AP

Psalm 139:5-7  You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me.  Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.  Where can I go from your Spirit?  Where can I flee from your presence?

To the modern ‘liberated’ reader of Scripture, David’s observation here is not good news!  For the last 50 years we have been ‘liberated’ from the restrictive ‘tight-jacket’ of oppressive Victorian morality that dominated us for over a century.  We are now ‘free’ to make our own determination of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ – no-one else has the authority to direct our path in life.  For modern man, to say of God, “You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me” would not be followed up by “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”.  Today it would be more common to follow it with, “The adoption of such a  world view is too awful/restrictive/ridiculous for me, it’s not even worth contemplating, it doesn’t allow me to be myself, to do me, to be really free, to live life to the full.”

But for those of us who take Jesus at his word when he said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10), and have experienced the truth in real life of the promise, “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36) the derscriptors ‘too wonderful’ and ‘too unattainably lofty’ are barely strong enough to explain what it means to us on a day-to-day basis that God ‘hems me in’ ‘behind and before’, and that I am unable to ‘go from his Spirit’ or ‘flee from his presence’!

The more we make a mess of the social structure of our sin-torn world with our ‘me-do-me’ philosophy of life the more we will come to realise, perhaps too late, that King David was right – we do need to recognise the value of, and the lasting comfort that comes from, letting our all-powerful, all-loving Creator ‘lay his hand upon us’ and acknowledge our dependance on him to run our lives in every detail.

My sympathies lie entirely with George Matheson who wrote: “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free, force me to render up my sword and I shall conqueror be.  I sink in life’s alarms when by myself I stand; imprison me within thy arms and strong shall be my hand.  My heart is weak and poor until it Master find; it has no spring of action sure, it varies with the wind.  It cannot freely move till thou hast wrought its chain; enslave it with thy matchless love and deathless it shall reign.  My power is faint and low till I have learned to serve; it lacks the needed fire to glow, it lacks the breeze to nerve.  It cannot drive the world until itself be driven; its flag can only be unfurled when thou shalt breathe from heaven.  My will is not my own till thou hast made it thine, if it would reach a monarch’s throne it must its crown resign; it only stands unbent amid the clashing strife when on thy bosom it has leant, and found in thee its life.” (It is the same George Matheson who, at the young age of 29, lost his eyesight, and consequently lost the love of his life, his fiancee, and sat down and wrote: “O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee”.)

– Bruce Christian