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.

• 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.