As we have seen in previous blogs, this Psalm has a wonderful outline of many of the attributes of YHWH, the Judeo–Christian God. We have seen these attributes in verses 1 to 6, the Omniscience of God. (He knows all things). In verses 7 to 12 King David introduces us to the Omnipresence of God (He can be experienced everywhere). Following that in verses 13 to 18, comes the Omnipotence of God (He can do all things He purposes to do). Having portrayed God in this way, David then prays to Him as the One who can search him, who can know him, who can show him what He sees in him, and who can lead him in God’s way. The relevance of the truths in these verses can be seen in counselling situations. The following are some of those truths.
1). God Alone Knows Everything There Is To Know About Every Human. (His Omniscience). His knowledge of people is one hundred percent detailed and accurate. He knows everything there is to know about every individual, their past, their present and their future. It makes such a difference to people who have suffered abuse for example, for them to realise that God knows the whole situation. He knows the name of perpetrators. He knows the degree of abuse that took place. He knows the physical, emotional and spiritual damage that took place. He also knows how to bring the necessary healing to those who were abused. However Satan, who loathes and detests humans who are made in the image of God, will try to turn these truths against Him. He will put it into the minds of the abused to accuse God of allowing things to take place that brought such damage. He will suggest that God is not loving, and was powerless to help. But God knows and cares about our human situations. He knows about us. We will see more clearly in the next blog how we can receive healing of the things of the past which may be known to nobody but God Himself.
There are other people who have been seriously misunderstood and it seems that no one will believe them. How wonderful it is for such people to know that God knows every thought of every heart. He knows the words that were said and the actions that were committed in every situation. But He also understands the motivation behind every thought and action. God is never mocked. He never misunderstands. He never gets it wrong. In counselling situations we frequently see how much damage is done when people are falsely accused. It can be soul-destroying. It can lead to disintegration of marriages and families. It is also soul-destroying for those who have suffered abuse, who have eventually shared what happened, only to be disbelieved, sometimes even by their own parents. We will have more to say about that in the next blog.
2). God Alone Can Be There For Every Person. (His Omnipresence). There are some circumstances in life when many of us feel isolated and alone. There are other times when for some reason or other we are made to feel isolated. Often when we have been misunderstood. Many of us in ministry have experienced times when we felt that people’s attitudes to us had changed to some degree. In one case we discovered subsequently that one individual had voiced his criticisms widely. When it was eventually shown that the criticisms were of no substance, the support returned. But it still hurt and did damage for a time. However some people are subjected to the pain of being misunderstood for years or even decades. Praise God He can bring healing to such hurts even when the misunderstanding continues.
It is true for believers that they are never alone. God’s eye is on them continuously. They are never out of His vision or His thoughts. In fact it is impossible for any of us to escape from His presence, as verses 7-12 put it, 7 Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! 9 If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 10 even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” 12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
As I put it in one of the previous blogs David considered every dimension he could, to consider if he could escape from God. But he realised that God was in the vertical dimension, between the heavens and Sheol, the depths of the earth. He was in the horizontal dimension, in the east and the west and all places between. Even the darkness couldn’t hide David from the sight of God. Probably based on Psalm 139, Francis Thompson’s poem, “ The Hound of Heaven” is a great description of the omnipresence of God. He describes God as a hound pursuing its prey, that is people, “ I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him, down the arches of the years; / I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways / Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears / I hid from Him, and under running laughter. / Up vistaed hopes I sped; / And shot, precipitated, / Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, / From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. / But with unhurrying chase, / And unperturbèd pace, / Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, / They beat—and a Voice beat / More instant than the Feet— / ‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me’.
Thompson describes the moment when the person running from God, realises he cannot escape as God declares to him, “Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, / Save Me, save only Me? / All which I took from thee I did but take, / Not for thy harms,/ But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms./ All which thy child’s mistake / Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: /Rise, clasp My hand, and come!’ I have ministered to dozens of people over the years who had this same sort of experience of the presence of God and who surrendered their lives to Him, the inescapable One. The realisation dawned on such folk that God was wooing them and pursuing them in love, not to cause them harm. The fleeing was over. In various ways they had taken hold of God’s outstretched hand and had come home to Him.
A man who had a similar experience was the late CS Lewis. In his book “Surprised by Joy” he gave this description of the time he met the inescapable One. “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” Lewis discovered that God cannot be avoided. He is everywhere. He is especially there for those who seek Him. Why? Because they are open to experience His presence and His healing power in their lives.
3). God Alone Knows The Full Circumstances Of Every Situation Of Every Person. In verses 13 to 18, King David spoke of God’s omnipotence, the fact that He can do what He purposes to do. He purposed to create a universe. He purposed to create humans to live in His universe. He purposed to create a man called David whom He would eventually anoint to be King. David in these verses reflects on his own creation as a human. Psa 139:13 For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. David sees that he was a creation by God. As we saw in an earlier blog, the circumstances of human conception are varied. Sometimes they are the result of a mutual act of love. Others are not like that at all. They may have been the result of an ugly power encounter in which one person was overpowered by another. But the important thing to note is that the child to be born is not “ugly”. God fashions that child in the womb as much as He does the child conceived in genuine love.
In fact the next verse affirms that, Psa 139:14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. David saw himself as part of the wonderful works of God. Many see that each human birth is a miracle from God, a touch of His handiwork. Sometimes horrible circumstances may lead to conception! But God’s love and care are seen in the way He puts each part in place in the human body. How wonderful to be able to remind people whose conception was in horrible situations that God took over and fashioned them individually. They are His, by creation.
God’s care is seen also in the growing process, Psa 139:15 My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance. His purpose for each individual was established before they were born. As the verse continues, in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. It raises the question as to whether we can miss out on God’s plan and purpose for our lives. There are some who come for counselling who feel that they have missed out on God’s purpose for their lives because of their sinful past. But God alone knows His purposes for us.
So it is good to be able to say to such people, that God has a plan for the remainder of their lives. They can enter into that plan if they give themselves completely to Him. No wonder David adds, 17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake, and I am still with you. A lifetime of contemplating God, would never be enough to fully grasp the totality and the immensity of His thoughts and purposes.
David is amazed at the plans and purposes of God. He knows they are far beyond his comprehension. But he is grateful for that which God has revealed to him. He is dedicated to doing God’s will for the rest of his life. That explains those “strange” verses from verse 19 to 22. What David is in essence saying is that he will never side with the enemies of God, against God. If they remain God’s enemies then they will be David’s enemies as well. He will be faithful to God. Psa 139:21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? 22 I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies. We will see in the next blog that because Jesus has given us His Holy Spirit to indwell us, there is the possibility of loving our enemies. But as with the example of David, never siding with them against God!
In the final verses 23,24, David turns what he has been saying about God into prayer. God is the One who searches everyone. So David asks Him to search Him and to know him. He wants to be open to God so that God can heal him and lead him in the everlasting way, God’s way.
So these are the truths that can be helpful to know and to share in counselling situations. They are reality in a world of unreality. But how do we go to apply these truths in counselling situations, or when we are trying to encourage others to reach out to God for healing. That is the subject of our next blog. It is extremely important and encouraging to be able to try to apply these wonderful, releasing, healing truths to those who need them. Like you and me!
Blog No.144. Jim Holbeck. Posted on Monday 24th February 2014
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145. Applying The Truths Of Psalm 139 In Counselling Situations. Series No.7 of 7
What the young woman said alarmed me. I had not met her before. As she sat down at the beginning of a time of Prayer Ministry with me she said simply, “I’ve come to be healed from my counselling!” A short time later it became obvious why she had come to get healing. She had been to a professional secular counsellor who had been inappropriate in his counselling approach. He had asked her probing questions of increasing depth. She felt that information was being dragged out of her almost against her will. She thought she had come to share her thoughts on her problem while the professional counsellor listened quietly. But it was not like that at all. At the end of the counselling session she felt a sense of being emotionally abused and vowed never to return to the same man for a second “bout”.
This happened about the same time as I read of a counsellor being taken to court for what a counselee saw as emotional damage coming from her appointment with him. It was said in court that he had wrongly identified what he thought was her problem. He had shared his opinion that he thought she had been abused as a child. As she acted on what he said, it had subsequently caused great damage to her mental health, and to her marriage and family. No abuse was ever found to have happened. He had got it wrong. Terribly wrong! Many people suffered as a result.
What insights do we find in Psalm 139 regarding counselling? What less damaging approach to counselling can we discover through reading this psalm? There are a number of truths to consider that we looked at in the previous article.
1). God Knows Everything About Every Human Situation. When someone comes to us for help they do not know all the details of the situation they want to share with us. They may come with all sorts of misunderstandings about their situation. They may think that they have understood the motives behind another person’s words or actions. However they may be totally wrong. Often words which have been said as an encouragement have been taken by those who have a deep sense of rejection, as being critical or down-putting or demeaning.
I once spoke to a man who had worked hard with a number of us all day in the heat of summer to clean out a parish hall. I tried to express my gratitude and thanks for all his efforts by saying as he lay down on a pew, “You’re having a well-deserved rest!” But he and his wife, who had both known incredible rejection earlier in life, later obviously talked about the day. It seems his rejection fed her rejection which fed his rejection and so on. They later told my wife that they were upset with me. Why? In the wife’s words, “On Saturday your husband called my husband a bludger!”
Nothing could have been further from the truth. My words of affirmation and thanks were filtered through their combined screens of negativity and came out as the words the wife uttered. People are often guilty of gross misunderstanding. The words we hear in counselling situations may have only some relevance to the real truth. But for the sake of those seeking our help, they need to be accepted as truth until proved otherwise. I tried to encourage those involved in praying for others to listen carefully to people as they share their story. Even when it seemed to be way out. The world is so twisted in its values and practices that the “way-out” things we hear, may in fact be true. God knows everything about every situation in the lives of all of us. No matter how much people think they know about their situation, only God knows the real truth. But praise God He does!
2). We Are Incapable As Humans Of Getting To The Real Truth By “Searching It Out”. Counselling techniques are varied. All of them should consist of letting the counselee share what they have come to share. To express their need as they see it. When we seek to ascertain from them more about the problem to try to help them, damage can occur. In the first example I mentioned above, the counsellor’s probing questions made the woman feel “raw” inside, as she expressed it. There is real danger is getting people to go beyond their comfort zone in sharing. They can feel bruised by the questions asked and by the answers drawn out of them. And less likely to share deeply again.
Another danger might come from the types of questions asked. For example, “Were you sexually abused as a child?” might seem to be a reasonable question. But in the minds of some people it sows the seed that the possibility might have occurred. Their reasoning may be like this. “This counsellor is the expert in these things. He surely would not have asked the question if he didn’t think it had happened. Though I have no memory of it, perhaps it did!”
Yet another danger may come when the counsellor seeks to add “helpful” information to what the counselee has shared. For example one person shared with a counsellor that they sometimes had flash-backs to their childhood. Part of the memories involved the person as a child being on an altar with people moving around the altar chanting. It may or may not have happened. But the counsellor unwisely said, “Oh, I’ve read about that. This is actually what they do.” Then he went on to explain in great detail what he had read of such practices. He fed in information which may not have been true of her situation at all. What he said could have been seen as a subtle form of brain-washing or a form of mind-control. A lively imagination in the counselee may have been fertilised with seeds that were not true. We cannot always understand ourselves, much less other people. As Jeremiah wrote, Jer 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? But Jeremiah answered his own question in the next verse, Jer 17:10 “I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.” Only the Lord can search and discern accurately.
3). We Can Invite The Lord To Do The Searching And The Revealing In A Counselling Situation. Psa 139:23 Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! 24 And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! What a difference it makes when we invite the Lord to do the searching. This is so individually, as we invite Him to search us and to reveal what He sees. This then enables us to seek to remove, with His help, all the barriers to receiving His grace, love and direction. But it also helpful in counselling situations. Especially so where the counselee and the counsellor are both looking to the Lord for Him to do the searching and the revealing of the problems. Because He knows each and every one of them. None are hidden from Him. He knows the time, the place, the people, the damage inflicted. AND He knows the healing that is necessary and how to bring it.
One amusing illustration. I had been teaching at a seminar on the need to be open to God and to trust Him. One of the women present had been having a real tussle with the Lord because she had so many unanswered questions. She would go so far but then would come the “But!” One of things I mentioned was that God could speak to us in all sorts of ways, even by printed signs if necessary, to attract our attention. As they drove back into the caravan park where she and her friends were staying, the first sign she saw as they entered the caravan park was “Put your butts in here.” (Meaning of course cigarette butts.) But it struck her deeply that now was the time for her to get rid of all her “buts” and to really trust God. She did! Wonderfully!
4). He Is Able To Reveal Appropriately What We Need To Know About Our Human Situations. This is the great value of the truth in Psalm 139 verses 23 and 24. When God searches us in answer to our prayers, it seems that He reveals only as much as we can handle for that moment. Then as we are healed of that, we become more open to receive more healing. His ministry as The Only True Perfect Counsellor will always be appropriate. The two stories at the beginning are illustrations of inappropriate counselling.
A very experienced professional counsellor told me of a counselling appointment she attended when she was learning to be a psychologist. She said that the male counsellor probed into his female client’s life with deeper and deeper questions. Eventually he told her he felt that she had been sexually abused earlier in her life. When he shared that with the woman, she became distraught. The male counsellor seemed to be unable to console her. My friend as now a senior counsellor thought that it was almost criminal for the man to leave a client at that point with nowhere to go. The male counsellor was doing the searching, and not the Lord.
I once had an amazingly successful counselling appointment. But you need to know what happened. A world-renowned academic professor missed out on being the head of a University department. He should have been offered the job. He was perhaps the world’s leading expert in his field and very competent. But a female academic with nowhere near his qualifications nor his experience nor his world renown was appointed over him. The man’s wife became extremely angry because of the injustice done to her husband. I heard that she was going around bad-mouthing the university in her disappointment and disgust. Many others were disgusted as well. Then came the day when I saw her coming unannounced to my office. Her walk showed that she was very upset! One could almost see the steam coming out of her ears and nostrils! I did a quick arrow prayer to God which in translation said, “HELP Lord! This is beyond me!” She came in and sat down obviously severely distraught and angry.
I suggested that we might pray before we discussed why she had come. Soon after I began to pray I heard a sudden exhalation of breath. I thought, “She’s exasperated already. She must want to get on with it.” I finished the prayer fearing what I would see when I looked up. To my utter shock I saw that she was smiling at me, looking quite composed. She said gently, “My whole attitude has been wrong hasn’t it? Thank you so much for your help.” With that she got up and left. But she was changed from that moment to become the fun-loving, positive person she had always been. It seemed that during the prayer God had searched her, had revealed to her what her problem was and she had responded instantly in repentance and faith. My contribution? To bring us both before the Lord in prayer. He took over as THE counsellor and healed her. My words of deep insightful counsel? Zero! The whole “successful counselling episode” took less than 5 minutes!
As we came before the Lord in counselling situations we were praying the prayer of openness in verses 23 and 24. Praying that God would search and reveal what He saw to be the problems in individual’s lives. Often the people we were counselling were given by the Lord as they prayed, a scripture verse or a biblical phrase that was very significant to them. Others received flash-backs to some incident in the past that they did not realise to that moment had impacted them deeply. Others had wonderful pictures in their minds of the Lord doing deep healing things in their lives. At other times the person doing the counselling had a scripture he or she felt led to share, to see if it was significant to the person. Most times it was deeply significant. Or it could have been a word of knowledge given to the counsellor that was sensitively introduced into the sharing time. Or a question to ask that was significant to the person.
I had been listening to a woman share with me for about an hour in a counselling situation. There appeared to be nothing significant in what she said. She had shared that she was having trouble disciplining a Grade 5 class she taught at school. I began to wonder why she had come to see me. In the quietness it was as though the Lord put this thought in my mind, “Ask her about her father.” It didn’t seem to be appropriate to do so at that moment because her conversation had been in a different direction altogether. When it seems to be appropriate to do so I said to her, “Tell me about your relationship with your father.” I wasn’t prepared for what was to happen. Immediately she burst out with great emotion, “When I was fifteen he raped me!” I knew then why she had come to see me. Much healing followed. But it needed the right question to facilitate the solution. It wasn’t a question I would have naturally thought of in such circumstances.
There are dozens of other examples I could give, but time does not permit. Suffice it to say that God is highly motivated to answer our prayers for Him to search us. He wants the best for us. He wants us to be whole people. He knows exactly what it takes for each individual to be healed, made whole, and equipped to serve Him in His world.
The Challenge To Us Today. What a blessing it might be to the church and the community if we allowed THE COUNSELLOR do His ministry in people’s lives. He can do it as we look to Him for the answers we cannot humanly find for ourselves. What might happen if we prayed individually for ourselves the prayer in verses 23, 24. We might be the more healed as the Lord shows us what we need to bring to Him for healing. What might happen if we prayed that prayer in our counselling situations and encouraged our counselees to pray it as well. I don’t really know what would happen. But what I think might happen would be a lot more healing taking place than is taking place today.
My encouragement is that we pray the prayer and act on whatever the Lord shows us, to our benefit and to His glory. Psalm 139:23 Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! 24 And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!
Blog No.145. Jim Holbeck. Posted on Tuesday 25th February 2014