Advent 2025, Week 3: Psalm 139, Part 3
This guest post is by Molly Stouffer, a ministry student at Regent University.
I’ve been trying to learn how to crochet since 2023. People who aren’t familiar with knitting or crocheting might see them as the same thing. I disagree entirely.
I can kind of do crocheting, but I’m not good. I gave some of my earliest projects as gifts to my boyfriend. I look at them now and think they’re really bad.
Crocheting is tough, but knitting, oh my goodness, that’s a challenge. If any of you can knit, kudos to you.
Knitting is so much more involved. Knitting requires more needles, and there’s endless spools of yarn going all at the same time. You’ve got all these strings, all the pearls, and I don’t quite know what. It’s a lot to keep up with if you want to make something that’s really beautiful.
In Psalm 139, David talks about knitting. Before we get to the knitting, let’s remember the context. In the first half of verse 12, David writes to God, “Even the darkness is not dark to you. The night is bright as the day.”
There is no place or moment that’s too dark for God. Now look at verses 13 through 16, where David expands on this idea by describing a dark place that each of us have been before, our mother’s womb.
David uses this analogy that each of us, even the original audience and the contemporary readers today, could resonate with. The womb is this dark place that each of us have been, and David reminds us that God is present there.
Here’s how David describes darkness and the womb in verses 13 through 16, “For you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother’s womb. And I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret. Intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”
These verses describe in intricate details that God was present and forming us from our earliest moments. The passage doesn’t have to say the words, “God was with us from our beginning,” because we can read about the hands-on nature of God that’s displayed in these verses. Of course we know that God was present, because how else would he have knit us together in the womb?
The word “knit” describes the intricate and delicate creation that is you. And if that alone isn’t enough to make you smile, that God intricately created you exactly the way He intended to, think about this: He did it in the dark.
If I tried to crochet anything in the dark, when the lights come on, you’re not going to be able to tell what it is. Even with the lights on, half the time you can’t tell what I’m making.
But in this dark place here, in the womb, God saw you. In the darkness, entirely unformed, God intricately knit you together. He wove together all your parts, from how you look, to how you talk, to how you speak, the way your personality is.
In our next post, we go back to verse 12, where David explains that the dark is not too dark for God, because the night is bright as the day. But how? We find out in the next post!
Photo by David Vilches on Unsplash
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