I GREW UP in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll; I was born just weeks before Elvis recorded Heartbreak Hotel. In the 60s, the soundtrack of my childhood was the British Invasion and Motown. That’s still the music I like to listen to when I have a late evening commute home and am too brain-dead to listen to an audiobook. I crank up the oldies (the old oldies, mind you) and sing along in the dark, in the privacy of my car.

So you’ll understand that when I read Psalm 139, I think… Motown. More specifically, I think Martha Reeves and the Vandellas: “Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.” The song, “Nowhere to Run” was released in 1965 and was one of their biggest hits. The lyrics, unfortunately, describe a woman in what sounds like an enmeshed but toxic relationship: “It’s not love I’m a-running from / Just the heartbreak I know will come / ‘Cause I know you’re no good for me / But you’ve become a part of me.”

That’s not the psalmist’s situation, of course. Be it David or some other poet writing in the Davidic tradition, the psalmist doesn’t actually claim to have been tempted to flee from the all-knowing and ever-present God. But the psalmist does suggest that when it comes to God, there’s nowhere to hide:

Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
    and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
    the night will shine like the day,
    for darkness is as light to you. (vss. 7-12, NIV)

Here, the psalmist uses still more merisms to describe God’s omnipresence. The psalmist could soar to the highest heaven and God, of course, would be there. But the psalmist could also go down into the deepest pit and God would still be there. The word that the New International Version translates as “depths” is Sheol, something like the Hebrew equivalent of Hades, the realm of the dead somewhere below the earth. This makes for a contrast with two related meanings: at a minimum, high versus low, but also heaven and hell. There is no place where the psalmist can flee from God.

What’s said of this vertical axis applies equally to the horizontal. The psalmist probably lives somewhere east of the Mediterranean, so the imagery of “[rising] on the wings of the dawn” and “[settling] on the far side of the sea” may picture the sun rising in the east, taking flight and soaring majestically across the sky, then setting in the west into some unknown horizon beyond the sea.

There is no place from east to west, therefore, where God’s hand won’t “guide” the psalmist. That language of guidance may echo another well-known psalm attributed to David:

The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
    He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
    he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
    for his name’s sake. (Ps 23:1-3)

In spatial metaphors, then, the omnipresence of God encompasses both the vertical and horizontal. Moreover, not even darkness can hide the psalmist. When the psalmist says, hypothetically, “Surely the darkness will hide me,” he may be thinking once more of Sheol, this time less as the deepest place imaginable and more as the darkest. But if God is there, as verse 8 insists, then even the night will shine like day, for no place can remain shrouded in darkness when confronted with the light of God. The imagery reminds me of the words of the apostle John, describing the Eternal Word who became flesh in the person of Jesus: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

. . .

I DON’T KNOW if the psalmist ever felt the urge to flee from God. We might, however, think of the words of yet another David psalm:

When I kept silent,
    my bones wasted away
    through my groaning all day long.
For day and night
    your hand was heavy on me;
my strength was sapped
    as in the heat of summer. (Ps 32:3-4)

Here, the psalmist suffered while refusing to confess his sin to God. And here’s the thing: it’s not as if God didn’t know. The psalmist felt the weight of God’s hand, but still stubbornly tried to hide, to cover up his guilt. Who knows: perhaps he tried to lie to God; more likely, he was lying to himself. When he finally gave in and admitted his wrongdoing, whatever it was, he experienced forgiveness and freedom.

Try as we might, there’s nowhere to hide from God. And what happened when the psalmist stopped trying? He experienced God’s grace. In a verse made famous by the story of Dutch evangelist Corrie ten Boom, the psalmist then praised God, declaring, “You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance” (Ps 32:7).

From the highest and brightest heaven to the darkest hell, from one horizon to the other, we will never find a hiding place into which God cannot peer. That should only terrify us if we continue to live in rebellion against him. But ironically, when we give up the attempt, we find that God is our hiding place.