Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

Psalm 139 sits in the last stretch of the Hebrew songbook, the section traditionally called Book Five (Psalms 107 to 150). Its heading names David, and the psalm reads like the work of someone long used to being watched and weighed by others, which much of David’s life clearly was. The first half is almost uncomfortable. God knows when I sit and when I rise. He hems me in behind and before. There is no dark deep enough to hide in. For a lot of us that is a threatening thought before it is a comforting one. Then, partway through, David turns from being fully known to being carefully made, and the temperature changes. The God who sees everything is the same God who formed me on purpose. Verse 14 is the hinge, the point where being exposed turns into being in awe. Reading it inside the whole psalm keeps me from lifting the line out as a slogan. David has sat with the harder half first. The wonder comes after the being known, not instead of it.

The word that trips people is ‘fearfully’. We hear anxiety, dread, something gone wrong. But the older sense here is closer to awe and reverence, the sort of quiet you feel under a clear night sky, not the fear that makes you flinch. So ‘fearfully made’ means made in a way that ought to stop you in your tracks, not made in a panic. Sitting beside it is ‘wonderfully made’, and that word belongs to the same family of language the Old Testament keeps for God’s most astonishing acts. David is not paying himself a compliment. He is putting his own existence in the same category as the wonders of God, which is a bold thing to do about your own body. The shape of the sentence matters too. He calls the works wonderful, then adds, almost stubbornly, ‘My soul knows that very well.’ He is not arguing the point. He is settling it.

David is not the only one to speak this way. Genesis 1:27 says we were made in God’s image, which is the dignity sitting underneath every other claim. Jeremiah 1:5 has God telling the prophet that he knew him and formed him before birth, the same hidden craft David sings about. Then Ephesians 2:10 picks the thread up on the far side of the cross and calls us God’s workmanship, made for good works he prepared in advance. So Scripture keeps coming back to the same idea: we are made things, not accidents, formed by hands that know what they are doing. And here is where it reaches Christ. The Maker of Psalm 139 did not stay at a distance from the bodies he formed. In Jesus he took one on. The God who knit David together in the womb was himself carried in Mary’s. The hands that formed us were, for a while, the working hands of a carpenter. The wonder David feels at being made is answered by a Maker willing to be made like us.

I want to be honest about where this verse actually has to work. Not in a service, where it is easy to nod along, but on an ordinary Tuesday in front of the bathroom mirror, or after a comment that landed wrong, or on the mornings when getting up feels like more than the day is worth. I have sat with people who could quote this verse and not believe a word of it about themselves. That is exactly the gap David names. He does not say ‘my soul agrees’. He says ‘My soul knows that very well’, down in the place where our harshest verdicts on ourselves usually live. What helps me is to treat the line as a fact about my origin rather than a report on my mood. My feelings about myself swing wildly. Where I came from does not move. I was made, deliberately, by someone who does not make rubbish. On the bad days I borrow David’s words out loud, slowly, until the head sentence sinks far enough down to become a soul sentence. Sometimes that takes years rather than minutes. That is allowed.

Here is something the verse quietly undoes. Most of us are taught, early and often, that we are worth what we produce. Good marks, useful hands, a tidy CV, a body that looks a certain way. Value becomes a wage, and we spend our lives anxious about whether we have earned this month’s. David’s wonder runs the other way entirely. The worth he sings about is settled before he has done a single thing to deserve it. Look at where he places it: at his making, in the womb, before the first achievement or failure could be logged against his name. A newborn has produced nothing, and we do not love a newborn less for it. The making itself is the dignity. That is the difference between worth you achieve and worth you receive. One you have to keep topping up, and you can always run dry. The other was handed to you by the Maker, and it does not rise and fall with your output this week. I find this almost too good to hold on a tired day. I did not earn my way into being wonderfully made, so I cannot fail my way out of it either.

The verses on either side of this one are worth slowing right down over. Just before, David pictures God forming his inward parts and weaving him together in a hidden place, somewhere as dark and secret as the depths of the earth. Just after, he says God saw him while he was still an unformed substance, and that the days of his life were written down before a single one of them had happened. Sit with that for a moment. I was watched, and attended to, and known, at the stage when there was nothing finished to show. No skills yet, no reputation, no good behaviour, nothing anyone could grade. The Maker was already there, unhurried, over the rough draft of me. This is where the verse reaches the days I least like myself. My harshest verdicts about me assume that love only turns up for the polished version, once I have got my act together. David says the opposite. The one who saw me at my most unformed, when I was barely begun, is the same one who looked at the work and called it wonderful. He did not wait for the finished me before deciding I was worth the making.

I have watched this verse hauled into public arguments it never asked for, “knit together” and “fearfully and wonderfully made” printed on a placard as though David were setting out embryology. He was not. He was a man long past his own birth, undone that he existed at all. Whatever you hold on the questions people load onto these two verses, and I am not pretending they are small ones, the psalm is a man singing to God rather than a case being made, and it buckles a little every time we press it into service as one.

We do a gentler version of the same thing closer to home. We hand it to someone at war with their body, or their face in the mirror, or a diagnosis they never asked for, as though the words could do the work of years by themselves. On a mug it turns into a slogan about self-esteem with the Maker quietly edited out: you are wonderful, and nobody wonderful left to be wonderful for. David is not telling himself he is fine. He is telling God he is grateful, and that difference is the whole verse.

The order of David’s sentence is the order of the talk, and it is the reverse of how most of us build one. He does not declare himself wonderful and wait for the feeling to turn up. Thanks comes first: “I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” The fact is the ground and the feeling is asked to catch up later. So do not open with self-esteem and reverse into theology by minute fifteen. Open where he opens.

Four things I would insist on if you are the one giving it. Read from verse 1, and read the first half in a voice that admits it is frightening before it is kind, because the wonder is the far side of being hunted down and found. Do not stop at “wonderfully made” for the tidy ending; the last line is the one people actually came for. Somewhere in the middle, tell them about a time you agreed with this verse and did not believe it, because a room can smell instantly whether you have crossed that distance yourself or are describing it from a map. And leave a proper silence after “My soul knows that very well.” Someone three rows back is doing hard arithmetic on that sentence and will need the time.

I would read it at a christening without a second thought, over a baby who has done nothing yet to earn anybody’s love, because that is exactly where David aims his wonder. I would use it at the funeral of someone who spent forty years at war with their own body, read slowly, an answer arriving too late for them and not too late for whoever is sitting at the back doubting the same thing.

I would not use it in the hour after a diagnosis, when a parent has just been told their child’s body will not do what other children’s bodies do. Said then it sounds like an instruction to be grateful for grief, and the honest thing at that bedside is a chair and your mouth shut. Nor in the weeks after a miscarriage, where the knitting in verse 13 can land as a wound rather than a comfort. Timing is not squeamishness here. It is part of telling the truth.

Most of us picked up, without ever agreeing to it, a picture of ourselves as a soul lodged inside a body, a ghost driving machinery it did not choose and cannot quite trust. So “My soul knows that very well” gets heard as a spiritual compartment nodding along while the body carries on doubting itself. I read it that way for years. But the word under “soul” here, nephesh, does not point at an invisible passenger. As best I understand it, and I am no Hebraist, it means the whole living creature: breath, appetite, the lot. Genesis 2:7 reaches for the same word for the man who became a living soul the moment breath met dust. Not a soul installed into a body afterwards. A body that had become one, all the way through.

That makes verse 14 a harder sentence than the tidy version, and a better one. David is not reporting that his spirit has quietly assented to something his hands and his gut still dispute. On his terms there is no compartment to file it in. If the knowing is real it has to be as whole as the making was, which is why I cannot get away with holding this as a nice thought upstairs while the rest of me carries on disagreeing. And something else follows, which took me a long time to see. If the soul was never a passenger, then whatever God has in mind for me at the end cannot be a spirit finally escaping the body it got stuck with. The body was never the cage. It was the me.

Where I get stuck is not verse 13 but verse 16. David says he was seen while he was still unformed, and that his days were written in God’s book before a single one of them existed. As comfort that line is gorgeous, and I have leaned on it. Stand it beside a cot in a neonatal unit and it turns over. If the body was knit on purpose, were those few days written on purpose too? People who love this psalm as much as I do answer that differently. Some hear a script fixed in advance. Some hear a Father who had already noticed and numbered a life nobody else would get long enough to count. I am not going to pretend I can settle it for you out of four lines of poetry.

What I will not do is quietly shrink the verse so it only covers bodies that turned out well. That is not what David wrote, and it is not what those parents need handed to them either. Some griefs this psalm walks straight into and does not walk back out of, not on this side of things. The closest I can get is thinner than I would like to offer: David never put verse 14 forward as an explanation of why bodies fail. He put it forward as a claim about where every body, failing or not, came from. That mends nothing. It only refuses to let the ruined ones be reclassified as accidents, which on some days is the entire difference between grief and despair.

Job reaches for David’s picture and does the opposite thing with it. In Job 10 he tells God that those hands framed him and fashioned him, that he was fashioned as clay, that he was clothed with skin and flesh and knit together with bones and sinews (Job 10:8 to 11). Knit. Our English Bibles put the same word in Job’s mouth that they put in David’s at Psalm 139:13, and Job spits it back. In the same breath as the craft comes the accusation: yet you destroy me. Same hands, same skill, opposite verdict.

Job has not stopped believing he was made well. He is furious precisely because he believes it. Careless hands he could shrug off. Deliberate ones mean every wound was aimed. That is the bill attached to David’s wonder and almost nobody mentions it when they print verse 14 on a canvas, because being carefully made means somebody was paying attention, and attention cuts both ways.

Set beside Job, Psalm 139:14 stops being the only honest response available to a person who believes he was carefully made. It is one. Job’s fury is another, and the same Bible keeps both without apologising for either. That steadies me more than it troubles me. The one conviction comes out of me most weeks as thanks and some weeks as Job’s question, and neither reaction proves I have quietly stopped believing what David believed. I have prayed both inside a fortnight. I used to think that made me inconsistent. Now I think it makes me someone still convinced enough to argue.

Here is what I missed for years, reading this the way it usually gets served up. Look at how fast David stops talking about himself. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” is one clause. One. Then straight away: “Your works are wonderful.” Plural. He has stepped off himself onto everything God has ever made, and he is gone. A few lines on he is trying to count God’s thoughts and giving up because they outnumber the grains of sand (Psalm 139:17 to 18). That is the briefest stay on the self anywhere in the psalm, and we have built an entire self-esteem industry in the gap.

I do not think David could have written a verse about how wonderful he was and stayed parked there, because the wonder was never really aimed at him. It was aimed at the workmanship, and he happened to be one piece of it. That is the whole distance between “I am wonderful” and “look what he made”. The first collapses the moment somebody you find credible tells you that you are not. The second does not depend on you at all, which is exactly why it holds on the days you cannot stand yourself. If you want this verse to bear weight, you have to let it do what it does here: mention you, briefly, then take your eyes off you.

It is tempting to read verse 14 as the place the psalm has been heading all along, wonder as the finish line after that unnerving opening about being hunted down and found. It is not the finish. Five verses on, David is asking God to kill the wicked and telling him he hates them with perfect hatred (Psalm 139:19 to 22), and it lands like a door slamming in a quiet room. I want to skip it every single time. Then, right at the end, he does something braver than either the wonder or the fury. He takes the searching that unsettled him back in verse 1 and asks for more of it: “Search me, God”, and know my heart, and see whether there is any wicked way in me (Psalm 139:23 to 24).

That arc changes how I hold verse 14. The wonder does not settle David into being pleased with himself. It does the opposite. Having been amazed at the care he was made with, he does not conclude that he must therefore be fine as he is. He asks the maker to keep looking, further in, at the parts that are nothing like wonderful, including the hatred he has just said out loud and not taken back. Being fearfully and wonderfully made turns out to be the reason he can bear being searched again, not a reason the searching should stop. We lift this verse out and let it stand in for the whole psalm, and the psalm will not have it. It hands you the wonder, and a few breaths later it hands you back to the searching you thought you had already survived.

• Where in my life do I quietly believe I was a mistake, and what would change if I treated my making as a fact rather than a feeling?
• David moved a truth from his head down into his soul. Which true thing about me am I still only agreeing with from the neck up?
• Who around me has stopped believing they were carefully made, and how could I gently name that wonder back to them this week?
• If the God who formed me also sees everything about me, is that mostly a threat or a comfort, and why?

If you want to keep going, you could read this psalm in its place among the rest of the Psalms, or find words for a particular day over at verses for how you feel.