God Sees You
Notes
Transcript
If you have your Bible, or Bible app, please once again turn to the book of Psalms, chapter 139.
PRAY
Background: Last week we began this series, titled “God and You”.
We are working our way through Psalm 139, a very relational text, a scripture passage that describes fully how God relates to us, how He knows us, He sees us, He designs us, He hears us, and He desires to lead us ever closer to Himself.
And today, we’re focusing on the fact that God sees us.
In fact, one of the names of God, the name Hagar, the servant of Sarah calls Him in Genesis 16 is “El-Roe-Ee”, the God who sees.
We caught a glimpse of this last week as we examined verses 1-6, when God searches us, surrounds us, and relates to us.
And this week as we continue this series, please read with me, beginning in verse 7.
Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
Intro: You’ve all heard the expression, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” right?
Something’s worth, or it’s value, is dependent upon how you see it!
When I was a kid, I had a collection of baseball cards. I had a Mark McGwire rookie card, Barry Bonds rookie card (now worth at least $400), a Bo Jackson card from his time with the White Sox.
Then, I got into basketball trading cards, and had the Fleer Ultra Michael Jordan card the year he retired the first time (now sells online for about $500). Hall of Famers from that era, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Clyde Drexler - I had them all.
I once traded a Shaquille O’Neal rookie card for a half dozen other players, Junior High Jeff was wheeling and dealing like Wall Street wannabe...
I really got into those little pieces of cardboard, I cherished those tiny pictures of the athletes on one side, and tried to memorize the stats and stories on the back.
Last night I looked up a few of those cards, and the lowest value I could find for the ones I remembered owning was $200. The lowest value on eBay.
But I don’t know what happened to them. Pretty sure my dad threw them away or has them in storage somewhere.
This is the same man, who, by the way, once told me he had baseball cards of Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, a few others, and thought they’d be fun to stick inside his Bicycle spokes.
But, the truth is, they are just little pieces of cardboard. And those pieces of cardboard are only valued by how rare they are, and by how much someone thinks they are worth when they see them.
I looked up how much the first appearance of Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy #15 was. Originally it sold for 12 cents. You know how much it goes for now? $1.5 million dollars.
Why? Nobody who buys it will ever read it. It’s poorly written even by today’s comic standards. Actions Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman sold for over 2 million dollars a few years ago.
When it hit news stands in 1938, it was worth a dime. 10 cents. Now, people put it in glass and just look at it. They don’t want to actually read the story - opening it up would cause it to lose its value, by the way.
It’s a dumb cartoony magazine, Superman doesn’t even fly, he just jumps far and is really strong. Spider-man is just the story of a nerd who got powers after being bitten by a radioactive bug - you don’t get powers from that, you get a rash.
But their value value is in how we see it.
Ladies, if you can’t relate, look at your jewelry and realize it’s just a few strands of metal, and some of them may have some rocks stuck to them - the same thing could be said about a lawnmower - it’s just metal and gas. But unless your front yard is the outfield at Yankee Stadium, I bet your husband paid a lot more for your wedding ring than he did his lawn mower.
Well, he should have, but I don’t want to get anyone in trouble this morning, so let’s move on...
But, God looks at you, and He sees you, and He knows your worth. And the thing is, I hope you understand this morning:
Thesis:
God sees you like no one else can.
God sees you like no one else can.
He sees us as he constantly pursues us, as He holds us, and as He is with us.
I. God Sees You As He Pursues You
I. God Sees You As He Pursues You
Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
Where shall I go? Where shall I go? That’s the question we must ask. If not to Him, where? If not in Him, where?
We can not escape Him, He pursues us wherever we are.
While David is generally pleased with God’s presence, he almost seems to find it overwhelming at the same time. He finds he cannot run from God or hide from Him.
Neither can we.
The presence of God is everywhere - that’s how He sees all things in all places. We can not out run the hound of Heaven.
His Spirit and His presence are already at whatever place we may go. This can actually be seen as either a comfort, or a threat. It’s terrifying if we are under God’s wrath.
But for those in Him, those who call Christ Lord and Savior, those who have “confessed with their mouth Jesus is Lord and believed in their heart God raised Him from the dead” (Romans 10:9).
Those, people, who call themselves saved…
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?
His Spirit and His presence - they are parallel here. His “ruach” is the Hebrew word for Spirit that is used. It’s the same word we saw a couple of weeks ago, when in Genesis 1:2, “The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
It’s a word that means “breath” or “wind” and it gives us an idea as to how closely knit the Trinity is tied together.
God’s presence, his “paneem” is His very face.
But it isn’t like when you wake up on a Saturday, and your 5 year old’s face is inches from your nose saying, “Mommy, I want waffles.” And you have no idea how long she’s been standing there with that crazy, sugar craving look in her eye.
It’s not like a scene from a horror movie, when the pretty girl closes the medicine cabinet and there’s a creepy face behind her.
No, God’s not Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger.
For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
God’s presence, His Spirit is overwhelming because it’s overwhelmingly good. And we find ourselves not liking that, because we are very much not good.
It doesn’t matter where we go. If we were able to ascend to the heavens, or plummet far down into Sheol.
This is a common thought throughout Scripture.
Why does He do this, though? Why pursue us?
In Jeremiah 23, God, Himself, asks:
“Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the Lord.
He says this because He is calling the prophets who are prophesying falsely to repent. To stop speaking lies in His name. And live in obedience to Him.
In Amos 9, Israel is under God’s judgment and they will not escape it this time, so He says
“If they dig into Sheol, from there shall my hand take them; if they climb up to heaven, from there I will bring them down. If they hide themselves on the top of Carmel, from there I will search them out and take them; and if they hide from my sight at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent, and it shall bite them.
But that book ends with God saying He will do this, with His ultimate plan to restore Israel.
I will plant them on their land, and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that I have given them,” says the Lord your God.
His pursuit of us should only be scary if we are in rebellion to Him, and even then, the pursuit remains a way to draw us to Him.
We saw this in our study of Jonah, and wasn’t it interesting that chapter 2 of his book begins,
Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, “I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.
Sheol is the Hebrew word for the “realm of the dead”, and it doesn’t just include what we call “hell”. There are some who try to teach it was some sort of dump outside Jerusalem, but Job speaks of it and he didn’t live in Jerusalem so that doesn’t really jive...
But it’s considered a place that is dusty, Job refers to this in...
They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them.
As will the writer of Psalm 7:
let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it, and let him trample my life to the ground and lay my glory in the dust. Selah
and Job also refers to in Job 17.
Will it go down to the bars of Sheol? Shall we descend together into the dust?”
And it is dark, Lamentations 3 speaks of this.
he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago.
It’s a place of silence, which Psalm 31 tell us:
O Lord, let me not be put to shame, for I call upon you; let the wicked be put to shame; let them go silently to Sheol. Let the lying lips be mute, which speak insolently against the righteous in pride and contempt.
It’s not a happy place, necessarily, but it’s not a bad place either.
Act therefore according to your wisdom, but do not let his gray head go down to Sheol in peace.
It’s a place people could go to find peace.
Job asks to be placed there to hide himself from what was taking place in his life, hoping to let God’s wrath pass over him.
Oh that you would hide me in Sheol, that you would conceal me until your wrath be past, that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me!
But Job also understands that if he were to go there, it’s a place of no return
As the cloud fades and vanishes, so he who goes down to Sheol does not come up;
And if we were to somehow, find our way even to this dark, desolate, dusty place of rest, where the Old Testament saints believed they were headed, if we were to find our way there, even there, we could not outrun God’s presence, His Spirit, or His loving pursuit of us.
When Paul was writing to the Romans, I believe he had this Psalm in mind as he penned the last portion of what we now call chapter 8.
For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Are we so bold as to think we can outrun God?
He continually pursues us out of love, a love no one else can fathom. But we must ask, are we continually pursuing Him?
II. God Sees You As He Holds You
II. God Sees You As He Holds You
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.
The word for “the morning” there is the Hebrew “shackahr” which refers to the sunrise, or the morning light - which takes place in the East.
Parallel to that in the next line is the Hebrew word “yawm” which refers to the sea that was to the West, the Mediterranean Sea.
So we can’t ascend high, or deep, East or West, and the implication is - in any direction, because “even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.”
The idea of God leading is not unfamiliar in the Psalms.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.
And later, in this chapter, we’ll see David again asking for God to lead him. But here, the text has a slightly different tone than in verse 24.
That word “lead” in both verses is the Hebrew “nawkhaw” and it means to bring or to guide.... but there’s a slightly more gentle tone here than the request of verse 24.
What David is saying, to this point, and taking last week’s message into account, it’s “God, you know me, and I can’t run from you. Even if I try, you are going to bring me back to You.”
A few weeks ago, in our Wednesday evening class, Joel had us practice sharing our testimony, and I shared with the class, there were times when I thought God was done with me in ministry, and I was so unhappy with him, I resented Him for that.
Because I’d sacrificed my plans, my wants for my future. I’d went into crushing Student Loan debt at a Bible college in North Dakota, when I could have went to Eastern Illinois University and been classmates with Tony Romo. I’d moved to Indianapolis to become a youth pastor, and at that point I could no longer even enjoy a church service.
There were days I would drive to work, and I would pray, “I hate that I believe in you. I want to be free of you, God, because if I could just convince myself that you weren’t there, I could be rid of You, and I could move on with my life.”
I was so miserable.
But even there, in the front seat of the Toyota Corolla I still drive, I would feel the Holy Spirit whisper, “You don’t really mean that,” and I’d clench my fist and drive to work and by the time I was driving home, hear myself whimper, “God I’m sorry. I don’t think I meant that. I didn’t mean that.”
Maybe you’ve never been in a place like that, but if you ever are, believe me, He still pursues you. If you’re in that place now, the fact you’re hearing this message is evidence of that. He is still there, seeking you, searching you, seeing you.
He is guiding you back to Himself.
And what does He do? He holds us. “and your right hand shall hold me.”
The fact that it is the right hand is significant. It was the hand of power and authority, which we see in Psalm 118.
Glad songs of salvation are in the tents of the righteous: “The right hand of the Lord does valiantly, the right hand of the Lord exalts, the right hand of the Lord does valiantly!”
It is a hand of protection, which we see in Isaiah 41.
fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
It should also be pointed out, that it is the side of the throne from where Christ is seated.
But from now on the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God.”
Peter tells us Christ is there, He
who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.
If He holds us in that right hand, if He has us there, what does that tell us?
We’re safe! We’re protected!
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?
Nothing, no one can separate us from Him.
We’re held in the hand of power by the Almighty!
That’s not to say we won’t suffer, or have problems in this life. We most assuredly will, but when we are in Him, we’re safe no matter what comes our way!
Paul warns Timothy,
Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it
It’s interesting, when Covid-19 caused us to close down the building for a couple of months, I probably got a dozen emails and texts and Facebook messages with another Psalm, people saying, “Pastor, you should read this. It’s so good.”
Psalm 91. We did a whole devotional series on our YouTube about it. I’d never studied it and at first glance, man, it was so reassuring.
But you know what I learned? That first half of the chapter? It’s about God saving us from His judgment.
He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.
He covers you with His pinions, and under His wings we find refuge, from what? All those things mentioned are what comes upon people who suffer judgment from Him. Those who are disobedient and under a curse.
Read Leviticus 26, if Israel wants a blessing, they must be obedient. If they fall into disobedience, they receive a curse. You want to avoid God’s wrath, be obedient.
But the message here, what the Holy Spirit is inspiring David to tell us in Psalm 139 this morning is, even when we are disobedient, that curse, those things that we bring upon ourselves, it is only there to draw us to Him.
So He can hold us, so He can be our fortress, our refuge amidst all the hurt, all the pain, and all the suffering.
Pastor, being under wrath or under a curse doesn’t sound like a loving God to me. Why would I want that God to hold me?
The writer of Hebrews answers:
It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.
For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
I’ve shared some stories with you all over the past couple of years about my time as a Probation officer, in the juvenile division in Indianapolis.
When I left the unit that worked every night in the streets and took a desk job, I was shocked by how much paperwork I had to do. We used to have to write these reports called, “Pre-Disposition Reports” or PDRs.
And I’d interview the family, call the school, any friends or relatives I could to get an accurate picture of a kids home-life, and the report was huge, dozens of pages, but by the time I sent it to the court, the Judge would only read the last page of the report and then decide to do whatever he wanted anyway. Maybe it just felt like that a lot of times. It was a depressing job.
I bet I did about 150-200 of those reports throughout my time there, and I can tell you this. Out of all those reports, in which I would have to ask a parent, “How do you discipline your child at home?” only one or two ever actually did.
Gee, I wonder why they were sitting in my office.
A good, loving Father disciplines His children, and when we understand that is what God does, we can rest in His loving embrace.
That’s not to say we won’t suffer, or experience any pain, but when we do, He is holding us in His arms as we walk through it with Him beside us, and woe be to anyone who stands in His way.
So the question we ask is, if He holds us like no one else can, why do we still try to escape his grasp? Are we so arrogant to believe we’re still capable of doing everything on our own?
III. God Sees You As He Is With You
III. God Sees You As He Is With You
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
The NASB translation says, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me”, and some translations even read “bruise” me. It’s understood that those who translate it that way believe the darkness to be a metaphor for distress.
And that’s possible, because the actual Hebrew word for “cover” is, “shoof” (Not to be confused with “shoov” which means “to turn”), but shoof and it means to bruise, or to crush. The darkness crushes me...
The Hebrew word for darkness, “khoshek” is often used as a metaphor for misery, destruction, sorrow, and even death.
Here’s what’s interesting, though. All throughout the Psalm so far, David is writing as though he were intentionally running from God. This whole time.
Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?
But here, at the end of this section, his wording changes slightly. “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me (or crush me), “ we are meant to hear and understand there’s a feeling of hopelessness in those words.
I’ve ran, and I’ve fled, and I can not escape You, God, and now - perhaps - the consequences of my actions are catching up to me and the darkness envelopes me to the point it hurts, it’s bruising me, it’s crushing me…
One scholar wrote, “it seems to indicate some sort of peril that will separate him from God.”
But, isn’t that what he wanted?
No. Not really, if we’re honest with ourselves. As CS Lewis would write:
“There are two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”
...
Jesus tells the parable of the servants and the talents in Matthew 25, and while the Master is away, one servant takes his 5 talents and turns them into 10 and
His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’
And so it is for the servant with two talents. Yet for the servant who had one… and went and hid it, and did nothing with it…
But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed?
And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
Into the “darkness”. Remember, last week, I mentioned to be in hell (not Sheol) is to be absent from the presence of God. David gets a glimpse of that here in Psalm 139, and it terrifies him. Even the light of daytime surrounds him like night.
But the hope, that God still sees us…
even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
As John’s Gospel tells us,
In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
In Him there is no darkness. In Him darkness can not exist.
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
How beautiful that victory over the darkness. When He is with us, and we are with Him! How glorious it will be.
Revelation speaks of a day where we won’t even need the sun or the moon to give us light, because God will provide the light for us.
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.
And that’s not the beautiful part of Scripture. That’s the hope we have for tomorrow, but that’s not the reality of today.
The reality is, the beauty of Christianity is not that one day I die and get to go to heaven, the beauty of Christianity is that God stepped out of Heaven to be with us.
And He sees us, He fills us, He still finds us, He holds us, He still lives within us and through us, bearing the fruit of His Spirit in our lives. If, indeed, we are in Him.
Matthew, quoting Isaiah, called Him “Immanuel”, which means “God with us.” (Matthew 1:23) and that light shines inside all who call Him Lord.
God is with us like no one else can be beside us, but do we welcome Him, do we want that relationship, that intimacy with Him?
Conclusion:
I hope you understand your worth to God. You’re not Issue #15, or one of a limited number of prints. You’re one of a kind, which we’ll get more into next week.
But, Before we close this morning, know this...
Because of who He is, because of His unfailing love for us, because of His faithfulness, He pursues us, He holds us, and He remains with us. He will never leave you.
There are always going to be days you may not feel like a million bucks, but you’re not that Topps baseball card, you’re not a Spider-man comic, you’re not a piece of jewelry.
You’re worth far more than that to Him. You’re worth the cross for Him.
For God so loved YOU, that He gave His only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in Him shall have everlasting life. (John 3:16)
No matter what you’re going through, no matter what hurt you carry, He sees you, and He loves you, and He wants to hold you in His arms and walk alongside you through it.
He is not done with you, and even when we’ve stopped breathing, we can’t be done with Him. Such is the love of the God who sees you. El Roe Ee
Stand with me today, as we go to close in prayer.
If you’re here and you realize God sees you but you’re in a place you need to see Him - maybe to see Him move, act, or just make Himself known...
If that’s you we’d love to pray with you, or pray for you. I’d ask the prayer team to begin to make their way to the front.
I’m going to dismiss in prayer, but if that’s you, if you need an increase in your faith, you feel far from Him, whatever it is. He sees you. Let’s pray.
PRAY