To Know Me Is To Love Me

"To Know Me Is To Love Me"
Psalm 139

In the cartoon, Hagar The Horrible, Hagar is lamenting how no one really knows him.  “Look at me!” he shouts, mainly to himself.  “A devoted father, a loving husband, a hard-working Viking, a kind employer, an honest taxpayer--and what does it get me?”  He looks around, then continues:  “Nobody listens to me anymore!  My children think I’m strictly from the dark ages.  My wife turns a deaf ear to everything I say.  And I could talk myself blue in the face but my crew ignores me.” He pauses, then finally says, “Doesn’t anybody care?  Doesn’t anybody listen anymore?!”
Then a voice comes from the clouds and says, “I’m sorry; what were you saying?”

Psalm 139 is one of my favorites.  The psalm’s themes are fairly clear.  It is mostly about how David, the Psalmist,  sees things differently than Hagar.  If David were to talk to Hagar the Horrible, he would tell him about how God thoroughly pays attention.

David has discerned that God knows everything about him.  Whether David, whether we, would care to admit it or not, his relationship to God is a relationship of intimacy.  David would tell Hagar that God is the one who is always there, always ready to listen, always ready to respond.

David’s first line in the psalm expresses that.  He starts out by acknowledging to God, “LORD, you have examined me and you know me!”  The word “know” in Hebrew is an interesting word.  Part of the meaning has to do with the sexual relationship between a man and a woman.  In the Garden of Eden story in Genesis, we are told that “Now Adam knew Eve his wife…”  (Genesis 4:1).  Just looking at the words, we might reply that we sure hope he knew her; they were the only humans around.

In the Christmas story, Matthew tells us, concerning Joseph and Mary, that, “...he knew her not till she had borne a son…” (Matthew 1:25).  Again, just looking at the words, we might ask, “How could Joseph not know her; they were engaged!”

In both instances, though, the term, “know,” is the Hebrew term which describes the intimacy of the sexual relationship.  In Psalm 139, David the poet is using this term, and taking it out of the sexual context to describe the intimate knowledge that God has of him--of all of us.  God knows all about David, inside and out.  God sees the big picture of who David is.  God’s relationship with David, and David’s relationship with God, has extended itself beyond the merely superficial and the surface.

In an online magazine I was reading, there was an interview with a Chinese actress who was trying to make it in Hollywood.  She was asked about some of the differences she saw between the cultures of the United States and China.  One of the things she answered struck me.  She said, “In China, we take time to get to know each other.  We spend great amounts of time in conversation with other people we want to know well.  Here, in America, you meet someone once, and they assume they know all about you.  Everyone is in such a hurry; how can anyone really know anybody else?”

What an interesting observation.  What she has put her finger on is the real lack of the kind of intimacy that I’m trying to describe.  How fearful we are to be known; to disclose ourselves, our deeper feelings and emotions; to let down our guard, and be willing to share both dreams and frustrations.  In a word, to know and be known.  Especially in our relationship with God.

Intimacy with God, or with anyone else takes time.  Instead of building it slowly through a process of conversation and just being with each other, people go for the “full monty” right away.  They do the quick strip tease and think they have really accomplished intimacy.  But far from anything intimate has happened.

One humorist said, “If you want to be happy, never hold hands.  Holding hands leads to kissing.  Kissing leads to marriage.  Marriage leads to talking.  And the first thing you know you’ve said the wrong thing.”

Reading through this Psalm 139, ponder all the ways that a deeper knowing has been grown between David and God.  Ask yourself, “How many people have I allowed to “search me and know me”--to know it all?”  How many people have known when you sit down in entrenched defiance?  When you sit down under life’s weariness?  How many people know when you rise up in joy?  Or when you rise up in protest?  How many people have you traced your journey of life with, describing the places you have stopped and settled, including all the decisions, the ins and outs, that have brought you along to where you are today?  How many people know you so well, that if you were asked a question, they would know the words you were forming in answer?

I think about Royal and Shirley Elder, seventy years together.  Married when they were 20 years old they’ve been by each other’s side for 70 years.  I hope to God I just make it to my 70th birthday.  I will never be by anyone’s side for 70 years.  Not many of us will be so fortunate.  I was lamenting that to a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago--that there isn’t one person I have walked with a majority of my life.  Just a person here and a person there for me.  There is no one whom I have known my whole life, who really knows me, save God.

The great fear in creating intimacy is that we won’t be loved if we open ourselves to someone else.  Once someone else knows my ins and outs, they won’t like me.  I will be spurned.  If I am known for all of who I am, then I might be seen as unloveable.  Once all my secrets are out, with someone I trust those secrets with, instead of empathy and understanding, I might have to deal with their disillusionment.  Which might come out in anger, disgust, or fear.  Yes, there’s a lot of risk in intimacy isn’t there.

That’s why I like this Psalm 139 so much.  One of the unspoken sentiments I hear coming through David’s poetry is wonder:  wonder that even though God knows him with such utter thoroughness, David still feels loved by God.  I think that’s what’s behind the words in verse 6:
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high, I cannot attain it.

David isn’t writing about God’s general knowledge, and how God knows so much that it’s incomprehensible.  David is being specific here about what God’s knowledge is all about.  It’s about David.  God knows it all--about David.  God understands it all--about David.  God sees it all--about David.  It blows David’s mind.  It blows my mind.  Because it’s not just about knowledge.  It’s about love.  It’s about knowledge and love, mixed together.  We fear that knowledge and love are like oil and water: no matter how much you shake them together, they’re never going to fully mix.  But what is just so awesome is that with God, knowledge and love are inseparable.  With God, you can’t have one without the other.  Amazing.

So we probably share David’s inability to understand how such a relationship could exist.  We demonstrate that by never attempting to see if it could really happen.  We remain lonely people, afraid to be really known, and therefore, really loved.

We hunger to be known, to be loved, to know intimacy.  But we are afraid.  We hang on the fence, standing on the side of loneliness, gazing at the side of intimacy with great longing, but never quite getting to the point of opening the gate and walking through to that other side.

We will never know what it is to be really and totally loved, until we have allowed someone to “know it all” and therefore love it all:  the good and the bad, the light and the dark, the beautiful and the ugly.  “Do you love me--because all of this is me?”  Or do you only love the part that you think is lovable, or worth loving?

On one of singer, songwriter Carly Simon’s albums there is a song that says:

I have no need of half of anything
No half time, no half a man’s attention…
Don’t give me fountains,
I need waterfalls
And, when I cry, my tears’ll fill an ocean
The pain of love, I’ll accept it all
As long as you’ll join me in that emotion
Half of lovin’ is no fun
Give it all, give it all to me
I can stand it
I am strong that way.

This notion, this reality, that God knows all about us, and yet still loves us, deeply, is almost too disturbing for David.  Thoughts of escape begin to germinate:  “Where can I go to escape your spirit?  Where can I flee to escape your presence?” David writes.

How can we be so adamant in our disbelief of love in full disclosure?  Why, instead of embracing such love, do we run away from it?  Push it away?  Try and pull darkness like a blanket over us and disappear, as David tried with God?  And when he found himself, safely hidden away in his darkness, in some remote spot of his denial and loneliness, covered there under the blanket of his incredulous imagination, on flicks a little light.  It is God, under that blanket with him.  Smiling.  Saying, “Hi; here I am.  Thought you might like a little company.”  And we are probably a strange mix of being half mad and half glad to see the Lord, who just won’t let us alone in our self-misery.

The psalmist discovers that God is going to go to great lengths to let us know that He cares about us.  That God will never let us out of His sight, no matter how much we think we need to hide, or how far we think we need to run; no matter how unloving we might be feeling, or how unlovely and unloveable we think we are.

David seems to be admitting that there are times he wants to be alone, even from this ever-loving God.  Even though David may have that desire, he recognizes the other undeniable fact:  he can’t get away from God, even if he wanted to.  Whenever David feels he desires greatest distance from God, he must still face God, face his sense of unloveableness, with this ever-present God.  There’s no getting away.

Adam and Eve, after their disobedience, are our everlasting examples.  They think they can hide from God behind a swash of bushes.  They did what God told them not to do: pick the forbidden fruit.  So they hid, as if they were hiding from disappointment and death itself.  That is what God had come to represent to them.  Feeling isolated, lost from their intimacy, thinking themselves unloved and unloveable, they run away.  They wait behind their bush in their fig leaf underwear for the inevitable.

But then the surprise.  God knows all.  They know He knows all.  They have tried to flee “ to heaven...to the world of the dead...to the wings of the morning…or to the uttermost parts of the sea.”  Anywhere.

But when God comes, He looks at the now vulnerable couple and sees them through the eyes of knowing.  That they are still known and loved, not because of them or what they did, but because of who God is.  God must have seen from the beginning that if He was going to love the people He had made, He’s going to have to love them for all that they are, and all that they aren’t, or may never be.

To know and allow yourself to be known, to love and allow yourself to be loved like that is at the heart of this kind of Godly relationship of intimacy.  It’s what it means to be close to the heart of God.