What Does Psalm 139 Mean? — Spurgeon on Being Fully Known
⏱ 15 min read
You came to the Psalm because something is making you feel unknown tonight. Or known in the wrong way — known by the version of yourself you have been performing, but not by the actual self underneath. You have read the famous line — I am fearfully and wonderfully made — on coffee mugs and on Instagram tiles, and the line has not quite touched the place it was written for, because the place it was written for is a place coffee mugs cannot reach. The Psalm was written by a man who had been seen — every thought, every wandering, every shame, every kept secret — and who had discovered, on the other side of being seen, that the seeing was love rather than judgement. You came to Psalm 139 tonight because you would like to find out whether the discovery he made is available to you.
This is the slow walk. The actual Psalm in its actual paragraph, read at the speed Charles Spurgeon read it when he sat with the twenty-four verses for the fifteen pages he gave them in Treasury of David. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women holds this kind of slow reading in a daily form, if you would like a place to take the practice after the essay. For now — read slowly, because the question what does Psalm 139 mean is not a question of definition. It is a question of whether the One whose knowing is total is also the One whose knowing is safe. (If the Psalm has felt like a passage you should be able to study and have not yet learned to, inductive Bible study for beginners — a 4-step method walks the slow study of a single Psalm at the pace this essay does. If the Bible itself has felt intimidating, a beginner study Bible for women — and how to use it without being embarrassed is the doorway companion. And if the question underneath the Psalm has been the heavier one — whether God knows what to do with the parts of you that are tired beyond words — can a Christian be depressed — Spurgeon on the minister’s fainting fits walks that ground. The sibling articles in this Treasury series sit at what does Psalm 23 mean and what does Psalm 91 mean.)
Spurgeon called Psalm 139 the crown of the Psalter. He said no other Psalm sat so close to the line between awe and dread — between the consolation of being known and the terror of it — and that David, who wrote it, had walked the line so carefully that the Psalm came out the other side as worship rather than fear. Spurgeon read the Psalm as a three-movement essay on what it means to be a soul who is fully known by God and who has, slowly, learned to be at rest inside the fullness of the knowing. The slow walk below follows his.
The first movement: thou hast searched me
The opening six verses are the diagnosis. O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. The verbs are all in the perfect tense. Hast searched. Hast known. Knowest. Understandest. Art acquainted. The Psalm opens with the recognition that the knowing is already complete. There is nothing left for the believer to disclose. There is nothing she can hide that He has not already seen.
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Spurgeon is describing the inner experience that the opening of Psalm 139 makes possible — though the connection is not obvious at first. The Psalm sounds, on a first reading, like a passage that ought to be terrifying. The God who knows your downsitting and uprising. The God who understands your thought afar off. The God who is acquainted with all your ways. To the soul who has been hiding something, the catalogue is a list of disasters. To the soul who has stopped hiding, the same catalogue becomes the inventory of what Spurgeon calls perfect peace — the peace of having nothing left to defend, nothing left to perform, nothing left to be discovered later because the discovery has already taken place.
This is the part that turns the Psalm. The terror of being fully known and the consolation of being fully known are the same fact, encountered from two different sides. The fact itself does not change. What changes is which side of it the soul is standing on. The believer who is still hiding stands on the side where the knowing feels like exposure. The believer who has finished hiding stands on the side where the knowing feels like rest. The Psalm does not ask you to deceive yourself about the fact. The Psalm walks you, slowly, to the side of the fact where the rest becomes available.
There is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. The line is a relief, once it has been turned the right way around. The God you are addressing is not a God you are introducing yourself to. He is the God who has been with the words before they reached your mouth, with the thoughts before they reached the words, with the impulses before they reached the thoughts. The Psalm is naming a relationship in which there are no surprises on His side, and the no-surprises is the foundation of the kind of intimacy that the surface relationships of the modern Christian woman almost never reach. He has never been startled by you. He never will be.
For the woman who has Googled what does Psalm 139 mean tonight, the first movement is the relief. The performance is unnecessary. The version-of-yourself you have been showing people, including the version you have been showing Him in prayer, has been redundant for the entire time you have been showing it. He has been looking at the actual self underneath. He has not flinched. He has not withdrawn. He has been steadily there, the whole time, knowing the whole thing, loving the actual self the performance was made to protect.
The second movement: I am fearfully and wonderfully made
The middle of the Psalm is the famous one. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
“Come, therefore, O Lord, my God, my soul invites thee earnestly, and waits for thee eagerly. Come to me, O Jesus, my well-beloved, and plant fresh flowers in my garden, such as I see blooming in such perfection in thy matchless character! Come, O my Father, who art the Husbandman, and deal with me in thy tenderness and prudence! Come, O Holy Spirit, and bedew my whole nature, as the herbs are now moistened with the evening dews. O that God would speak to me.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. The second time, read it as a prayer.
Notice what Spurgeon is doing in this passage. He is naming God as the Husbandman — the gardener who has been tending the soul as a careful gardener tends a particular plant. The image opens the middle verses of Psalm 139 in a way the coffee-mug reading cannot. I am fearfully and wonderfully made is not, in Spurgeon’s hands, a self-esteem slogan. It is the recognition that the soul has been worked on — slowly, deliberately, by a Husbandman whose tenderness has been steady through years the soul did not know she was being tended. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret. The making was unseen by the made-one. It has been seen, the whole time, by the Maker.
Curiously wrought. The phrase is the seventeenth-century English for carefully crafted. The Psalm is naming the deliberateness of your particular construction. The body you have been carrying — the height, the bone structure, the colour of the eyes, the genetic susceptibilities, the temperament — was curiously wrought. The soul that came with it was curiously wrought. The mind, with its particular set of strengths and its particular set of difficulties, was curiously wrought. Nothing about you is accidental. Nothing about you is a misprint. The careful crafting was done by a Husbandman whose work in the secret place produced exactly the person who is now reading this paragraph.
For the modern Christian woman who has been carrying a long quiet shame about parts of her construction — the body she did not choose, the temperament she has been at odds with, the mind that processes the world the way it does — this is the verse to slow down for. The shame has been the by-product of comparing the curiously-wrought self to a version of herself she was never made to be. The Psalm does not ask her to admire herself. It asks her to recognise the Husbandman’s work in the actual self she is, and to let the recognition do its slow displacement of the shame that has been sitting in the place the recognition belongs.
Bedew my whole nature, as the herbs are now moistened with the evening dews. Hold that line. Spurgeon is asking God to do, in the middle of his soul, what God is already doing in the garden at evening. The dew is not produced by the herb. The dew is given to the herb. The soul that is dry — the soul that has been comparing itself to others, the soul that has been performing wellness, the soul that has been hiding from the knowing — is dry because she has been refusing the dew the Husbandman has been offering. The Psalm’s fearfully and wonderfully made is the dew. The recognition that you were curiously wrought by the One whose tenderness is steady is the moistening of the dry herb. The dryness lifts in the receiving. The receiving is the work the second movement is asking of you.
In thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. The closing line of the middle movement is the part that reaches the longest. The Psalm is saying that the days of your life — fashioned in continuance — were written before they began to unfold. The Husbandman has been working from a plan. The plan is not coercive; the Psalm is not predestinarian in the cold sense. The plan is parental — the way a careful mother imagines her child’s life before the child arrives, and then holds the imagined life lightly as the actual child unfolds inside it. The God who wrote the book of your days is the God who has been turning the pages with you, one day at a time, since the first one.
A pause — for the body
The Psalm has a body to it, and the body is where the fully known lodges before the mind catches up.
Sit somewhere quiet. Set the page down. Place one hand lightly over your heart, where the breastbone meets the rib cage. Take one slow inhale. Notice whether the chest is held away from the hand, or whether the breath reaches the place under the palm. The chest of the woman who has been hiding usually holds the rib cage forward and the shoulders rounded — the protective posture the body learns when the soul has not been safe to be seen. Take a second inhale. On the exhale, let the chest soften under the hand. Not collapse. Soften. The shoulders lower by a millimetre. The breath reaches the palm. Take one more breath and let it linger. Lower the hand.
That small softening at the centre of the chest is the body’s translation of thou hast searched me, and known me. The body cannot stop hiding while the chest is held forward and the shoulders rounded. The chest releasing by a millimetre is the somatic equivalent of the soul stopping the small ongoing effort of hiding from the One who has known her the whole time. Spurgeon, who knew the body and the soul met in this region, wrote elsewhere of the bosom that has stopped its guarding. The unguarding is the entry point. The fully-known is the room you walk into once the guarding lowers.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow daily lodging. One Psalm or passage per session, room to write the line that is doing the work tonight, a slow companion for the woman who has been hiding from the One who has already seen the whole thing, and who would like to begin, slowly, to let the chest unguard so the fully known can become a felt thing rather than a remembered verse. The workbook does not produce the unguarding. He does. The workbook is the place you sit while He is teaching you, again, that the knowing has always been safe.
The third movement: search me, O God
The closing verses turn the Psalm inside out. The Psalm has been the believer recognising that she is known. The last two verses are the believer asking to be known further. Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. The grammar shifts. The asking has begun.
“He is so prolific of grace, that like the sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit, his path is radiant with lovingkindness. He is a swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, as sweet odours exhale from flowers; and it always will be emanating from him, as water from a sparkling fountain. What delightful encouragement this truth affords us! If our Lord is so ready to heal the sick and bless the needy, then, my soul, be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
The closing verses of Psalm 139 are the moment the soul stops being passive in the knowing and begins to invite further knowing. Spurgeon’s be not thou slow to put thyself in his way is the practical instruction the third movement of the Psalm depends on. The believer who has settled into the fully known of the first two movements has earned the freedom to ask, in the third, for the knowing to go further. Search me. Try me. See if there be any wicked way in me. The asking is not flinching. It is the asking of a soul who has discovered that the knowing of God is safe, and who would now like to invite Him further in.
Notice the difference between the Psalm’s first verb and its last. The Psalm opened with thou hast searched me. The Psalm closes with search me. The first is past tense. The second is imperative. The Psalm has moved the believer from the recognition of an accomplished fact to the active inviting of its further unfolding. The knowing was already total. The believer’s experience of the knowing is what is now being deepened, and the deepening is invited rather than feared.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the part the Psalm has been building toward. You came in afraid of being fully known. You are leaving asking for further knowing. The shift is the Psalm’s central work. Search me, O God. The line that opens the third movement is the line worth keeping near the page in the year ahead, because the woman who learns to pray it tomorrow morning has begun to live inside the architecture the Psalm has been describing. The hiding is over. The performance is unnecessary. The Husbandman is welcome to come in further, to plant fresh flowers, to bedew the parts of the nature that have been dry, to lead in the way everlasting.
Lead me in the way everlasting. The closing phrase is the long horizon. The fully-known soul is not at the end of her road. She is at the beginning of a different one — the way everlasting, the path the Husbandman has been preparing in the book that was written before the days were unfolded. The leading is now welcomed. The walk is now under His direction in a way the performing self could not allow. The Psalm closes not with arrival but with consent — the consent of the soul to be led by the One who has known her all along.
What the slow walk actually leaves you with
So — what does Psalm 139 mean. The coffee-mug answer is partial. The fuller answer is the one Spurgeon’s Treasury of David sits with for fifteen pages: the knowing is total; the hiding is unnecessary; the curiously-wrought self has been crafted by a Husbandman whose tenderness has been steady; and the soul who has discovered all of that ends not with relief but with the search me of the woman who is ready to be led further by the One whose knowing she has finally allowed to be safe.
Hold the famous line if you need to tonight. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Spurgeon would. But hold it inside the slow walk — knowing that the Psalm is not asking you to admire yourself. It is asking you to recognise the Husbandman who has been tending the actual you the whole time, and to invite Him in further, to let the search me become the prayer the small Tuesday evenings are quietly built around in the year ahead.
That is the meaning Spurgeon read out of Psalm 139. Not a self-esteem line. The deeper consolation — that the One whose knowing is total is the One whose knowing is love, and that the soul who has settled into the fact has been given the freedom to ask for more.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each session, a short Psalm or passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the fully known in proximity to a soul that has been reaching for Psalm 139 and is, at last, ready to let it lodge.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the Husbandman, the curiously-wrought self, the search-me of the soul that has stopped hiding — into a daily companion built for the woman whose question what does Psalm 139 mean is, at last, ready to become the answer the Psalm has been holding for the souls who have lived inside it for three thousand years.
