The searching eye of the Lord is not always for the biblical writers a pleasant notion. In his agony, Job finds it ruthless. Sinners, we are told, consider it laughable and, sometimes, a paper tiger meant to scare people straight but quite powerless once you get a clear angle on things.
On the other side of things, the writer of the one hundred thirty-ninth psalm delights in God’s unlimited insight into his life. Indeed, after chronicling the impossibility of hiding from his maker, he asks for even more of it:
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my thoughts.
See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
Such is the remarkable conclusion of a poem that insists that you can run but you cannot hide, then claims that such an escape-less life is a good thing:
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can 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 settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,’
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
The writer does not signal what life experience, what existential dilemma may have roused in him thoughts of flight from God. He provides no circumstances for the hypothetical self-cursing that would call darkness over him. Such details suggest that the man has lived much or at least observed much, and that he has done so thoughtfully.
There is wonder, too, at the glory of being human and a grateful refusal to let credit for that splendor rest finally upon the creature that manifests it.
O LORD, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
O LORD, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Life lived out in this see-through way may not always be a sweet thing, the psalmist seems to suggest. There is too much darkness on the margins of this poem for us to think so. Yet it wonderful. One is so deeply known that only the hyperboles, images, and exclamations of poetry come close to saying it well.
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