Psalm 139:18

Psalm 139 is a psalm of David, and it moves in clear steps. In Psalm 139:1–6 he marvels that the LORD knows his sitting down and his rising up, his paths, and his words before he speaks them, and he calls that knowledge too wonderful for him. In Psalm 139:7–12 he finds God’s Spirit everywhere he could go, in heaven, in the depths of Sheol and at the farthest reaches of the sea, and he finds the darkness itself open to God’s sight.

Verse 13 opens with “For”, and it gives the reason God knows David so completely: God made him. The psalm moves from God’s knowledge of David and his presence with David to his work in forming David, and verses 13 to 16 follow that work from the womb onward. Verses 17 and 18 are David’s answer to it. The psalm ends with his prayer that God would search his heart and lead him in the way everlasting (Psalm 139:23–24).

The word for “thoughts” in verse 17, rêaʻ, appears only twice in the Bible, here and in verse 2, where David says, “thou understandest my thought afar off” (Psalm 139:2). The psalm begins with God reading David’s thoughts, and in these verses it reaches David marvelling at God’s.

“Thou hast possessed my reins” uses the verb qânâh, which means to create, to acquire or buy, and to possess or own. Both the making and the owning belong here. God brought David’s inner self into being, and it is his.

The second line names the place where this happened. “Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb” uses çâkak, to entwine as a screen, and so to fence in, cover over and protect. The picture holds two things together, the careful weaving of a child and the shelter around him while the work goes on. The womb is beṭen, the belly and especially the womb, the hidden place where God does this work.

Israel’s neighbours told of many gods, often at war with one another, behind the making of the world. David speaks to the one LORD, who made him personally, and the rest of Scripture speaks of God in the same way. Job remembers that God’s hands made and fashioned him and clothed him with skin and flesh (Job 10:8–12). The LORD calls himself “thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb” (Isaiah 44:24). He tells Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee” (Jeremiah 1:5), and the servant in Isaiah says that the LORD called him from the womb and made mention of his name while he was still in his mother’s body (Isaiah 49:1).

Verse 14 opens with praise and then gives its reason. “I will praise thee” uses yâdâh, which in this form means to praise, to give thanks or to confess. It is the response of a man who has looked at how he was made and seen God’s hand in it.

“Fearfully” is from yârêʼ, the verb for fear, which also means to revere. “Wonderfully made” is from pâlâh, to distinguish or set apart, to show something marvellous, to make wonderfully. “Marvellous” in the next line comes from the related verb pâlâʼ, to be great, difficult or wonderful. Together they say that David was made with a skill that sets him apart and fills him with awe. Then he widens his view from himself to everything God has done: “marvellous are thy works”. He is one of those works, made in the image of God like the first man and woman (Genesis 1:27), and his praise agrees with the psalm that says, “Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable” (Psalm 145:3).

“And that my soul knoweth right well” closes the verse with certainty. Yâdaʻ is to know, first of all by seeing, and it covers observation and recognition. “Right well” is mᵉʼôd, “very” or “greatly”. David knows very well, from his own life, that God’s works are marvellous.

This is where human worth rests. It comes from the God who made us and from the care he took in making us, and so it belongs to every person alike, whatever they achieve and however others measure them.

Verse 15 returns to the womb. “My substance” is ʻôtsem, a word meaning power, and so the body or substance, the frame of a person. “Was not hid” uses kâchad, to hide or conceal. The womb is out of every human eye’s reach, and David says that the body taking shape inside it was in full view of God the whole time.

“When I was made in secret” uses ʻâsâh, the common verb to make or do, with God as the maker. “Curiously wrought” is râqam, to weave in many colours, to embroider. The word belongs to the textile arts, which Israel prized for the skill, patience and design they call for. The hanging for the door of the tabernacle was to be “wrought with needlework” (Exodus 26:36), and David takes the craft of the embroiderer as his picture of the way God put his body together, part by part, with every detail placed on purpose.

“Substance” comes again in verse 16, where it translates a different Hebrew word, gôlem. The two verses share the English word only.

“Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect” goes back to the earliest stage of all. Behind these words stands gôlem, an unformed mass, an embryo, the body before its organs and limbs have taken a shape anyone could recognise. God saw David then, before any human eye could have known him.

“In thy book all my members were written” adds that God had recorded what David would be before it came to be. Kâthab means to engrave, and so to write, inscribe or prescribe. Scripture speaks of God’s book in more than one way. Moses asks to be blotted out of the book God has written, the register of the living (Exodus 32:32), and Malachi tells of a book of remembrance written for those who feared the LORD (Malachi 3:16). Here the book holds the design of one man before he existed.

“Which in continuance were fashioned” uses yâtsar, to mould or form, as a potter shapes clay. “In continuance” stands for yôwm, a day or a span of time, so the members were formed day by day over the time God appointed. “When as yet there was none of them” puts the writing before any of that forming began.

The words “my members” are supplied by the translators, and since the Hebrew behind “in continuance” is the word for days, the verse can also be read of David’s days, every one of them written in God’s book before the first had come. On either reading, God knew David entirely and had designed him before he existed. Paul says the same of everyone in Christ: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).

Verses 13 to 16 describe a child in the womb as God’s own work at every stage. God made and owns his inner self, wove him together and sheltered him, watched his body take shape in secret, and saw him when he was still an unformed embryo. The life in the womb is a person God is making on purpose, known and valued by him before the first breath.

That gives every human life its dignity from its earliest stage, at every level of development and ability and in every station of life, from conception to natural death. Each unborn child is a unique work of God, worthy of protection, respect and love.

David has spent four verses on what God knows of him, and in verse 17 he turns to what God thinks. “How precious” is yâqar, to be heavy, and so to be valuable, rare and highly prized. “Thy thoughts” is rêaʻ, a thought, the word used for David’s own thought in verse 2. God’s thoughts are precious to David, and they are thoughts toward him, full of care and purpose.

“How great is the sum of them!” uses ʻâtsam, to be powerful or numerous, and rôʼsh, literally the head, which here means the whole total. David is amazed first at their worth and then at their number. The LORD says through Isaiah, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9). Yet those high thoughts are turned toward his people: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11). Another psalm asks in the same wonder, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:3–4), and Paul cries out, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Romans 11:33–36).

Verse 18 takes the count further. “If I should count them” uses çâphar, to count or number, a verb that in another form means to recount or tell. “Them” points back to God’s thoughts in verse 17. If David tried to number them, they would outrun the chôwl, the sand. Sand is Scripture’s picture of a number past counting, as when God promised to multiply Abraham’s seed “as the sand which is upon the sea shore” (Genesis 22:17). God’s thoughts reach the smallest details of a life, as Jesus taught when he said that the Father sees every sparrow that falls and that the very hairs of our heads are all numbered (Matthew 10:29–31).

The verse ends by turning from the number of God’s thoughts to the nearness of God himself. “Still” is ʻôwd, a word of continuance, “yet” or “again”. Sleep is the time when a person knows least and can guard himself least, and David wakes to find that God has stayed with him through it. The God who was with him in the womb is with him at the start of every day. God is “our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1), and he has said, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5).

David speaks of himself, and the God who knew him this closely knows and cares for everyone who trusts in him in the same way.

The New Testament shows who the maker in these verses is. All things were made by the Word, who was with God and was God (John 1:1–3). Paul says that the Son is the image of the invisible God, that by him all things were created, in heaven and in earth, and that by him all things consist (Colossians 1:15–17). The hand that curiously wrought David in the womb was the hand of the Son.

That same Son was himself formed in a womb. He “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). The Holy Ghost came upon Mary, and the child born of her was holy (Luke 1:35), and “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). In Mary’s womb God fashioned a human nature without sin, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), who knew no sin and was made sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). The wonder David felt at his own making points forward to that greater wonder. Christ was foreordained before the foundation of the world and revealed in these last times for our sake (1 Peter 1:20), and in him God’s precious thoughts toward us are shown most fully.

Sin marred the work that verse 14 praises, and Christ renews it. Anyone in Christ is a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17), being conformed to the image of the Son (Romans 8:29) and renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him (Colossians 3:10). So the praise of verse 14 for our first making grows into praise for our remaking. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son (John 3:16), and through the Spirit believers have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16).

“When I awake, I am still with thee” has its fullest answer in the name Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), in the Comforter whom Jesus promised would abide with his disciples for ever (John 14:16–18), and in his word, “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20). It reaches its end where Scripture ends, when the tabernacle of God is with men and God himself is with them and is their God (Revelation 21:3).

These verses give us a God who made each of us with his own hands, in secret, before anyone else knew we were there. He saw us unformed and wrote in his book what we would be. His thoughts toward us are precious and too many to count, and he is with us when we wake. David’s answer was praise, and his words belong to every one of God’s people: “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” The psalm goes on to ask God to search the heart and lead it in the way everlasting, so the God who began his work in the womb is the God who guides the life that follows.