This Psalm appears to accompany the previous one. It is like the feast of unleavened bread attending on the Passover. For there the grace, here the holiness, of our calling in Christ Jesus is set forth. For light is light of God, comforting the sinner but rebuking sin.
The believer begins by confessing the terribleness of the fact that God knows him. This was overwhelming to a soul duly convicted of sin. But he finds full relief and occasion for praise in this, that he knows God—knows Him, too, in the mystery of the grave of Christ and the new creation there (Eph. 2:5). This is the fearful, wonderful workmanship; Eve taken out of the sleeping Adam. This at once puts praise into the lips, the desire of further purifying into the soul, and a readiness, not a fear, to be searched out by the inquiring “word of God” (Heb. 4), that no leaven may be found in that which is now consciously an Israelite’s dwelling. The sense of the richest grace is thus in company with the exactest jealousy of holiness (Psa. 138-139). The passover and the feast of unleavened bread are still together.
Perhaps there is no place in the Scriptures of old where the mystic oneness of Christ and His saint is more distinctly owned.
NOTE—The human body is, we know, treated as the symbol of the Church or mystic Christ. Both have been fearfully and wonderfully made. And this “great mystery” is looked at in this Psalm.
It is heard as on the lips of Christ Himself (Psa. 139:14-16). For personally, if I may so express it, Christ is heard in these verses. The theme was so worthy of His own lips and of His own personal presence. The convicted saint, led by His Spirit, had, as we have observed above, owned the searching light of God, and it was solemn to the soul (Psa. 139:1-13); but now, having listened to this welcome and cheering interruption from the lips of Christ (Psa. 139:14-16), he goes on with his meditations and communion, but in the full relief of one who had, in spirit, drunk in the refreshing of such a mystery (Psa. 139:17-24). And now the happy saint can desire (in his love of God and of the holiness and righteousness of His power) present spiritual judgment of himself and the coming destructive juagment of evil. He invites that searching which the convicted saint had dreaded.