God's all seeing eye

God's all seeing eye Psalm 139, Mark 3:13-19 I wonder if you've ever thought, or had someone say to you: "nobody understands me!" The sort of thing I suppose that an irate teenager might say to a parent who plainly, so far as they're concerned, "isn't getting them". Nobody can understand, nobody knows the trouble I've seen, as the song goes. On the other hand it was Robert Burns who said in his Ayrshire tones: "O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, an' foolish notion". So there must be some hope and belief, in the minds of collective humanity that the thoughts of someone, be it friend, family member, or professional disinterested party, might well help us to understand ourselves better than we already do. However how much understanding would we be comfortable with I, wonder. For example if we happened to come across someone who could read our minds and challenge not only our words but our thoughts too, would we be happy with that, would we stick around and listen to them, or would we get as far away from them as possible in case they happened to blurt it out to others? I suspect the latter would be the case. After all none of us wants to be understood too well, and there are certainly things that we prefer to keep to ourselves. So what are we to think when we open our Bibles and read these words from Psalm 139: "O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord"? Because here we have the psalmist, who we're told is David, saying to the Bard "It's not what others think that we should be bothering about but what God, the ultimate power, knows". And saying too to that disgruntled youth: "You know somebody does understand you, far better than you know yourself in fact." Here David is addressing God and telling him that he recognises that He knows everything that there is to know about him. God sees him whether he's sitting down or getting up again, whether he's about his daily activities or lying down sleeping, recovering from those activities. And what's more it's not just that the Lord has his eye on him all the time, no he also hears his every thought so that whatever his words, which by the way God is never surprised by, and actions, might be saying to others about the sort of person he is, God knows the truth of the matter. David says to God: "You hem me in - behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me' using a picture that he, the great commander of the armies of Israel, would have been very familiar with, that of a city under siege from a great army such that its inhabitants are surrounded on all sides and unable to escape from the vice like grip of the oppressor whose powerful hand lies firmly upon them. And this is how he, David, is in relation to the Lord. God is very near, he is wholly in his power, and from that power there is no escape. So how does David feel? Does he feel claustrophobic and wish that he could get away so as to have some space to himself? Well what would be the point, he realises. "Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?" (Verse 7). He understands, you see, that if he was to climb the highest mountain or bury himself down in the deepest cavern, or if he was to travel at the speed of the light which brings in the dawn, or sail away to a distant land, the truth is that God would be already there before him, still with him, still surrounding him, still knowing his every action and thought. It's as if the Lord is the context, the environment, in which he finds himself, the very atmosphere that surrounds him. Something which the apostle Paul focused on when defending himself before the Areopagus in Athens when he declared about God (Acts chapter 17 and verses 17 and 18: "he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.'" And so there's no chance, David realises, of hiding from such a God. "But then what about the darkness?" he asks. The night that was separated from the day by God himself at the very beginning of time. "Surely that will hide me. Surely I'll be able to wrap myself up in it so that not even you God will be able to penetrate it". But then he realises that the Lord doesn't need to see through the darkness because for him "the night will shine like the day". For God all is light, so that nothing comes between his gaze and those who are his creation. Now someone might say: "Isn't this idea of an all seeing, all knowing, ever present God, who's constantly monitoring my every move and every thought, more than a little bit scary? Because after all it means that there's nothing about me, nothing that I am or that I that I do that he isn't aware of". Well there's no doubt that if we're determined to live our lives rejecting the very idea of such a god, if we've made up our minds that even if such a god does exist we want nothing to do with him, or if our lifestyle and habits are such that there's no way that we'd want someone to know about what we get up to, then yes if our creator, as Spurgeon puts it: "is in all places, at all times" such that "nothing can by any possibility be kept away from his all-observing, all comprehending mind" then such a thought, if treated seriously, would be terrifying. But what about David? Because here we have a man who, far from wanting to reject the idea of a God who sees all and knows all about him, has learned through his life's experiences of this God to love the Lord more than anyone or anything else, so that he wants to know much more of him. And as for his own morality, well he realises that he deserves the judgement of a Holy God who knows far better than he does how morally corrupt he is, and yet he marvels at the Lord's mercy. What then is David's response to his realisation of God's universal presence and knowledge? Well he's excited at the thought! He marvels at it! Saying, in verse 6: "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me". And even though he realises that, again as Spurgeon puts it, "when we stand a-tip-toe we cannot reach the lowest step of the throne of the eternal" and that therefore there's no way that he's ever going to grasp anything like the full implications of what this all means this side of heaven, nevertheless there's no concern, there are no thoughts of dread. Rather he delights in the, albeit, limited revelation which God has afforded him. Why? Well because David does grasp something of the nature of God and of his motives behind his constant vigilance. He realises that God isn't some despot who's playing games with his creation as if we were all just a collection of plastic characters to be positioned in different interesting scenarios according to his whim, so as to see how we get on. No, on the contrary God is intimately interested and concerned about each one of us, to him we're each far more than a temporary player on the stage of life. He is our creator who loves his creation with a love that is never ending. A depth of love which means that he oversees and is a part of every aspect of our lives. Indeed he is the driving force behind everything such that even before we were born his hand of love was upon us. "For you created my inmost being" says David (verse 13) "You knit me together in my mother's womb" and "My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body". Today we marvel when we see a picture of a baby in the womb on a CT scan, and so we should, but the reality is that God sees that yet unborn baby, and is with that baby, constantly from the moment of conception to the moment of birth. And there's more, King David observes, more evidence yet of God's love for each one of us, a love far greater than that of even the most devoted of mothers. Which is that he didn't just know us intimately as we developed in the womb, but he went before us into our life planning out our days and recording them in his book. At which point David responds in the only right way. That is by giving himself over to the one who constantly gives himself, his attention, his loving kindness to him. By worshipping and giving praise to such a God and confessing his commitment to Him, saying that these thoughts of him are like precious jewels to be repeatedly counted and delighted in, as he rests in the knowledge that he is ever with his Lord. And surely this should be the attitude of each one of us who know for certain that we are now part of God's family, the true Church. We too should want to constantly be coming to him, giving our time to him as we turn to him in prayer and as we think on and cherish the thoughts of God revealed to us in his Word which together outnumber every grain of sand to be found on the earth. We too should be led to worship, to praise and adore, and to stand in awe of the one about whom our understanding, which leads us to these responses, is as yet extremely poor, for he is far greater and far more loving than our simple minds can comprehend. A call to worship then, but also a call to turn away from anything and anyone who will come between ourselves and the one who eye and hand is always upon us. Which is why in verse 19 to 22 of our psalm David speaks in such harsh tones about those who are by nature anti God, those who are wicked, who thirst for blood rather than righteousness, who blaspheme God's name. "Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord, and abhor those who rise up against you?" he says, "I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies". But notice that he's not condemning them, it is God alone who has any right to do that. Rather David is recognising that to treat such people and their ways as friends or even worthy of his close attention would be to put in jeopardy that close relationship which God desires to have with him. A lesson for us to take on-board too. Yes we're in the world and are to reach out to the world with the Good news of Jesus Christ but we're not at the same time to share the world's values or the world's ways. God's attitude to the sinner is at the same time one of love and of wrath and we are to have that same attitude and not to be tempted to condone what the Lord condemns. Which is why David now turns to the Lord in prayer asking that he who knows him intimately would search him and know him even better so that that which is sin in him, and so offensive to God, would be exposed and might be rooted out, such that any obstacles to his being led in the way everlasting would be cleared away. In other words then King David's response to God's intimate love of him, to his complete knowledge of his ways, to his constant presence with him, is not to run away but to seek to open himself up fully to God, that which is the Lord's desire for his own. And the same should be the case for us. And, unlike even the best of those who thinking they know us better than we know ourselves, are ready to listen and advise us, we can trust God as we open ourselves up to him. And as we do so we'll find that he won't condemn, he won't trample on our feelings or treat our thoughts and opinions as of no consequence, but rather he who has always known and loved us and has us writ down in the book of life will simply and lovingly take us as we are and gently knit us together into what he wants us to be. A final thought: As we grow as Christians we inevitably learn more about the nature of God and at the same time our own nature, with the consequence that what perhaps at one point was supreme confidence that we are the Lord's and that therefore we have nothing to concern us, can become a little bit more shaky such that the thought: "Why should Christ have died for such as me?" becomes, perhaps, a source of doubt. The problem is, of course, that we're thinking in human terms, thinking: "If I was God I wouldn't want to know me". But then we look at the list of the twelve chosen apostles in Mark chapter 3. Luke in his account tells us that Jesus prayed all night before the choosing. And yet look who he chose, a rag tag group of betrayers, doubters and hot heads, who would fail him and let him down time after time. But then these very ordinary, deeply flawed men were the very ones who God had earmarked from ages past and had been preparing for this task since before they were born. Men who as they yielded themselves ever more to him, would change the world. I wonder, if we had been a part of the selection committee tasked with assessing these twelve men, how many of them would we have chosen to be an apostle? And remember one of them would betray Jesus to death The point of course is that God alone is the one who is all knowing, who is ever present, and so his choice alone is perfect. We for our part can't hope to understand that choice, but we can trust and in that trusting we can rejoice that even though he knows and understands us still he has chosen us. And then we can turn to him in love and adoration seeking to be led in that way everlasting. Amen