Advent 2025, Week 3: Psalm 139, Part 2
This guest post is by Molly Stouffer, a ministry student at Regent University.
In Psalm 139, verse 11, David writes, “Darkness shall cover me.”
The word, “cover,” in the Hebrew is the same word that’s used all the way back in Genesis 3:15, when God is speaking to Adam and Eve, after they sinned. God tells them that their offspring “strike the head of the enemy.” This is the first time God refers to someone who was going to come and save the world. It is the first message of the gospel. The same Hebrew is translated “strike.”
In Psalm 139, that word is translated “cover.” This gives us the sense that the darkness that’s described here is like a thick, heavy blanket that’s laid across us, covering all sense of light. David is painting a picture for us.
In the previous post, I asked you to imagine a scenario of being in a dark, strange room in the middle of the night. I’m going to keep revisiting that scene to help us understand what God’s trying to say in Psalm 139. For example, I mentioned that David seems to be writing about hiding in the darkness. But is this verse really about fleeing? Having this impulse to just go from God? But go where? I don’t think it is.
I don’t think we can flee. All of Psalm 139 is about how deeply, personally God knows us. The verses leading up to verse eleven talk about this overwhelming and always present God.
That’s our God. His presence. His spirit. We can’t flee from it. Look at what David writes in verse 7, “Where shall I go from your spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?” His point is that we can’t flee.
Then in verse 11 he acknowledges that idea, almost as if David is joking by saying, “The dark is so piercing, and I can’t see anything. Even the light feels dark.”
David here has finally been crowned king. And he’s experiencing God’s light after what may have been many countless years of waiting. So, this verse isn’t a desire to go away from the Lord.
It’s this introduction and this acknowledgement of the reality of God’s omnipresence, his constant never-ending, never-ending, never-changing presence. He never leaves us. There isn’t anywhere that we could go to flee from him.
On the blog last year, we studied the life of David. He had his fair share of moments where he might have wanted to flee far from God. And yet, in every moment of his life and in ours, God is present.
When I say this, you’re likely going to feel one of two things. The first being that you’re going to have a sigh of relief moment where your shoulders kind of drop and you let out a sigh. You can acknowledge in your heart that “God’s never going to leave me. There isn’t anything I could do to make him leave.” And that’s a comfort.
But on the other hand, the second option is that you might tense up a little bit. You may bite your lip or grit your teeth or have a feeling of anxiety in your chest. Knowing that you can never flee from God might make you worried. You can’t hide from him. You can’t disguise yourself or put on a mask.
But at the same time, you could be feeling both relief and anxiety. We can’t put on a disguise from him because he knows us and he will never leave us. His presence is constant.
That feeling, knowing that we can’t put on a disguise, goes both ways. We can’t pretend to be something that we’re not, whether that’s good or bad, because God sees us at a heart level. And whether your disguise is something you would disguise as Christian or not, God sees you at your heart level, beneath everything.
This may be a comfort to you that you don’t have to put on a get up, that you can come to him exactly as you are right now, and he’ll lovingly embrace you. Or it might be terrifying that God sees you exactly where you are right now. But I want to encourage you, though, to lean into that first feeling that we have the ability to come to him right now.
Whether we’re broken or not, we can come to him exactly as we are in this moment. We don’t have to put on an act. Find peace in the fact that your maker loves you and knows you so deeply and personally. His light sees through us, and he knows us down to the depths of our souls.
And that truth leads into the next verse of Psalm 139, which we’ll study in the next post.
Photo by Ahtziri Lagarde on Unsplash
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