This will not be the detailed post I had first envisioned but I said I would post something and so I will. I really need to put boloney back on my ignore list. The fact that he's the one that brought this up just makes me loath to discuss it. I very much prefer to keep him as ignorant as possible. But for the sake of others who may be reading this thread without participating....
Psalm 139
For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David.
1 O LORD, You have searched me and known me.
2 You know my sitting down and my rising up;
You understand my thought afar off.
3 You comprehend my path and my lying down,
And are acquainted with all my ways.
4 For there is not a word on my tongue,
But behold, O LORD, You know it altogether.
The Psalm starts off with a brilliantly eloquent discussion of how well God knows us. God knows us better than we know ourselves. Indeed, God knows us better than we are able to know ourselves but He does so not because He foreknows everything but because He has access to information about us and why we do the things we do that we ourselves do not have. He designed us (as the Psalm will go on to say) and knows us in intimate ways that we cannot imagine. Notice however that David talks about things we are familiar with. He talks about how God knows what we are going to say before we say it. Anyone with a half way decent marriage understands this concept very well. I finish my wifes sentences for her and she mine all the time! It isn't because I foreknew what she was going to say eons before she said it, it just means that I know my wife and she knows me. The things I say, don't surprise her at all and in the same way only more so the same is true of God, the things we say and think and do, do not come as any surprise to God.
An excellent example of this is demonstrated for us when Jesus tells Peter that he will deny Him three times. It wasn't because Jesus peaked into the future and "saw" Peter denying Him, its merely because Jesus knew Peter very well and thus knew that he was not as strong as he pretended to be. Peter could have repented and if he had Jesus would have been astonished (as He had been before) but not devastated or disqualified as God, nor would Peter have ruined the Bible or screwed up God's whole plan of redemption. God and all of heaven would have rejoiced at Peter's repentance and interestingly the story of it in the Bible would have carried pretty much the same lesson for us that it does today, it just would have been ignored by all the Calvinists of the world, that's all.
5 You have hedged me behind and before,
And laid Your hand upon me.
God protects His own.
It is important to keep in mind that this Psalms is written from the perspective of one who is God's child. God's enemies have no such protection for it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is high, I cannot attain it.
Knowledge of what? The know of the fact that God places His protective hand upon His beloved? No, I don't think that is it. It seems to me that David here is amazed that he is one of those beloved! It blows his mind that God would have anything to do with him, never mind protect Him by placing His hand upon Him. David knows that he is unlovable and that he deserves God's wrath and that instead God calls him 'friend' and love him dearly. Such concepts are completely bereft of meaning in a world where ever action, every event is predestined by God and where there is no choice, for love is a choice.
7 Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
8 If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
10 Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,”
Even the night shall be light about me;
12 Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day;
The darkness and the light are both alike to You.
This section is easy.
If we are His, we cannot escape the immediate presence of God, no matter what. Even if we die physically, God is with us. This is, of course, not so for the unbeliever. For them, physical death (the separation of their spirit from their physical body) makes their spiritual death (their spiritual separation from God) permanent.
13 For You formed my inward parts;
You covered me in my mother’s womb.
14 I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Marvelous are Your works,
And that my soul knows very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.
And in Your book they all were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none of them.
Here David, millennia before its time, discusses with remarkable clarity how it is that God knows him so well and I believe brings up yet another detail of God's relationship with mankind that just boggles David's mind and which happens to apply to both believer and unbeliever alike.
For this section I want to quote something written by Bob Enyart for Battle Royale X but which was edited out in order to reduce the length of the post. His treatment of it is better than I am capable of and the length of it will probably prevent those who don't deserve to know this stuff from reading it in the first place.
Yes, I believe that in His book all my days were written before there was one of them (Ps. 139:16). But the Settled View has the wrong book! Even though David claims this comforting knowledge of himself, we understand that it is true of everyone, the just and the unjust. This book records the days of the unrepentant too. And God is an Author who has written many books. Christians debate whether or not everyone’s name, the saved and the unsaved, appears in the Book of Life of the Lamb Slain. But regardless, David is not speaking of that book. For the Holy Spirit inspired this, not referring to the book that documents your salvation, and not referring to the book that documents your death, but the book that documents your birth.
In verse 16, David is bragging about God’s extraordinary design of the development of the baby in the womb, but those who desperately look for proof-texts to prop up the Greek concept of a Settled future have wrenched this passage out of context, from the third stanza of Psalm 139 which is about the development of the fetus. The embryo goes through the trimesters of development not haphazardly but by direction from God.
The child forms in the womb by God’s intricate plan of fetal development, which we now know He recorded in the written instructions of our DNA, which contains step-by-step, day-by-day directions of the 280 days of gestation, which are the days that the Spirit inspired David to write about. By the context of Psalm 139, the days that are numbered are not the days of your life, but of your development in the womb.
(By the way, God did not originally design human gestation to be 280 days. After Eve sinned, God announced the curse of pain in childbirth, but this was not because He was a sadist, inflicting pain on future mothers. Rather, God cursed Adam and Eve pronouncing merciful consequences. One of these effects increased gestation to nine months. For, “To the woman He said, ‘I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children,’” (Gen. 3:16). Conception is used here as a figure for gestation, which God lengthened so that newborns would remain longer in the womb, growing stronger to survive being born into the hostile environment of the fallen world. God had already commanded them to multiply (Gen. 1:28), so this was not a reference to having more children, which is a blessing, but to a longer gestation, which leads to lower infant mortality rates and greater pain in delivery! I only mention this to illustrate that when we throw off the Greek-influenced OMNIs and IMs, we begin to realize that the Bible makes extraordinarily good sense, and that God is not arbitrary, sadistic, nor capricious, but more wonderfully obviously good and loving than we had realized!)
Even though Psalm 139:16 refers to the length of human gestation, theologians conditioned by Augustine to look for proof-texts of a settled future, so misconstrue this verse that not one Christian in 100 has been taught that the immediate context of this passage is about the development of the baby.
Psalm 139:13: For You formed my inward parts; you covered me in my mother’s womb.
God designed the process by which the baby is formed, protecting the little one (Latin, fetus) with the cover of his mother’s womb.
Psalm 139:14: I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.
David rightly is in awe of the human body, and how “wonderfully” it is “made” in his “mother’s womb.”
Psalm 139:15: My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
David praised God, for even as he developed in the womb, God could see his frame (Hebrew, skeleton, lit., bones) being knit together, “skillfully wrought,” in “my mother’s womb.” By the way, “the lowest parts of the earth” was a common Hebrew expression for “the womb,” as you can see from the reverse use of the idiom in Job 1:21.
Psalm 139:16 Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.
God saw me, who I really am, my substance, my soul-spirit interfaced to my body, all through the extraordinary DNA code which God wrote (which David had no concept of, but which as the author, God knew all about). So, from the moment of conception, “being yet unformed,” that is, just a single cell, in my mother’s womb (but not before conception!), God saw me, and knit me together, and in His book (of His instructions for my awesome development in the womb), all “the days fashioned for me,” that is, all the days which God decreed for the fashioning of a fetus, they were written and set from the very beginning, before a single day’s growth unfolded, even before the first cell divided into two, all 280 days of gestation, from that moment of fertilization!
Sam twice claimed that verse 16 seems clear that God knows “all of the days of our lives.” Let’s eliminate that possibility. Hebrew parallelism, so common in Scripture and especially in the Psalms, is the technique whereby the author repeats the same idea twice, so that we get a deeper understanding of the meaning. Parallelisms are fascinating, and there are nested parallels, and inverted parallels, but the simplest are typical couplets, as exist around the world as a standard structure of poetry (that’s why we have our English word couplet). Read Psalms through and mark the parallelisms and carefully consider them, and by the time you reach Psalm 150, you will have learned more about God than the average church member learns in a lifetime.
Psalm 139:16 is a simple Hebrew parallelism, a couplet. And Hebrew couplets, as in English, typically form a complete thought. (Rhyme however was possibly not as important in Hebrew couplets as in English, for the lines of a Hebrew couplet would “rhyme” in meaning more importantly than in sound.) We know that most chapter and verse divisions were marked by mere men, and so we can argue that some chapters or verses are poorly divided and lead to misunderstanding. But the chapter divisions in Psalms are divinely inspired. And the strong poetical “meter” and parallelism makes the Author’s verse divisions more plain, as we have here.
The two sentences of Psalm 139:16 form a couplet, speaking of the same topic, with each further explaining the other. Thus, “the days fashioned for me,” were not the days of my childhood, or my marriage, for these were the days when only God could see “my substance, being yet unformed.” For He knows what a human being is like, in the most extraordinary detail, at the moment of conception. Praise Him!
From the comprehensive answer I gave to your SLQ2, our readers can now understand what drives us to opposite interpretations here. The Open View is free to accept David’s immediate context of fetology, because it is consistent with the greater context of God’s attributes of Him being relational, good, and loving, and because we are not desperate to find a passage that proves that the day of your death is already settled.
The Settled View outright ignores the immediate context of Ps. 139:16, because it is beholden to the Greek-influenced, quantitative, lesser attributes of immutability and knowledge. And worse, Sam, Calvinists further embrace pagan Greek error by exaggerating power and control (above relationship, goodness and love), and teach that God had recorded the day of Conner Peterson’s death, and so He ordained Scott to an adulterous affair and thoughts of bloodshed, and finally, to murder Laci, all in obedience to God’s eternal, unchangeable decree. Sam, I know you love God, but you’ve read even murder into this delightful verse.
Through Augustine this Greek influence is ubiquitous. Thus the entire Body of Christ has missed out on this passage as providing biblical teaching on God’s loving care, as shown through all three trimesters of the baby’s development. And even worse, millions of believers are apathetic about the abortion holocaust. (I know, and am glad, that D. James Kennedy is not; but he’s unusual.) And so many Christians I’ve talked to in fifteen years of pro-life work (like my Calvinist aunt) tell me they’re not that concerned about abortion, because after all it’s God’s will. And by the way, to those Arminian Settled Viewers out there, please don’t quote Psalm 139:16 to refute Openness, because you’ll be propping up Calvinism; for if you ignore the Greater Context of the pre-eminence of God’s deeper attributes, and also the immediate context of fetology, then the passage smacks of Calvinistic preordination by God “fashioning” all the days of your entire life including even the day of your death!
And some even use this beautiful verse, about how God carefully designed the precious development of the baby in the womb, all nine months worth, to justify a lack of concern for the killing of the baby. After all, God has decreed the day of each death, and that includes abortions. So that means, “you might not like it, but it’s His plan for those babies to be aborted today.” For He wrote that baby’s days in His book, and they just ran out.
So in one of the greatest ironies of theology, the Settled View has turned this verse of God’s plan for the baby’s birth, into a death certificate, effectively sacrificing that little one to a pagan Greek idol.
Pastor Bob Enyart
Denver Bible Church
Thank you Bob for your insights on this awesome passage of Scripture! :thumb:
All possitive rep for the above excerpt should be given
Here
17 How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!
How great is the sum of them!
18 If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand;
When I awake, I am still with You.
19 Oh, that You would slay the wicked, O God!
Depart from me, therefore, you bloodthirsty men.
20 For they speak against You wickedly;
Your enemies take Your name in vain.
21 Do I not hate them, O LORD, who hate You?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against You?
22 I hate them with perfect hatred;
I count them my enemies.
This portion of the passage couldn't be more ironically appropriate for consideration in this thread at this time.
David, after having just exclaimed how precious the thoughts of God are to him and how he wakes up in the morning with God on his mind, launches into biting comments concerning his deep hatred for those who are God's enemies. No doubt if David were to have posted this on TOL, AMR would accuse him of being "an angry and petulant young man".
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me, and know my anxieties;
24 And see if there is any wicked way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.
AMEN!
Of course the Calvinist believes that any such wicked ways would only be in me if He had put them in me and so such a prayer in the mouth of a Calvinist is irrational and blasphemous nonsense. But if one, as Bob pointed out, reads this passage as it was intended, with God's relationship in view over and above his "sovereignty" (I put that in quotes because the Calvinist version of sovereignty is a sick joke), then the prayer is beautiful and deep with passion and meaning.
In short Psalm 139 is about the Creator God who condescends to passionately and intimately love and protect His most precious creation, which He made in His own image and likeness. It is not about predestination, it is not about foreknowledge, it does not mention the book of life and cannot in any way be rightly used as a proof text for a Calvinistic worldview. On the contrary, it is perhaps one of the most powerful expression of both God's love more His children and our love for Him. The passage is about relationship, as are virtually all of the Psalms, a concept which the Calvinist cannot rationally cope.
Resting in Him,
Clete
hiletus