The Mirror
Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts;Psalm 139:23 NASB
Search me– Don’t forget the context. We have a tendency to pull this verse from its context in the psalm and concentrate on the emotional appeal for God to look deeply into our hearts to purify us. In other words, we apply the verse to our lives as if David were writing about our own inner need for transparency. Over the years, my previous investigations of this verse have often followed this usual approach.[1]
Now I want to step away from the penchant to apply these words and ask the exegetical question: “What was the author thinking about when he wrote these words and what did the original audience hear him say?” To answer these questions, we need to involve the entire context of the poem.
We’ve noticed that the poem moves along a deliberate trajectory. It begins with something close to Job’s complaint. “How can I have any real freedom if You Lord have determined everything in advance? Where is there any space for my own personal development if everything I do and everywhere I go is always surrounded by Your presence?” That complaint follows a logical course that leads to a nearly nihilistic view of life. “What’s the point of trying if God knows everything about me before I was born?” But at the moment when we expect the Psalmist to throw up his hands in existential despair, a shift occurs. Without warning, the Psalmist breaks into praise, extolling God for His awesome creative power exhibited in the cosmos. He just can’t help himself when he considers the magnificence of creation. Instead of continuing down the road toward defeated cynicism, he is suddenly overwhelmed by the competence and control of God. Even if he can’t find space for a private world, the very fact that he can’t find that space only underscores the incredible mastery and authority of the Creator. And that’s enough to make him break out in Hallelujahs.
Then something else happens. Like Job, the Psalmist suddenly realizes that his prior complaints could be received as insults to God. After all, his thoughts challenged the divine design of the universe. Like Job, he needs to find a way to make amends. Job confessed. David declares that God’s enemies are his enemies. Affiliation becomes a sign of acceptance and shifts the focus from personal complaint to justice. In this way, the poet hopes God will excuse the original affront and welcome the writer on the basis of common enemies. Perhaps the invitation of “Search me” isn’t quite the spiritual summons of purity that we thought. Perhaps what David is suggesting is that God examine his motives to make sure that he isn’t counted among God’s enemies.
David chooses the verb ḥāqar (to search, investigate, examine). This is the same verb used in the opening verse, bringing this song to a close. ḥāqar acts as the bookends of the story. David opens with a complaint that God observes the complexity of the human heart, making him feel trapped by such knowledge, and now he ends with an invitation to allow God full access to his inner world. The initial unease has turned to submission.
Perhaps David’s journey in this psalm is ours. We start with the emotional sense of constraint. God just knows us too well. There isn’t any breathing room. But as we work through our emotional experience, we discover that we really do want a God who executes justice, and that God needs to know the hearts of men. In the end, we can’t have it both ways. We can’t have our own hidden soul-space and have a God who carries out perfect justice. We have to settle for what matters most: that the wicked don’t get away with it. That leaves us with only one question to answer: “Am I among the wicked?” The answer can’t be found by looking in the mirror. The answer requires God’s perfect and exhaustive knowledge of all of me. In the end, omniscience is a requirement of justice.
Topical Index: ḥāqar, search, justice, Psalm 139:23
[1]If you care to read them, you might see the pattern and the progress:
https://skipmoen.com/2009/08/silenced-alarms/
https://skipmoen.com/2007/10/the-acid-test/
https://skipmoen.com/2007/10/elective-surgery-2/
https://skipmoen.com/2006/08/inviting-examination/
I think David started the Psalm out by wanting God on his side, but he ends it by realizing that he wants to be on God’s side. I think he realized that God’s side has all the good stuff!
I agree totally. I thank YHVH that he does truly know the hearts of men and how wickedly deceptive they can be.
Am I to understand that David comes to the realization that through his quest to secure his free will, he wills for God to be omniscient?
will for God to be omniscient? No, maybe realizes that God’s omniscience is something more than he thought
Thank you Skip Moen for availing yourself to Adonai Eloheinu so he can speak through you to me. Psalm 139 is one of my all time favorites. You NAILED what I know to be true and I am so thankful a God likes ours exists and is real and cares for me in sprite of myself. Shalom!
The big question for all of us is WHEN did we first
realize our Creator was as much a part of us as we
are ourselves? Like David, we hate to admit that fact
when we’re in a negative mind set, and rejoice about it
when all systems are go.
The greatest facet of this, is that He purposely leaves us
to our own devices . . . yet gently leads us to the saving
Intents of His heart.
It’s nice to think we’re on our own.
It’s far greater to know He’s engraved us in the palms of His hands.
To that process is what David says in Psalm 51:6 – ‘but you desire truth in my inward parts.” The kidney’s, the filtration system for our deepest darkest feelings – motives. He’s the only ‘Sifter.”
I think the answer CAN be found by looking in the mirror, but only if what I see there isn’t distorted, but is as God sees. What I see reflected there (through His spirit) is one who IS among the wicked and deserves God’s justice…an enemy deserving annihilation. Yes, I tremble in fear of the execution of His sentence, but I find no justification, nothing deserving of His consideration of anything but destruction. That is the reflection of what I see in the mirror—and that reflection is true.
But scripture tells me there is another principle, a different law, by which I may have the hope of receiving liberty from that destiny I have seen reflected in the mirror. James referred to it as “the perfect law of liberty”, and it, too, reflects reality. But I must take care not to turn away from what I have seen reflected in the mirror, lest I make God’s grace merely that which enables me to do as I desire.
In Messiah “loyal love” and “truth” encounter one another; righteousness and peace (shalom) kiss. The death of that One serves to appease God’s wrath toward me, cover my sin, and justify His choice to look upon me, an enemy deserving annihilation, with mercy, and—even to me—extend His grace.
Ultimately, the one question I must answer through the actions and activities of the life I have been given is, “In the context of the liberty I have been given, to whom have I demonstrated ‘loyal love’?”
Yes, and in the end omniscience is a requirement of justice.
I was doing okay on your comment until I came to the “serves to appease God’s wrath.” Are you sure that this penal view of atonement is truly biblical? It was created at the time of the Reformation and owes a lot to the Catholic view of law (which is based in a Roman view). The early Church fathers didn’t even embrace this view and the Tanakh has a much wider range of meanings to atonement than this. Is God really “mad” about sin, so angry that He is willing to destroy it all (as Genesis 6), or is there something else going on that shows His intense love for what He has created, so powerful that it overcomes what we think of as “deserved” punishment? If the Hebraic view is about wholeness and opposes the Christian concoction of “sinful nature,” then appeasement is more like the pagan divinities than like YHVH.
Thanks, Skip, for your helpful challenge…paradigmatic thinking has its weaknesses! Actually, I haven’t really explored the idea of atonement very deeply from the Hebrew context…only as it’s been purveyed in the Christian paradigm. Your comments have once again challenged me to perform my due diligence. “Iron sharpeneth iron”…(and yes, we are “united/together” on this)…thank you, brother!
I have learnt much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and most from my students.
Rabi Hanina, Ta’anit 7a.