What does it mean that we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’?
Question 05021
Psalm 139 is one of the most intimate passages in all of Scripture. From beginning to end, David is meditating on what it means to be completely and personally known by God. By verse 13 he moves from the general truth of God’s omniscience to its application to his own individual life, and the language he uses to describe his formation in the womb is remarkable: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.” The question is what exactly those two words mean.
Fearfully and Wonderfully
The Hebrew word translated “fearfully” is yārēʾ, which means to stand in awe, to be filled with reverence. It is the word used when Moses hid his face at the burning bush because he was afraid to look at God (Exodus 3:6), and when Jacob woke from his dream at Bethel and said, “How awesome (yārēʾ) is this place!” (Genesis 28:17). David is not saying that he personally is impressive. He is saying that what God did in forming him evokes the same response of awe that a genuine encounter with God evokes.
The word translated “wonderfully” is niplāʾ, from the same Hebrew root as pele’, wonder or miracle. This is the vocabulary used for God’s extraordinary acts in history, the plagues of Egypt, the parting of the sea, the deeds that set Israel apart from every other nation as a people with a God who does wonders. David is placing his own formation in that category. He is not speaking about the complexity of human biology in a clinical sense; he is saying that what God did in making him belongs to the same class of things as the miracles of redemption. His existence is one of God’s wondrous works.
Known Before Seen
Verses 13 to 16 unfold the meaning of this. God “formed” David’s inward parts, the Hebrew word qānāh carrying the sense of acquiring or creating with deliberate intention. He “knitted” him together in his mother’s womb, the image suggesting careful, intentional work in a hidden place. The word for “inward parts” in verse 13, kĕlāyôt, literally refers to the kidneys but is used throughout the Old Testament as an idiom for the innermost self, the deepest centre of a person. God did not merely shape an outer form; his attention was on the person being formed from within.
What David stresses in verse 15 is the hiddenness of all this: “my frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” No human eye could see what was happening in the womb, but God saw. His knowledge of David was not triggered by birth or first breath; it preceded the moment when any other person could have identified David as a person at all. And verse 16 goes further: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” Before there was a body, there was a person God was forming, and God already knew the full shape of that person’s life.
Personal, Not Generic
What makes this passage stand out against the background of ancient thought, and much modern thinking too, is its insistence on the personal particularity of God’s knowledge. David is not reflecting on humanity in general. He is reflecting on himself: on these inward parts, this frame, these days, this life. The God who made the stars and set the boundaries of the sea is the same God who was attentively at work in the dark place of the womb, forming one man, knowing him fully.
This understanding carries implications beyond the personal comfort it rightly offers. If God’s attentive, personal, image-forming work begins in the womb and not at some later point, then the person in the womb is not a pre-personal process awaiting personhood. The language of the psalm does not allow that reading. God is forming a person, knowing a person, writing the days of a person, from the very beginning of that person’s existence.
So, now what?
The practical effect of this psalm should be a reorientation in how we think about our own lives and the lives of others. We were not made incidentally, shaped by impersonal processes, and then noticed by God at some later stage. We were known from the beginning, formed with attentive care, and the days of our lives were already written when we had no existence we could be aware of. That is not cause for self-importance but for worship. “Wonderful are your works,” David says, “my soul knows it very well.” The appropriate response to this knowledge is to know it well, to carry it, and to let it shape how we regard every human being made in the same way.
“I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.” Psalm 139:14
