For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works! Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth. Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are thy thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand. When I awake, I am still with thee.
Psalms 139:13-18 RSV
“For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.”
In this division, the psalmist praises the miracle of conception and birth as a marvelous work of the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent God.
“I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalms 139:14).
There is no more wonderful work of God in the whole universe than a human being.
Each human body has trillions of cells falling into some five classifications, and recent research into the mysteries of the DNA, the effective element in conception, has added almost incredible dimensions to the wonder which men already had identified, but which is a million times more wonderful than anyone ever dreamed it was until the discoveries by such noted medical doctors as Dr. Elton Stubblefield, a director of such research at the M. D. Anderson Hospital in Houston.
Dr. Elton Stubblefield recently declared in a public address that each cell (and, remember there are trillions of them) at the moment of conception is supplied with a library of one quarter of a million words commanding that cell exactly how many times to multiply, and when to die.
That is the reason one’s nose is not as long as that of an elephant!
In view of this knwoledge, and it is only beginning to be unraveled and deciphered, one must admit that the words that stand at the head of these two paragraphs in Psalms 139:14 are the greatest understatement on earth.
“The lowest parts of the earth” (Psalms 139:15), “depths of the earth” in the RSV. “This is an idiom for the darkness of the womb and does not carry any mythological implications.
Depths of the earth’ is a metaphor for the deepest concealment, in the hiddenness of the womb.
Psalms 139:15 here is connected closely in thought with Psalms 139:13 where we haveknit together.’
Here the words curiously’ orintricately wrought’, take the image a bit further, suggesting the complex patterns and colors of the weaver or the embroiderer.
“In thy book they were written … even the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was none of them” (Psalms 139:16).
Another pertinent reference is that of Hebrews 9:27, “It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment.” There is nothing accidental about man’s mortality.
If it depended merely upon chance, now and then, there would be someone to live a thousand years, but it is not a matter of “chance” at all.
It is the ordained will of God for men to die.
This passage declares that the psalmist’s days were preordained by God and visible to Him long before they had actual existence.
Any unscriptural view of rigid fatalism falsely based upon these words should be noted. Any such view that robs man of his personal responsibility is biblically untenable.
Concerning the foreknowledge of God, it has the same relationship to human events that the knowledge of them after those events has.
Thus, a man’s knowledge of “what happened yesterday” is in no way related to those events as cause.
In the same way God’s knowledge of “what will happen tomorrow” is unrelated to those events as cause.
“How precious thy thoughts … unto me” (Psalms 139:17).
David moves on in this verse from contemplating the nakedness of his own thoughts before God to the consideration of God’s innumerable thoughts toward him.
The Davidic authorship of the psalm should be noted here.
“More in number than the sand” (Psalms 139:18). Read this verse in the light of the cellular statistics of a human body under Psalms 139:14, above.
Multiply 7,000,000,000,000 cells (the estimated number in a single human body) times 250,000 words for each cell.
Psalms 22:9 RSV
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