Fearfully Made
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. Psalm 139:6 · Berean Standard Bible
The psalmist is saying: this knowledge of God is so vast and overwhelming that I can't even comprehend it. It's beyond my ability to grasp.
There's a pause here. The psalmist isn't complaining—he's in awe. He's saying, 'This is too big for my mind to contain, and that's okay.' It's an honest moment of humility.
The psalmist expressing his limits in the face of God's infinite nature.
Throughout the Bible, people encounter God's knowledge and nature and discover they're too vast to contain—Isaiah, Job, Paul all expressed this kind of overwhelmed wonder.
The psalmist acknowledges that the grandeur of God's knowledge exceeds human cognitive capacity and lies beyond what human effort can comprehend or attain.
The Hebrew נִפְלָא (nifla) and נִשְׂגָּבָה (nisgava)—literally 'wonderful' and 'elevated/inaccessible'—employ vocabulary typically reserved for divine attributes in the wisdom tradition. The psalmist does not claim ignorance of God's knowledge but rather acknowledges a qualitative gap between divine and human understanding. This verse constitutes a pivot point: the exposition of omniscience yields to confession of mystery. The philosophical term what scholars call the 'via negativa'—the way of denying human categories as applicable to God—appears here implicitly, centuries before medieval scholasticism would formalize it.
The same worshiper, now expressing humility in the face of divine transcendence.
This echoes Isaiah 40:28 ('His understanding is unsearchable') and anticipates Paul's hymn to divine inscrutability in Romans 11:33-36. It positions the psalmic tradition within the broader biblical insistence that God's ways are not our ways, and understanding must acknowledge its own finitude.
4Even before a word is on my tongue, You know all about it, O LORD.
5You hem me in behind and before; You have laid Your hand upon me.
6Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
7Where can I go to escape Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence?
8If I ascend to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, You are there.
Read all of Psalm 139 — Nowhere you can go that God is not already there. This psalm moves from awe to intimacy.
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