Psalm 139

Psalm cxxxix. But it is not without the most thorough searching out of all that we are. But this, where there is confidence, is a great grace; for He who alone can do it, and does it according to His own perfectness, does it to purify us from all inconsistent with Himself — His own mind, and hence with our blessedness, which is in communion with Himself. I do not think that the psalm goes beyond creation and God’s knowing perfectly His own work, though there may he a known analogy to the Church. It is the conscience brought into the sense of God’s perfect acquaintance with everything in lis. All is under His eye and He actually sees everything. It is not only He sees, but He searches. He is there with us, however offended, in all our ways. This produces uneasiness. Adam innocent could not have thought of it. There was no reflex act in himself to judge how he was going on; no thought consequently of what God had to see. He enjoyed and blessed or might have done so. But where there is a knowledge of good and evil, a reflex act on what passes consequently in our hearts, the eye of God that reaches all its recesses, knows all, makes us uneasy — i.e., makes the disturbed conscience uneasy. God is everywhere and in every corner of my heart, and darkness and light are all the same. The very fact makes us uneasy now in our natural state; for fear and moral fear has entered in and is become a part of our nature. Still, where He is known, there is confidence, and here integrity of heart gives confidence. Not here the peaceful confidence of known redemption and living in a nature the fulness of which is

Christ Himself; but the state of heart wliicli gives confidence, as being the integrity of the new nature. And this knowledge which searches the conscience is drawn from creative power. We are the work of His hands. Here it is man as man, so that the earth out of which he was fashioned at first is as the womb out of which we were born. God has formed us, be it in the womb of dust or of our mother, the place where we were nothing, before we were. The same God has ever thought of us along the road, and here confidence

pii acquired, though thus acquired it reaches to all God’s creative knowledge and power. If He sees in the dark, He keeps in the dark when we awake. and so it will be in resurrection too. We arc still with Him — He knows our thoughts, but thinks of us when we think not. Thus if God knows all our thoughts, and long before His are precious to us, to Midi the putting down of evil is the sure expectation, yea the call for judgment on the haters of the Lord, whom we therefore abhor. Christians do not desire their ruin as souls, nm- does God; but looked at as wicked, as haters of the Lord, one does desire their removal by judgment — abhors them as such and rejoices at their being taken away from corrupting and destroying the earth. But if this desire of their judg meut be holiness and righteousness, not will, we shall

the full searching out of evil in ourselves. It is tin.’ hatred of evil as under the eve of an all-seeing God. But it is exceedingly beautiful to sec this integrity of heart, broughi into the lull light of God’s presence (one” shrunk from as searching all), now it

thr thorough searching of God, that it may gel rid of the evil that it hates. Note, too, mere integrity will not suffice without God to find out evil. An honest, natural man may use his conscience, but as the natural eye must have light to search with, so’ we the presence of Him who is light. He who had kept the commandments for his own conscience from his youth up, shrunk from that which searched his heart and its motives. So we, even if desirous of knowing the evil of our hearts, bring God into the work, and seek Him to do it. If not, there is not integrity.