My personal Psalm 139

I was given the opportunity to teach this familiar Psalm this morning for my Bible study class. At first, I was a little nervous. Not for the actual teaching so much as the ability to take an all too familiar passage and bringing a new perspective to it. I enjoyed studying the passage throughout the last 10-14 days or so and digging deeper into the heart of Psalms. I did run into a problem while I was studying and praying through the lesson.

How can I possibly communicate the proper elevation of Almighty God with only 1 hour and a finite vocabulary filled with concrete and very measured terms? David is so clearly speaking to the omniscience of God, the omnipresence of God, the omnipotence of God. Praise for our God who is outside of time and space and who fits into no box we could ever create for Him. I think I might have said this before but sometimes we have a tendency to try to make God fit into our image we have conjured up for Him, with dimensions and boundaries. We think (or hope) there must be places He goes and places He can't (or doesn't), big things He knows with small pockets of undiscovered private things He knows nothing about. When we develop these false ideas of God and who He is, we, in actuality, become idolators worshipping a "false god". We have created and images graven in our mind's eye that are at the very least, inaccurate. He is so far beyond these ridiculous parameters we put around Him.

That still leaves me with a question. How do I classify in the clearest of terms, the greatness of El Shaddai? I came to this conclusion...

You don't.

You don't because you can't possibly.

There are no words to capture the essence of our Jehovah God and the scope and space He inhabits. The only way to begin my futile attempts at understanding the greatness of God, is to try and grasp who I am, how far I fall short, and how I am truly nothing but wind-swept dust without God's own breath inflating my lungs and his right hand gently pulsating my heart every moment of every day. It is so easy for me to take for granted the basics because I do nothing to keep them sustained. They just are. And they just continue without my help. When I finally get to the point that I realize that every step I walk, every sound I verbalize, every thought that passes through my mind, and every intention of my heart is only there because of God's grace and love for me, I will perhaps have barely scratched the surface of the most elementary of understanding with regard to God's deserved place in my life.

I am going to blog on this topic more in depth this week. Tune in.