Psalm 144:3-4—“O Lord, what is man that you regard him, or the son of man that you think of him? Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow.” (ESV) In 和合本, verse 3 is translated as “耶和華阿，人算甚麼，你竟認識他。世人算甚麼、你竟顧念他。” Who are we that God should know us? Knowing in the Bible is the language of intimacy. It’s shared relationship. Knowing someone means more than mere knowledge of that person. Knowing in the Bible carries the meaning of sexual intimacy. As Eugene Peterson said,
“The best knowledge, the knowledge that is thorough and personal, is not information. It is shared intimacy—a knowing and being known that becomes a creative act. It is analogous to sexual relationship in which two persons are vulnerable and open to each other, the consequence of which is the creation of new life…The knowing results in a new being that is different from and more than either partner. No child is replica of either parent; no child is a mere amalgamation of parents. There are characteristics of both, but the new life is unpredictable, full of surprises, a life of its own” [Living the Message. Edited by Janice S. Peterson (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 37.].
God knows us in an intimate way like Adam knew Eve (Gen. 4:1). God knows us in a personal way like we know our lovers. It’s personal, intimate, and even sexual. In such a relationship, it discourages dishonesty and yet demands transparency and vulnerability. But this kind of knowing is not so-called co-dependence. It doesn’t suffocate. It doesn’t neglect personal maturity and responsibility. In such a knowing relationship grounded in His grace, there is always a space for personal space. The older I get, the more I realize the importance of grace and space. I am often impressed by God’s relational skill to balance both. He never indulges us in grace; he never pushes us against the wall.
This idea of intimate knowing ought to have some sort of impact on our prayer. In Psalm 139, the psalmist prays, “O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my every thought when far away…Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to know!” (vv. 1-2, 7). The fact that God is all-knowing doesn’t hinder the psalmist to pray. Rather, he’s telling God what God has already known. Even though God knows it all, the psalmist keeps talking to God because praying is not informing and letting Him know about our needs. For the psalmist, prayer is relating.
“We can say that persons in human cultures characteristically practice prayer. How they pray, however, is determined by the particularity of the God to whom they pray. And because Israel, in the Old Testament, prays to the God of the exodus who is the creator of heaven and earth, we will not be surprised that Israel prays in a certain way that is required and permitted by the character of the God addressed” [Walter Brueggemann, Great Prayers of the Old Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), p. xii.].
The God of Israel is not a general god in a stolid manner up there. The particularity of God is a personal God who created and rescued. He is an unsettling God. He created in Word and rescued in Work. The psalmist knows that he is not relating to an abstract god in his prayer. He clings to God’s particularity while he is relating to Him. In another place, Walter Brueggemann said a similar thing about God,
“But of course, ‘God’ as rendered in the Bible…does not conform to either the temptation of vagueness or the temptation of settledness.” [Rather,] “‘God’ as rendered in the Old Testament is a fully articulated personal agent, with all the particularities of personhood and with a full repertoire of traits and actions that belong to a fully formed and actualized person. Such a particular person cannot settle for vagueness because the particularity has a history and an identity that remain constant over time. Such a particular person cannot accept a fixity as reflected in some forms of classical tradition, because this particular person possesses all of the dimensions of freedom and possibility that rightly belong to a personal agent. To be sure, such a rendering of God suffers all of the problematic of the scandal of particularity, as this God is embedded in the interpretive memory of ancient Israel” [An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), p. 2].
God takes the risk and being embedded in the psalmist’s own particularity. It’s not that God doesn’t know what is going on in the life of the psalmist. He knows, but He is willing to be embedded in the psalmist’s unknown. The God of all-knowing suffers from and suffers with the psalmist’s unknown. God is unsettled until the psalmist is settled in Him. Augustine said, “God longs to be longed after.” The psalmist longs for God’s longing; God longs to be longed after. Such a longing unsettles both parties.
Nice blog.
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