This is a continuation of a series started here.
Designed with Care
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” (Psalm 139:13-16)
Verse 13 is a wonderful verse, and one of my favourite in the whole Bible. It begins to show the motive that we were lacking in the first sections. It shows a relationship between the knower and the knowee. Up until this point there has been a kind of detachment in the knowledge… an almost surgical understanding. God is there, He knows, He sees… but he has yet to do anything. But the picture of verses 13 to 16 is more along the lines of describing an intimate and personal knowledge. We move from a detached study, to a personal exploration… even to careful and loving interaction… from a text book study to an actual experience.
It’s like they say… “it’s one thing to read the books and do the math, study the subject and even research the system, but it’s another thing to actually get your hands dirty with it.” Medical school is great, but who would trust a doctor that has only studied the books, but has never seen a patient? Who would trust or acknowledge some one as an expert in art that had never picked up a paintbrush? How can you practice or teach law well if you have never been in a courtroom? Can you call yourself an expert chef if you only memorized all of the ways to cook, the recipes, vocabulary and conversion tables, and have even supervised other chefs, but have never actually cooked anything yourself?
Here we learn that God’s knowledge of us is not merely factual and clinical, but is also experiential and intimate. The language here conveys that even in the womb, God is designing, and knitting, and forming, not only our physical features, but also out passions as well! The words, “inmost being” are actually the single Hebrew word for KIDNEY. It says, “You formed my kidneys.” I’m sure that helps you understand this passage a great deal.
Hebrew culture saw and spoke of the kidneys in much the same way our western culture speaks of the heart. It is considered to metaphorically be the center of a person’s emotions, passions and moral sensitivity. When we say that a person has a “big heart”, we aren’t talking about the internal organ, but that the person seems to have a lot of love. I’m guessing that an ancient Hebrew would have said that a loving person had “big kidneys.”
Have you ever wondered why two twins, who are identical in appearance and DNA can be so remarkably different? One likes music, the other science. One is an adventurer, the other a book-worm? It’s because God doesn’t just stir the DNA soup that makes up a person, but knits together and designs the person’s personality, passions and interests too!
Why does He do this? Vs 16 tells us. It’s because you and I were made for a purpose and designed to be useful. And these different characteristics make us perfectly suited to serve God in our own unique way. God has a plan for you and for me. The Psalmist says, “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” His “book” (as the passage calls it) has all of the schematics for who we are, how we were made, and what our life is designed to be, and will be. In it is written who you are, and what the potential for your future can be. There is a holy register of God’s decisions and desires for your life and mine! God has the plans written out for how you are to be most effective and useful in this world and the next, how you are going to be the most happy, and the most secure in your life.
Consider for a moment what it means that you are known intimately, designed with care and precision, and were called and equipped for your life before you were born! Are you getting a sense for why David, and those in relationship with God, don’t have a foreboding sense of God’s intimate knowledge, but it causes them instead to worship? And when we open the rest of the Bible and it begins to open the revelation of how we are to live, the wisest way to relate to others and to our world, and shows us that God loves us so much that He was willing to save us from ourselves, by the work of Jesus Christ!
Question 3: What does it mean to you that you were made for a purpose and designed to be useful?
