Psalm 139 opens with a claim stated as an accomplished fact before the psalmist has asked for anything. 1"O LORD, you have searched me and known me!" The verb "know" runs through the whole psalm like a spine. God knows David's sitting and rising, his path and his lying down, and the word not yet on his tongue. The pairs of opposites are a Hebrew way of saying "all of it" without needing the word.
That knowledge cannot be fled. Verses 7 through 12 list every hiding place imaginable, heaven, Sheol, the wings of the dawn, the far side of the sea, and then darkness itself, and close each door with the same refrain. 8"If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!" A ruler's total reach could mean something menacing. David borrows that language and turns it. 10"Even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me." The hand that cannot be escaped is also the hand that leads.
The word "for" in verse 13 is the hinge. Having said that God knows him and cannot be evaded, David explains why. It is because God made him. 13"You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb." The verbs cluster, formed, knitted, made, woven, near-synonyms circling one idea, divine craftsmanship at the most hidden and unwitnessed stage of a life. One detail is easy to miss. He was 15"intricately woven in the depths of the earth," a phrase the Psalms use elsewhere for the realm of the dead (Psalm 63:9). The womb, hidden from every other eye, is described in the language of the grave, a pairing meant to say how deeply hidden that place is.
The section ends by returning to counting. God's thoughts toward David outnumber the sand, an echo of God's promise to Abraham about his descendants, turned now from offspring to a meditation on how much God thinks about the one he made. 18"If I would count them, they are more than the sand."
This complete knowledge, more complete than self-knowledge, is already true, and the psalm means it to land as wonder. It can feel like terror to someone with something to hide and like comfort to someone who has stopped hiding. Which it is depends on whether we have run toward this God or away from him, since the fact is unchangeable either way.
The deepest comfort here is being made on purpose, in the one place no other eye could reach. Whatever you cannot explain about your body, your circumstances, or the particular shape of the life handed to you, "the depths of the earth" quietly insists that none of it was hidden from the one who formed you.
Then comes the end of verse 18, a companionship noticed. The psalmist falls asleep in a world where God knows everything, and he wakes to find that God has not gone anywhere. Long before anyone said "God with us" over a manger, this psalm had learned to wake up and find it true.
Whatever you wake into tomorrow, a hard day or an empty one, say it to him first thing. I awake, and I am still with you.
Prayer
Father, you have searched us and known us, and such knowledge is too wonderful for us. Thank you that the hand we cannot escape is the hand that leads. Where we have resented some part of how we were made, teach us to receive it as your work. Whatever we wake into, let us find that we are still with you. In Jesus' name, amen.