Psalm 139
“Where can I go to escape your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.”
Psalm 139 is both glorious and a puzzle.
The glorious part is verses 1–18. In these lines, the poet describes the inescapable presence of God—“Where can I go to escape your Spirit?”—along with God’s intimate knowledge—“Your eyes saw me when I was formless”—of the poet.
The puzzling and controversial part of Psalm 139 concerns the final part of the poem, verses 19–24. After the soaring and intimate poetry we experience in the first eighteen verses, there is a sudden turn to imprecation: “God, if only you would kill the wicked” and “I hate them with extreme hatred.”
So, how do we make sense of this? Scholars are divided on this question.
Some scholars, noting the hard and harsh change of tone between verse 18 and 19, have suggested that the imprecatory conclusion of the psalm was a later addition to the original song. I suspect this conclusion is somewhat nudged along by our modern moral sensibilities. For my part, I feel that verses 19–24 mar the beauty of the song. And a lot of public and liturgical readings of Psalm 139 do not include the ending for that reason. Added or not, the final lines of the song create significant whiplash.
Other scholars disagree and argue that the final lines were part of the original composition. The goal of these scholars is to show some connection between verses 1–18 and verses 19–24. Here is a sketch of what some of those arguments sound like. Let’s start by attending to the final lines of the song:
Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my concerns.
See if there is any offensive way in me;
lead me in the everlasting way.
Given the Lord’s intimate closeness to and knowledge of the singer, the issue of moral integrity is acute. God always sees me, and God sees me with absolute knowledge and clarity. I am under total and inescapable exposure to the gaze of the Lord. There is no place I can escape to in the cosmos, not even in the underworld, and no place within my own heart where I can hide. And so the petition: Search me. See if there is any offensive way in me. Given this request, it stands to reason that the poet would adopt a posture of hatred toward the enemies of God. Not my personal enemies, but God’s enemies.
Who are these enemies of God? They are “bloodthirsty.” Simply put, they are perpetrating physical harm and violence against people. More than that, they are justifying their violence by invoking God deceitfully and swearing falsely by God’s name. Basically, they are baptizing their violence, using God as a divine justification. Beholding this blasphemy, the poet declares his allegiance: “I hate them with extreme hatred; I consider them my enemies.”
As I have shared on Fridays when we have read imprecatory psalms together, progressive readers of these poems often display an odd lack of self-awareness. And I get it. As I mentioned above, I have always felt that Psalm 139 would be better if it did not include verses 19–24. But I understand hatred directed at bloody-handed pseudo-Christians and naming them as real the enemies of God. I feel that rage myself.
And so it stands to reason that if I were to invite God into my heart with the petition, “Search me, see if there is any offensive way in me,” the same God who sees me most clearly and intimately, and from whose gaze I cannot escape, then I should want my back firmly turned on the enemies of God, those who justify their violence by invoking the Lord. Of course, it is God’s work, and God’s alone, to deal with the bloody impostors. But it is up to me to make sure I am standing on the other side of the line.
It seems like the fact that God is all seeing/all knowing/impossible to hide from, and yet still perfectly loving and merciful, is actually the very thing that gives the psalmist the freedom to present himself in full honesty to him, even expressing intense hatred and desire for vengeance, rather than an anxious, cleaned up, performance of piety. The psalmist is free to express himself in full honesty knowing that his merciful God will search him and find any grievous way in him and lead him in the way everlasting.
In one sense, Psalm 139 demonstrates the limitations of human introspection in relation to Divine Justice. The rationalization of verses 21 & 22 of - “Hating those who hate You”, feels like a dark appeal to God’s punishing power. This is the same mindset of the Disciples who had wanted fire to rain down from heaven to consume the rude Samaritan village. Or the desire by many at the time, to crush the Romans and usher in the Messianic Kingdom, etc.. The Psalmist attitude is set in contrast to the nonselective, nonpartisan Grace of Jesus who demonstrated ubiquitous redemption for even his enemies who nailed him to The Cross – “Father forgive them for they know not what they do….” It’s a chiastic hourglass kind of structure where the Psalmist reveals the all too human propensity for retribution, once we declare the deck of intimacy with God is stacked in our favor. I’m not so sure with God, there ultimately are any “lines” that we need to stand on either side of (?) Just as the Psalmist can claim God’s intimate knowledge and presence in his own life, he seems to forget that God also deeply knows his supposed enemies intimately, personally and efficaciously and the limited temporal evil they do, although satanically reproachable, cannot ultimately separate them from His Love in the end.