we arrive. The heights of joy and success are within his presence, and so are grief, failure and the approach of death. David walked through “the valley of the shadow of death” fearing no evil because God was with him (Psalm 23:4), and Paul is persuaded that death, life, height, depth and every other created thing are unable to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38–39). Prayer, in the light of this passage, is conversation with a Father who is in the room.

The passage also frees us from the labour of hiding. Since God sees the whole of our lives already, public and private alike, we are able to “walk in the light, as he is in the light”, where the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7). And when the way ahead is dark to us, it is bright to him. The hand that leads us sees the road, and the right hand that holds us is strong enough to keep us on it.