Search me, O God and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! - Psalm 139.23-24
“Search me! Try me!”
Why would anyone call on God to do such a thing to him? One would assume that the last thing a person wants is for God to search and try him. Who wants to be so thoroughly scrutinized, judged and tested by the omniscient one? And yet, here at the conclusion of Psalm 139, David makes this incredible invocation.
God knows Everything
Psalm 139 is a great statement of God’s omniscience. God’s omniscience means that He knows all things. He does not gain any new knowledge, for there’s none for Him to gain and he does not forget anything. This coupled with his omnipresence, the fact that he is everywhere present at the same time, means that man is always in God’s presence or under God’s searching gaze. This knowledge ought to have a restraining and even sanctifying influence on the saint. And yet, for many saints, this truth has barely any bearing on their day to day lives. They still live as if God were not observing their every deed. Not only so, for many saints, the last thing they want is to invoke the searching gaze of God onto their hearts and thoughts.
Why does the theoretical knowledge of Divine omniscience fail to inspire us to live lives of godliness and devotion before Him? A possible explanation is connected to two other of God’s attributes, namely His invisibility and his patience. The perception of people seeing us is more immediate and obvious to our senses, thus it has a more immediate force in restraining us. However, because we don’t see God, we don’t see Him seeing us. This tends to suppress our mindfulness of God. Additionally, being exposed by fellow human beings tends to have more immediate consequences. However, because of God’s patience with us, the consequences may take time or even come in eternity. The feeling that though God sees, yet doesn't seem to do anything, contributes to our lethargy in this regard.
How might we remedy this in ourselves? In Psalm 139, David meditates deeply on God's knowledge of him. He begins ‘O Lord, you have searched me and known me!’ By searching David, we cannot conclude that God is exercising his mind to discover some previously unknown facts as this would contradict Divine omniscience. The one who is exercising his mind here is David. He is the one coming to terms with the fact of God’s complete knowledge of Him. There isn’t a word, deed or thought of David that God doesn’t see coming (v.1-6) and there isn't a location in the entire cosmos that David could go to hide from the eye of God (v.7-12). He is known right from his development in his mother’s womb.(v.13-16) He hates the wicked who suppose that God doesn’t see what they do and hence live murderous and malicious lives. David recognizes that God not only sees what he does and says, God even sees his thoughts and motives. He is always completely bare before him. There is no escaping the gaze of God.
Why God’s Knowledge of us is Good News
It is after having canvassed the depth and breadth of God’s knowledge of Him, that David then comes to the end of the psalm, where he asks God to search him and try him. Not only has he become deeply mindful of God’s omniscience, He wants it pressed and applied to him. This brings us full circle to our question at the beginning: why would David call on God to search and try Him? Well, because in his meditation on God’s omniscience, he had come to see that there was no point in trying to live in any other way. It would be a futile exercise to try hiding his actions from the Gaze of God. So, he is constrained by this knowledge to live honestly before Him. But he is aware that living honestly before God requires a scrutiny of his heart to ensure that all is as it should be. David doesn’t always know all that is in his heart, but God does. And so he seeks to recruit God’s omniscience as an ally to his goal. He wants God’s knowledge of him to further expose what was bent in him and thereby aid him in walking the path of life. He wants God to make him more consciously aware of anything in his heart that needs amending. He is not hiding from omniscience, rather he deliberately is subjecting himself to it.
David, therefore, teaches us that we must engage our minds in continuous theological reflection on God’s omniscience and omnipresence. The more we think on the subject, the more it will become a part of our conscious daily existence. The deeper our meditation, the more real to our faith his omniscient knowledge of us will be. His invisibility and patience will, therefore, not be barriers to our grasping the reality of His presence with us always.
Pressing on into God’s Knowledge of Us
Like David, we should also pray for God to press an awareness of his omniscience on us. He is able, through different kinds of providence, to heighten our awareness of His presence with us and knowledge of us. In the gathering of the saints, for example, He is often pleased to cause the preaching of his word to come with such piercing insight and applicability as to cause us to be overwhelmed with a sense of his presence among us. Sometimes God directs a preacher to so speak as to cause us to wonder if the preacher was watching CCTV footage of our lives from the previous week!
When God reveals us to ourselves, He is sharing snippets of His knowledge of us with us. He does so that we might make war against that which is wayward in us. He also reveals us to ourselves so that we might rejoice in His grace. Dear saint, sometimes, God reveals you to yourself so that you may see how you need to grow. Other times, He reveals you to yourself so that you may see how you’ve grown and praise Him for His work in you. In doing so, God in his omniscience becomes an aid to our sanctification. May we lean into this grace for our good and for His glory.
