If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light become night around me,” even the darkness is not dark to You, but the night shines like the day, for darkness is as light to You.
The psalmist first reaches for darkness as a hiding place, and the verse takes that hiding place away.
Today's reflection
Most of us read these lines as comfort, and they are. They do not start there.
The section opens with a question that sounds like a man looking for the exit. Where can I go to escape Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? He tries the heavens and Sheol. He tries the wings of the dawn and the farthest sea. Then he tries the oldest hiding place there is. Surely the darkness will hide me.
Darkness is where people go when they do not want to be seen. It is also where people end up without choosing it, in the long nights of grief or illness or shame, when it feels as if nobody could find you even if they came looking.
The answer is the same either way. Even the darkness is not dark to You. The Hebrew is blunter still, something like: darkness does not darken, for you. God does not need the lights on. The night that hides you from everyone else, and sometimes from yourself, is broad day to him.
If you were hoping to hide, that is unsettling. If you were afraid of being lost, it is the best news in the psalm. It is the same fact.
David lets both be true. By the end of the psalm he has stopped trying to get away, and he asks for the very thing he began half running from. Search me, O God, and know my heart.
It is possible to get there. You can begin a night wishing the dark would cover you and end it asking to be seen. God’s sight does not change between those two prayers. What changes is that you stop being afraid of it.
Why this passage
Context checked: Psalm 139 is headed "For the choirmaster. A Psalm of David." Verses 1-6 speak of being searched and known; verses 7-12 ask where the psalmist could flee from God's presence: the heavens, Sheol, the wings of the dawn, the farthest sea. Verses 11-12 are the last of these attempted escapes, darkness itself. The Hebrew of verse 12 repeats the root for darkness, very literally "even darkness does not darken from you." The verb rendered "hide" in verse 11 is uncertain, and translations vary. The psalm then turns to the forming of the body in the womb (13-16) and a hard word against the wicked (19-22), and ends by asking God to do what verse 1 said he had already done: search me and know me (23-24).
Scripture in English is from the Berean Standard Bible, which its publisher placed in the public domain on 30 April 2023.