For These Reasons, Lord, We Thank You! (Part Two), Part 1

Whether you're listening in the United States or any other part of the world, we want to wish you a happy Thanksgiving, not only from Chuck and Cynthia Swindoll, but the entire staff and family of Insight for Living as well. All five programs that were prepared for you this week are focused on a psalm from David. Chuck chose to teach from Psalm 139 because David's expression of worship and wonder emanates from his understanding of God's character. It's the perfect model for giving God thanks.

Chuck titled his message, For These Reasons Lord, We Thank You. We were in the first 12 verses last Sunday and we learned that God knows everything, not only everything about us, but everything about everything that is known as the doctrine of omniscience. He knows it all, verses one through six. When we got to verse seven down through verse 12, we discovered that God is everywhere at once and no more in one place than another, and always fully aware of wherever he may be, and that's everywhere, of everything that's happening. So God does not learn or discover, nor does God ever late, never delayed.

He is forever there. Today in verses 13 through 18, we're going to make a journey where the scriptures rarely go to the womb of a mother. We're going to see an unborn child being formed by the hand of God.

As we realize right down to the minutiae of that prenatal stage, God is omnipotent, all powerful, at work in the life of each one of us as we are formed in the womb. The verses are found in Psalm 139, 13 through 18, and then we'll conclude our reading with the last two verses of the Psalm. I'm reading from the New Living Translation.

Please follow along beginning in verse 13. Your workmanship is marvelous. How well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book, every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered.

I can't even count them. They outnumber the grains of sand, and when I wake up, you are still with me. Search me, O God, and know my heart.

Test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you and lead me along the path of everlasting life. The obstetrician who delivered our firstborn had a fascinating testimony. We had chosen him because he was known in the city as one of the best in his career and in his field of work. We respected him, though we really didn't know much about him, until that period of time when he worked with us as Cynthia was preparing for our firstborn, who was a little boy that God gave us. When our physician began his schooling, he was interested in the sciences, and he found that the more he studied in that field, the less he was drawn to the things of God and the more he was attracted to humanism and the things that would normally be a part of the intellectual world. In fact, he came to the place where the idea of faith in God was rather naive and unsophisticated. His years in medical school didn't help his faith. In fact, his profs almost to a person drew him further and further away until finally, by the time he graduated with his medical degree and began to practice his OBGYN work, he took pride in telling patients from time to time that he was an atheist, without question. But his career worked against him, as he put it. For he said, if not every day, certainly every week, sometimes several times a day, he found himself holding what amounted to a miracle in his hands, a newborn. And the closer he studied those features, the adorable little eyes and eyelashes and fingers and tiny fingernails and toes and toenails and different parts of this wriggling little squirming screaming creature, he realized that the design of something like this certainly called for a designer, though he never talked about that. He simply and secretly bought a Bible.

Now track me on this. Having had no teaching in spiritual things, he started with Genesis 1 and began to read through the Bible, all the way into the Gospels where he realized the one who had been predicted a number of times in the Old Testament was now fulfilling those predictions in the New as Jesus came, born of a virgin, grew up to minister to those in need, helping the sick, raising the dead, cleansing the lepers, and in fact dying for the sins of the world and remarkably miraculously bodily coming back after his death in the grave, he rose triumphant. And our physician, all alone, trusted in Christ as his Savior.

I never did, but I, thinking back, wish I would have asked him, when you got to Psalm 139, did you pay much attention to verses 13 to 18? For like no other scripture, the Lord uses those verses to take us into the most sacred place on earth where life is formed in the womb of a mother and there God is at work in an intricate, incredible way. Even though he's beginning with and initiates life when it's smaller than a period at the end of a sentence, tiny, tiny microscopic cells coming together, life forming. There's no other scripture like this as omnipotence, omnipotence pays attention to each conception, each prenatal stage, all the way from conception to birth.

God is right there. Now to make this even more intriguing, the Psalm is written not by a medical doctor and even if it had been, the study of embryology was unheard of when this Psalm was written. There were no advanced medical schools and if there had been, David certainly wasn't a student in one of them, he's a shepherd. Here is a shepherd, no doubt unschooled, who had kept his father's sheep during his growing up years. If he was schooled, it would be in the local synagogue and they wouldn't learn of anatomy there or of the things of medicine there. They would study the scriptures there if in fact he attended, for he wasn't really that appreciated by his father. You remember when Samuel came to choose the king, God had led him to the home of Jesse and Jesse paraded his sons in front of Samuel and Samuel said, the Lord's anointed is not here.

Are these all your sons? And Jesse thinks for a moment says, you know I've got one more. He's out in the field. He's keeping the sheep and Samuel said, bring him. And when David walks in, because of course David's never read Samuel, he doesn't know what's coming, suddenly there's oil running down his neck and he hears words like, the anointed one is standing before us, the one who will be king. David knew nothing more of that than he did of this, as he's led by the Spirit of God to write truth that is intriguing. And whoever gives attention to it as we want to do today, leaves realizing how carefully how carefully God has put each one of us together.

No two alike. Each one of us unique because of what we learned from these verses. So at the risk of sounding a bit pedantic at times, I'm going to do a little dissecting of nouns and verbs and pronouns and well let's take this first word, you. Verse 13 begins, you and it's an emphatic you in the Hebrew. You and no other, not nature, not mother nature.

There is no mother nature. It's God. You alone, God and God alone. And look at how the verse reads, you made all the delicate inner parts of my body. See those words, the inner parts of my body?

It's a reference to the visceral vital organs, the brain, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the liver, that which is such a vital part of our lives. You were right there, shaping, forming, placing, connecting those inner delicate parts of my body. In fact, in doing so, you knit me together. Look at your Bible, you knit me together in my mother's womb. This is the inception of life. Knit me together has in mind the idea of a of a network, like a thicket, except in this case the network is is the veritable thicket of bones and muscles and glands and veins and tendons and arteries and along with the lungs with the air later in life and as after birth and and the blood that flows through the system to cleanse and consistently flow there energizing the body. It's a phenomenal system. You put it all together.

You did that, oh God, you and none other. Several years ago I came across an interesting article titled This is You and in that article I found these words. Today your heart will beat an average of 103,000 times. Your blood will travel 168,000 miles causing 250 pounds of blood to pass through your heart. You will breathe 23,000 times inhaling 438 cubic feet of air. You will speak an average of 36,000 words.

You will move 750 major muscles and you will use seven billion brain cells. Truly we're fearfully and wonderfully made and it all begins within the womb. When you stop and realize that that speck of cells so tiny leads to all of that, no wonder David doesn't go on David doesn't go on before verse 14. He has a burst of praise to God. Thank you, he says, thank you for making me so wonderfully complex.

The message reads, thank you, high God, you're breathtaking. Body and soul, I am marvelously made. The New American Standard Bible renders this, in the familiar words, I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Isn't it true? The human body is a phenomenal blend of strength and beauty and coordination and balance and efficiency and the deeper you look and study the makeup within, it gets even more complex and intriguing. Think about it, your temperament is uniquely yours, your set of emotions uniquely given, your giftedness, your personality, your glans, your senses, your memory, your fingerprints, like no other, your DNA, like no other. All part of this intricate system made by our one and only God. I wondered if the physician, when he read those words, connected it to the very things he had been training himself not to believe in. I never ask him and so I will never know, but as we read these, David's words end with, how marvelous, how well I know this. And then he goes back, says, you watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.

Look at that. He goes where at that time in life, no one had ever gone and he looks deeply at the secret place where our frame is put together. The word means bony substance. It would have reference to the spine and the skeletal structure of our body and next you will observe, he says, it is all woven together in the dark of the womb. The term has in mind, get this, variegated, like multi-colored tapestry, like fine needlepoint, we might say, or even intricate embroidery. Not unlike the veil in the ancient tabernacle, when you stop to study it, you'll find in Exodus 28 verse 8, that it too was multi-colored. Remember the colors?

Gold, blue, purple, and scarlet. But this isn't referring to the veil of the tabernacle, it's referring to the veins and arteries and organic tissue and the nerves within our anatomy. Perhaps a paraphrase will help. My skeletal structure was not hidden from you when I was being formed in that place of complete protection within my mother. When my veins, arteries, nerves, and organic tissue were embroidered together in variegated colors just like fine needlepoint, prepared by the skill of your hands according to your sovereign plan. In our earliest days and hours actually of life, God is there shaping us, forming us, making us who we would become.

The early part of verse 16 is equally intriguing. You saw me before I was born. If anyone attempts to tell you that life doesn't begin until after birth, remind them of Psalm 139, 13 to 18. God is at work, not as planned parenthood would tell you, but as planned parenthood would tell you with fetal tissue, fetal matter, but with a baby. A living human being, he watched as we were in that womb before birth. Your eyes have seen my unformed substance. The words come from the Hebrew word to wrap or to fold together and in this particular noun form it appears only here in the sacred text and it has reference to the embryo.

It appears first in the sentence. My embryo, your eyes saw me. In my very first stage of life, hours and days of existence still wrapped in embryonic form. You were there watching over every moment of my being formed. He goes on and looks at life after birth.

Did you notice in verse 16? Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Now I pause because this is mind-boggling. You and I are able to handle the dimensions of life fairly well, but when we get beyond that ability we get into the foreknowledge of God, the sovereignty of God. Theologians have for centuries attempted to unscrew the inscrutable, explain this which is inexplicable, but we believe it.

Look at what he says. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out. Your Bible reads ordained.

Good word there. It's often used in the scriptures to refer to the potter at his or her wheel as she works with a lump of clay, shapes it and forms it rendered here ordained. Every moment was ordained or laid out before a single day had passed. Now for a moment hold your finger here and go back to Job 14. Just a quick glance at two verses in Job 14.

I love these cross-references that verify what is said in a previous passage. 14.1, Job writes, how frail is humanity? How short is life? How full of trouble? That sort of wraps up life in one sentence, doesn't it? How frail is humanity? How fleeting is life?

How full of trouble? Now look at verse five. Hold on now.

Verse five. You have decided the length of our lives. You know how many months we will live and we are not given a minute longer.

Isn't that great? I got people worried about when they're going to die. You have to worry about it.

God's got it under control. When it's the moment you go, guess what? You don't stay. You're gone.

I see people on the airplane going through their beads. I'm going to go, please. You know, if we're going to go down, we're going to go down. And this may be our last flight.

I just don't have the heart to say that to somebody who's worried sick over it. But the fact is, one day will be our last day. For my mother, it took place when she laid down for a nap and never woke up, only 63 years old.

My dad lingered ill and infirm for seven or more years, lived with us when we were living in California. And we literally watched the process of death transpire. But he lingered. And your loved one may linger or may be taken suddenly, or it may seem to you prematurely. There's no such thing.

There's no such thing. We need to get words like mistake and fate out of our vocabulary and luck. Oh, I guess he had good luck.

He lived a long time. It had nothing to do with luck. It had everything to do with the book of God. God's got it all under control. When our lives take an unexpected turn, and we're confused by the heartbreak that comes our way, it's tempting to blame our circumstances on fate or even luck.

But because God is sovereign in all things, our situations have nothing to do with luck. You're listening to a special edition of God's Word. It's a special edition of God's Word. It's a special edition of God's Word. In which our teacher Chuck Swindoll is presenting a study in Psalm 139. In David's Psalm, we find credible reasons to give thanks to God no matter what happens.

And there's much more coming from this passage, so please keep listening. And to learn about this ministry, please visit us online at insightworld.org. It's possible that today is one of the few times you've been able to listen to Chuck's teaching.

For that reason, you might not be aware of several resources we've made available to you. For instance, did you know that Insight for Living Ministries produces a daily devotional from Chuck that comes right to your inbox? This is the perfect way to start or end your day by refreshing your soul with select verses from God's Word, complemented by practical insights from Chuck. You can sign up to receive the daily devotional by going to insight.org. And maybe you're looking for a creative way to inspire young kids with truth from the Bible as well. Insight for Living Ministries produces a popular children's program called Paws and Tails. The story's main character, Pawpaw Chuck, lives in the community of Wildwood, along with a cast of lovable creatures.

These are audio programs, but there's an animated version too. In fact, there's even a section on the website to equip parents with teaching tools. To access these stories and the related resources for your family, go to insight.org slash Paws and Tails. And if you'd like to connect with us today, you can easily connect anytime day or night online at insight.org. Once again, that's insight.org.

Or if you're listening in the United States, you can call 1-800-772-8888. We look forward to hearing from you soon. Join us when Chuck Swindoll presents his final message in a five-day mini series on giving thanks. Tomorrow on Insight for Living. The preceding message, For These Reasons Lord, We Thank You, Part Two, was copyrighted in 2020 and 2021, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2021 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.