Third Presbyterian Sunday Morning Bible Study - July 18, 2021

Below is the Bible Study written by Jim Rudiger for his Sunday School Class which meets at Third Presbyterian Church, Norfolk, Virginia. It's based on Psalm 139:1-6, 13-16, 23, 24.

I’ve got a secret.  Want to hear it?  One of the fun things about being around other people is having secrets.  Remember way back in the days of black and white TV the show called “I’ve Got a Secret?”  A person would come on the set and whisper a secret in the moderator’s ear and the secret would be flashed across the screen so we knew what it was.  Then three panelist would have twenty questions that could only be answered by “Yes” or “No.”  When one panelist got a “No” the next panelist took up the questioning.  After twenty questions the panel would try to guess what the secret was.  It was a very popular show.  Why do you think that show was so popular?  

Here’s why.  Most people love to be in on a secret.  To know a secret means that you know something that others don’t know.  Having knowledge that others don’t possess gives you a sense of power over others.  That’s why those tabloids at the check out counter of Food Lion are bought.  Those papers are letting you in on a secret.  Did Britney Spears lock the door to her finances?  That Nostradamus predicted that the world would end tomorrow.  But there is a problem with knowing a secret.  How will people know you really have a great secret if your lips are sealed and you threw away the key?  You see, having a secret is only fun if you are the first person to tell another person what that secret is.  I go up to Jim Dasilva and say, “Jim, I heard something about Garland the other day.”  Jim asks, “What did you hear?”  “I can’t tell.  It’s a secret.”  Now what happens is I have to now make Jim realize that it is a secret worth knowing so, I say something like, ”Boy, it really bowled me over when I heard it.”  After a few more tantalizing statements like that and I have Jim hooked, I reluctantly begin answering his questions about the secret with “yes” and “no” responses.  After all, I have to be honest with Jim.  He’s my friend.  And what have Jim and I ended up playing?  “I’ve Got a Secret.”

Now there are certain rules about secrets.  When you tell somebody a secret, you have to recognize that it will be a secret for maybe the next 24 hours, tops.  When I was a teenage boy, the worst thing that could happen to a boy was to be turned down by a girl for a date.  To get over the turn down, I would seek the support of a buddy by confiding in him the humiliation I had just endured.  This humiliation was told to my buddy, Ralph, only after he had promised the mandatory “lock up his lips and throw away the key” demand.  Generally, the lips became unsealed before the bell for the next class rang.  I knew that Ralph had betrayed me when another  buddy would come up and laughingly tell me, “I heard Jackie turned you down AGAIN!” Now there are people who when told a secret really do put it in a locked box.  I was married to one of those people.  You could shove burning bamboo shoots under her fingernails and she wouldn’t talk.  Now, I will never know what her friend, Pat Moore, whispered to her at our wedding. 

Secrets come in all sizes and can be bigger than life and more important than who turned you down for a date.  This is a true story.  Only the names have changed, because I forgot the names.  In 1945 a sixteen year old boy was a messenger in Washington DC.  One day he was given a cablegram and told to deliver it to the White House.  On the way, he got hungry and stopped at a diner for an order of pancakes.  Some of his buddies were there and so, after the pancakes, he hung out with them and horsed around for a while. Then some teenage girls came in and he spent a lot of time flirting with them.  Finally, he jammed the cable in his pocket and took off for the White House.  He got stopped by the police for making an illegal U turn and after a long lecture by the cop, he was allowed to continue on to the White House.  He arrived at the gate of the White House and turned the cable over to the guard who took it up to the President’s secretary.  She took it into the Oval Office and handed it to President Truman.  That cable was from the government of Japan accepting America’s terms of surrender.  This secret message ending the Second World War had been entrusted with a hungry, amiable sixteen year old boy whose only interest was filling his stomach and hanging with his buddies.  This story was made into a movie called “The Messenger.” He died eleven years ago at the age of 76 and nobody ever gave him a secret message in his last 60 years.

Probably the people you kept secrets from the most were your parents.  For some reason, parents always wanted to know what you were doing and you knew that if they knew, the fire works would start.  What is the hardest secret that you hid from your parents?  If you think trying to keep secrets from your earthly parents was hard, wait until we study today’s lesson about trying to keep something from our heavenly Father. You see, God has a personality characteristic called Omniscience Being omniscience means:

(1) He is aware of all our thoughts.

(2) He knows everything.

(3) His understanding has no limits.

(4) Nothing can be hidden from Him.

That’s pretty impressive.   A Gallop pole taken a few years back reported that of the 82% of Americans say they believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God.  Only half of them could name one of the four gospels and less than half knew who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.  In today’s world with so much of our personal information stored some where in a government computer data bank, all sorts of people know a great deal about what we like or dislike, what our plans are, even some of the most intimate things about us. What do you think about so many people knowing so much about you? We seem to know so much about each other but know so little about God.  But, God knows even more about us than any Google search would turn up. In fact he knows us better than we know ourselves.  In today's study well see just how much he knows about us.

Psalm 139:1 O Lord, you have searched me and known me.  2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up.  You discern my thoughts from far away.  3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.  4 Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.  5 You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.  6 Such a knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

The psalmist starts out saying God has done what? Searched him.  Does that mean God gave him a pat down or put him through a full body scan?  He is saying that God has literally dug into every area of his life, turned over all the rocks and found all of the skeletons hidden in the closet. Does it bother you that God knows more about you than any living person?  Most importantly,  he knows all your weaknesses. Further, he says that God “knows” you.  Now this doesn’t mean know about you or have some facts identifying you. This means that God knows you and I intimately. These are the same words that the Bible uses to describe the relationship between a husband and wife. For a husband and wife to “know” each other is for them to see the other uncovered, to have contact and feelings which are not shared with another person. So our understanding of God’s knowledge of us is that it is so deep and personal that we stand totally exposed before him.

In Victorian times, parents would put a picture of a giant eye on the wall of a child’s room.  Under the eye was written, “God is watching.”  Why did they do that?  This was meant to scare the child into not doing something bad when the parent wasn’t there to see him.  I employed a similar device with my kids.  When we were raising our children, they were aware when they were in trouble. They said that I gave them “the eye.”  My eyes would narrow and I would fix my gaze on them - not saying a word - and they knew that they were in for it. I never knew what they expected me to do or what the follow-up to “the eye” should have been, but, it always worked. Like the Victorian children, we need to know that God is keeping his eye on us.

The psalmist says that God knows when we get up and when we go to bed. He knows all of our thoughts and he knows this even when we place him out of our lives - we push him away from us. I want you to think of something about Christmas, I’m not going to ask you what it is, just something you haven’t been thinking about this morning. Got that thought in your head?  The psalmist says that the thought you just had about Christmas, God knew about it centuries ago.  Before you were born or your parents were born.  Before there were the pyramids or dinosaurs, God knew that precise thought you just had. Not only you but all of the different thoughts of everybody reading this study.  In fact God knows the individual thoughts of everybody everywhere. God not only knows every thought we have but evaluates that thought and reflects on the effect it will have on us and on other people. Every impact that the thought could have is considered by God.  Before the words ever formed in our brain, God knows what we are going to think. Isn’t that something?

Don’t you know people who just blurt out what ever is on their mind, let the cards fall where they may? We say, “That’s how she is.  She speaks her mind.”  Some times we hear someone say something and we think that they spoke without thinking, you know, stepping on the gas before getting the car in gear.  But, the psalmist says that while she may not be thinking, God is and knows she is going to say it.

But this brings up another point. If God knows everything we think even before we think it and everything we are going to say before we say it, then why pray? Prayer isn’t news or a late breaking update on our lives. Even though God knows the situation and what is going to happen, prayer allows us to have a conscious fellowship and sharing with God and just maybe we will find something out about ourselves or our relationship with God and others. We get to verbalize our concerns and reflect on how those concerns are impacting on our relationships with God and others.

Just think about this.  All of those secrets, all of those weaknesses that we have worked so hard to hide from other people is like putting them on God’s 6 o’clock evening news program.  Is it fair that God should know everything?  I mean if I could hide some things from God, he might like me a little better. 

Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and immediately did two things.  They realized that they were naked and made some clothes out of fig leaves.  No Walmart stores in the Garden of Eden.  Second, they hid from God because they were ashamed of what they had done.  God went for a walk in the garden.  He always does that in the cool of the evening, and right away noticed that Adam and Eve weren’t around.  He said, “Come out.  Come out.  Wherever you are?”  Now God knew where they were.  It was his way of getting Adam and Eve to face what they had done wrong.  Adam and Eve tried to hide their secret from God, but it didn’t work.  And it won’t work for us either. The lesson is that we not only can’t hide physically from God, we can’t hide our innermost secrets and feelings from God.  God knows us intimately and completely.

In verses 7-12, the psalmist zeros in on God being omnipresent.  What does omnipresent mean?  Being everywhere all at the same time.  You know what that means?  God doesn’t need a GPS because he knows how to get there because he is already there.  God being everywhere didn’t bother the psalmist.  What mattered to him was that God was present with him wherever he was.  There was no way to escape God’s presence. 

The psalmist says that he can ascend into heaven. Now he is not planning a weekend get-away in heaven. He is speaking about those “heavenly times”, those times when everything is going great, everything is really clicking. Everything we plan goes off like clock work. He says that during those good times, God is there. Not only then, bur even if the palmist makes his bed in hell, God is there, too.  Again, he isn’t talking about a literal trip to hell. He is talking about those” hell on earth” times that we all have sometimes. Like being forced to watch Japanese cartoons on TV when the grandchildren come over. What are some of your “heavenly times” and the “hellish times”?

We've talked about how the people back then were really afraid of the night and darkness.  The psalmist brings up fearing darkness and tells God, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me becomes night.”  He’s talking about his most fearsome times.  The black days of his or our life.  Not even darkness or the most terrifying times can keep God away from us.  After all, God is the inventor of light and darkness. To him they are one and the same. John writes that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. We generally think of light as goodness and dark as evil.  But, God can use evil as a tool to achieve what He wants. From darkness and chaos, what did God create? The earth.  So, while some of us may be accused of being in the dark, God cast such a bright light on us that everything is clearly exposed.

Psalm 139:13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb.  14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  Wonderful are your your works; that I know very well.  15 My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.  16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.  In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

The psalmist doesn’t see himself as the product of a natural biological process.  Darwin hadn’t been born yet, but, the psalmist was not buying that humans were just the result of a random mixing of sludge and water.  He knows better than that.  He was the result of the will and work of a gracious God.  A lot of time in the Bible, God is depicted as the potter.  Remember the hymn where we sing “You are the potter and we are the clay.”  The psalmist uses another occupation to describe God’s efforts.  God did what?  “Knit me together in my mother’s womb.”  Among other things we discover God is a weaver.  Apparently, God did some work before then because in verse 15 God is described as doing some weaving in the depths of the earth.  There was belief back then that God made the fetus somewhere else and then put it into the womb.  The psalmist says this somewhere else was the depths of the earth.

The psalmist confesses that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Have you ever had to assemble something?  Later on you have to replace something like the batteries and because you put it together you know what pieces to take apart to easily put in the new batteries.  The replacement is easy because you put it together, you made it.  You know how it works.  That’s how God works with us.  He put us together so he knows exactly which pieces fit in and where they fit. He knows how we work.  What evidence do you see that supports the view that we are fearfully and wonderfully made? Look at our bodies. The heart is about the size of two balled up fists and yet it pumps ONE MILLION barrels of blood during our life time and this only accounts for the time when we are resting. During times of stress or exercise, the heart will pump ten times more blood than when it is at rest.  By-the-way, God didn’t make us fat.  We did that the old fashion way.  We did it all by ourselves.

Psalm 139:23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.  24 See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.",

In verse 1 the psalmist says that God has searched him. Kind of like searching him without his permission.  Now what does he ask God to do? To search him, only, this time he wants it to be a continuing process so God can keep on weeding out undesirable thoughts and activities. The psalmist  wants to know where he can improve and that can come only if God continues to monitor our lives and work with us. If there is something wicked coming our way, let us know so that we can purge it from our life. The thought is that God is a God who was, is and will remain an active participant in our lives. And we should want Him to remain that way. After all, He has read the last chapter in our lives. That's the one secret we really aren’t anxious to hear.  What better person to advise us than some one who knows all the right decisions and actions that we should take. It beats asking Dear Abby for advice.

The psalmist wasn’t afraid to be judged by God.  When he asks God to see if there is any wickedness in him, it wasn’t because he felt that he as pure as the driven snow and wanted to impress God with his righteousness.  No.  He recognizes that he might not be free of the wickedness that he saw and hated in other people.  He knew that God was more than a judge.  He was a shepherd who will not only judge, but, lead his sheep along the right safe path.

Last week's study dealt with death which let's us know that a psalm isn't always an uplifting song.  In the real world there are bad hair days.  So, for the last psalm we will study, I wanted to leave on a positive note.  If the organist will hit a positive note, here it is:

We Americans put a high value on privacy.  We don’t like anybody to invade that privacy, so, we guard crucial information about ourselves.  Little secrets about what we have done or thought. I’ve got a secret.  In fact we all have secrets.  But after studying this psalm maybe we aren’t as secure in those secrets as we thought. God is watching.  He's the big eye on our wall.  He knows everything about us including the bad things, but you know what?  God still loves us.  People today are sick from loneliness, but we never have to feel alone because God is everywhere and will not leave or forsake us.  In spite of all of our secrets, the fact is - not that we believe in God - but, that God believes in us. Is that a wonderful God or what?

*Ping* (positive note)

Prayer: Father, we are in awe when we think about all the attributes about you that we have studied today. We can’t comprehend how you read the secret places of our heart and still love us.  Thank you for being steadfast in that love and not giving up on us.  We lift this prayer up in the name of your precious son, our Savior, Jesus Christ.