Psalm 139:20

Psalm 139 opens with David marvelling that the LORD knows his every thought, word and path (verses 1–6), that God’s Spirit is with him wherever he could go, in the heavens, in Sheol or at the farthest reaches of the sea (verses 7–12), and that God formed him in his mother’s womb with wonderful skill (verses 13–18). Then verse 19 breaks in with “Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God.” The change is sudden, and it grows out of everything before it. A man who has just seen how holy, near and wise God is feels the full weight of those who defy him, and his zeal for God’s honour springs from the closeness he has been describing.

David wrote as a king with enemies at home and abroad. In Israel the king stood as God’s representative, so an attack on the king or his people was an attack on God’s rule, and the enemies in the Psalms are usually people hostile to God and his ways as well as to the psalmist. Justice lay at the centre of Israel’s faith. God is the judge who upholds righteousness and punishes wickedness, and a psalm says that “God is angry with the wicked every day” (Psalm 7:11).

The close of the psalm has two movements. In verses 19–22 David declares his loyalty to God against God’s enemies, and in verses 23–24 he asks God to search him. The two belong together. The man who longs for evil to be judged in others asks God to find whatever is wrong in himself, and so even his zeal is laid open before the God who knows his heart.

“Surely” opens verse 19 with certainty. David is stating what God will do, and he says it to God’s face: “O God”. The verb qâṭal, “slay”, means to kill, and its root sense is to cut off. God is the one who acts, and the word speaks of a final judgment that removes the wicked from God’s holy order. The wicked, râshâʻ, are those who are in the wrong: guilty, ungodly people who set themselves against God and his laws by choice.

“Bloody men” is in Hebrew anshei damim, “men of bloods”. The first word, ʼĕnôwsh, is the plain word for men, and the second, dâm, is blood, the blood that brings death when it is shed. In the plural it means bloodshed, or the guilt of blood that has been shed. These are men marked by violence and treachery, who hold human life and God’s law cheap.

The word “therefore” ties the two halves of the verse together. Because God will surely judge the wicked, David wants to be clear of them, and he turns and speaks to them directly: “depart from me”. He is asking to be kept apart from their ways, so that he shares in their deeds and their guilt in no way. Scripture calls all God’s people to the same distinctness. Paul writes “come out from among them” (2 Corinthians 6:14–17), and he describes a life changed by a renewed mind, so that believers are set apart from the world’s sinful patterns while still living among people (Romans 12:2).

Verse 20 begins with “For” and gives the reason for David’s indignation. The wicked speak against God, and the KJV’s “wickedly” translates mᵉzimmâh, a plan or device, usually an evil one. Their words are a scheme, deliberate and calculated, aimed at defaming God and undermining his truth.

“Take thy name in vain” joins the verb nâsâʼ, to lift up or to carry, with shâvᵉʼ, emptiness, falsehood, worthlessness. To lift up God’s name to emptiness is to treat it as empty, to call on it falsely, or to use it for trivial or deceitful ends. This is the language of the third commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain” (Exodus 20:7). The law also forbids swearing falsely by God’s name (Leviticus 19:12), and Malachi records the LORD’s rebuke of those who dishonour his name (Malachi 1:6).

In Israel God’s name stood for who he is: his character, his presence, his authority and his faithfulness to his covenant. To empty his name is to scorn God himself, and “thine enemies” are those opposed to him in what they are and what they do. David’s anger is zeal for God’s honour, the zeal Scripture praises in Phinehas (Numbers 25:11) and voices in another psalm: “For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up; and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me” (Psalm 69:9).

Verse 21 asks two questions that answer themselves: “Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?” Each expects the answer yes, and the second says the first again in other words, which makes the declaration stronger. David addresses God by his covenant name, Yᵉhôvâh, the self-existent and eternal One, so his feelings rise out of his relationship with the LORD whose honour is under attack.

The verb sânêʼ means to hate, to be an enemy, to find someone odious. In the English, “hate” answers “hate”: those who hate the LORD are hated by David. “Grieved” is qûwṭ, whose root sense is to cut off, and which figuratively means to detest or loathe. David feels revulsion and vexation at those who “rise up against” God, the open rebels who defy his authority.

Verse 22 goes further: “I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.” The noun sinʼâh, “hatred”, comes from the verb sânêʼ, so verb and noun share one root. “Perfect” is taklîyth, completion, the furthest end of a thing. This hatred is complete and unreserved. The second half turns the feeling into a settled judgment, for David counts them his enemies. The word ʼôyêb is the participle of a verb meaning to be hostile, and it is the ordinary Hebrew word for an enemy. God’s enemies have become David’s, and he stands wholly on the LORD’s side.

Having spoken with such force about others, David turns the searching light on himself. The God whose knowledge of him he praised at the start of the psalm is the God he now asks to examine him. Here he calls him ʼêl, a word for God that Strong’s also gives the sense of strength and might.

The verb châqar, “search”, means to search, examine carefully, explore and find out. yâdaʻ, “know”, is the common verb for knowing, and it covers the knowledge that comes by experience and close acquaintance. The heart, lêbâb, is in Hebrew the centre of the whole inner person: mind, will, intentions, desires and conscience along with the feelings, the place from which a life flows. bâchan, “try”, means to test or prove, and it is used especially of testing metals to show how pure they are. The thoughts, sarʻaph, are the reasonings, plans and inner deliberations of the mind, and the word can carry the sense of anxious thoughts.

The verse is built in two matching halves. The request to search and know his heart is answered by the request to try and know his thoughts, and the verb “know” comes twice in the verse. Between them the two halves reach the whole inner man, his will and his mind.

David knew his own failures. His sin with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11) shows how far a man devoted to God can fall, and that gives his prayer its weight. The LORD himself says that he searches the heart (Jeremiah 17:10), and all things are naked and open before him (Hebrews 4:13). Those who stand in his presence need a pure heart, for a psalm asks, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD?” and answers with the man of clean hands and a pure heart (Psalm 24:3–4).

“And see if there be any wicked way in me” uses râʼâh, the ordinary verb for seeing, which also means to consider, discern and perceive. David asks God to look and find out.

The word behind “wicked” in this verse is ʻôtseb. The “wicked” of verse 19 is râshâʻ, and the “wickedly” of verse 20 is mᵉzimmâh, so the English shares one word across the three verses while the Hebrew uses three different words. ʻôtseb means an idol in some places and pain or sorrow in others, and this verse belongs with pain. The “wicked way” is a way of pain, a course of life that brings grief, and “wicked” is the KJV’s rendering of it. David asks God to find any such path in him, whether a habit, a pattern of thought or a leaning hidden even from himself.

“Way” is derek, a picture Scripture uses again and again for a course of life, a manner of conduct and where it ends. To walk in God’s way is to live by his commands, which leads to life, while a wicked way ends in ruin. The same word stands in both halves of verse 24, so the way of pain is set against the way everlasting. ʻôwlâm reaches to the vanishing point of time, past or future, and the KJV renders it “ever”, “everlasting”, “of old” and “perpetual”. The way everlasting is God’s own lasting path of righteousness, truth and life, and it leads to eternal life with him.

“Lead me” asks God to take him along that path, and Proverbs says the same of all who trust him: “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6). David, called a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22), was humble about his own fallibility, as his prayer of repentance shows (Psalm 51). The psalm that began with God’s knowledge of David ends with David asking to be known and led.

The longing of these verses is answered in Jesus Christ. The Father has committed all judgment to the Son (John 5:22), so the one who will deal with the wicked at the last is Christ. His first coming was to save, for God sent his Son into the world that the world through him might be saved (John 3:17), and John the Baptist pointed to him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29).

Christ shared the psalmist’s zeal perfectly. He hallowed his Father’s name, taught us to pray “Hallowed be thy name” (Matthew 6:9), and made that name known to his disciples (John 17:6). He drove out those who profaned his Father’s house (John 2:13–17) and pronounced woes on the hypocrites who opposed God’s truth and hindered others from entering the kingdom (Matthew 23). And he became the target of those who speak against God, slandered, falsely accused and crucified.

On the cross he met wickedness at its root. Through death he destroyed him that had the power of death, the devil (Hebrews 2:14), and he disarmed principalities and powers and triumphed over them (Colossians 2:15). God made him to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21), and while we were enemies God reconciled us to himself by the death of his Son (Romans 5:8–10). So Christ holds together a perfect hatred of sin and a perfect love for sinners, and people who once rose up against God become his children. When he returns he will judge and make war in righteousness (Revelation 19:11–16), every knee will bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord (Philippians 2:9–11), and God will bring new heavens and a new earth where righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13).

Christ also answers the prayer of verses 23–24. He knew what was in man (John 2:24–25), and he himself was sinless, with no guile in his mouth (1 Peter 2:22). The Holy Spirit whom he sends convicts the world of sin (John 16:8), carrying on in us the searching David asked for, and trials prove our faith as fire proves gold (1 Peter 1:7). Christ gave himself for the church to cleanse it with the washing of water by the word and present it holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5:26–27). And he is the way everlasting in person: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Those who believe in him are raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4).

These six verses give us words for two things at once. They give words for grief and anger at evil that mocks God, and they give words for humility about the evil that may lie in us. The God of Psalm 139 is just. The wicked will answer to him, and his name is holy whoever takes it in vain. He also knows every heart and is willing to search the heart that asks him, and he leads those who ask into the way that lasts for ever.

David hands both things to God in prayer. His longing for justice rests on what God will surely do, and his own heart is laid open to the same God in the next breath. In Christ we see the judgment David longed for joined to mercy for enemies, and the searching David asked for carried out by a Saviour who cleanses. Whoever prays “Search me, O God” is praying to one who already knows all there is to find, and who leads in the way everlasting.