What Does It Mean That We Are ‘Fearfully and Wonderfully Made’?

Question 5021.

To be wonderfully made is not a compliment David pays himself in Psalm 139; it is worship he pays to his Maker. “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14) is a sentence about God before it is a sentence about David, and that ordering matters more than almost anything else I can tell you about the verse. Our culture has borrowed the phrase for greetings cards and self-esteem posters, and in the borrowing it has quietly deleted the praise. David is not admiring himself in the mirror. He is on his knees.

So what does the phrase actually claim? And what difference should it make to the way you think about your own body, your own mind, and the person sitting next to you on the bus? Let me take you into the psalm.

Where the Words Come From

Psalm 139 is David’s meditation on how completely God knows him. The LORD has searched him and known him; He discerns his thoughts from afar; there is nowhere in creation David could go to escape His presence. Then, in verses 13 to 16, David explains why this knowledge runs so deep. God knows him inside out because God made him inside out: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13).

The verse we are studying sits inside that argument. David is wonderfully made by a God who was personally present at the making. The womb was not a private place where biology ticked along unobserved. It was a workshop, and the LORD Himself was at the bench.

What Wonderfully Made Actually Means

The Hebrew behind “wonderfully made” is the verb palah, which carries the idea of being set apart, distinguished, made distinct. David is saying that his making was no production line affair. He was singled out, crafted as a one-off. The companion verb in verse 15, raqam, is the word for embroidery, the careful weaving of coloured threads into a pattern. Think of that. The God who spoke galaxies into being with a word chose needlework as the picture of how He made you.

To be wonderfully made, then, is to be the deliberate, detailed, personal work of God. Not an accident of chemistry, not the leftover product of blind forces, but an embroidered work with the Maker’s own hand in every thread. When David says “wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well”, he is drawing the only sane conclusion.

What “Fearfully” Adds

The word “fearfully” puzzles modern readers, because we hear fear as something negative. The Hebrew yare points to awe, the trembling reverence that seizes a person confronted with something far greater than themselves. David looks at his own existence and feels what Moses felt at the burning bush. There is something about a human being that ought to make us take off our shoes.

Modern science has, if anything, deepened the point. A single human cell contains a coded library that would fill shelves of books; the brain holds tens of billions of neurons woven into circuitry no engineer can rival. David knew none of that detail, yet he saw enough by candlelight to worship. We have seen the blueprints, and too many of us shrug. Awe is the honest response, and awe directed at the Craftsman rather than the craft.

Wonderfully Made Before Birth

Notice where all this happens: in the womb. David’s language reaches back before his birthday. “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” (Psalm 139:16). Before David had a face, God had a file on him, so to speak. Days were allotted, a life was planned, a person was known.

This is why Christians have always insisted that the unborn child is not a potential person but a person with potential. The one being knitted together is already a “me” whom God addresses and knows. I have written more about this in what is personhood? and it undergirds everything Scripture says about human dignity. If every child in the womb is wonderfully made, then no child in the womb is disposable.

When the Body Does Not Feel Wonderful

Here I want to slow down, because I know who reads these articles. Some of you live with chronic pain, disability, disfigurement, or a body that has let you down in ways you never chose. Does “wonderfully made” mock you? Not for a moment. The psalm was written in a fallen world by a man who knew illness and would die old and frail. Scripture never pretends our bodies are perfect; it teaches that they are purposeful. The design is wonderful even where the fabric is torn, and the tear grieves the Weaver more than it grieves you.

When Moses protested his speech impediment, the LORD answered, “Who has made man’s mouth?” (Exodus 4:11). God takes responsibility for making each person as they are, and He attaches purpose to the making. I have explored this further in how Christians should view those with disabilities. A broken instrument in the Master’s hands still plays music the whole man cannot.

Not a Licence for Vanity

Because the verse has been co-opted by the self-esteem industry, I need to say plainly what it does not mean. Being wonderfully made is not a declaration that I am wonderful in character, that my desires are wonderful, or that whatever I feel myself to be must be affirmed. David wrote the psalm; David also wrote Psalm 51, begging for mercy over his sin. The same man who was wonderfully made was also gravely fallen, and he knew both truths at once.

The biblical picture holds glory and ruin together. We are royal portraits, but the portraits are damaged; wonderfully made, yet born with a nature bent towards sin. Take away either half and you get a lie. Take away the glory and human beings become animals to be managed. Take away the ruin and we become gods to be flattered. Scripture bows to neither error.

Praise Is the Point

Look again at how the verse begins: “I praise you.” The doctrine of being wonderfully made is designed to produce doxology, not self-regard. David’s soul “knows it very well”, and the knowing overflows in worship. When was the last time you thanked God for your own existence? For eyes that read this sentence, for a mind that weighs it, for a heart that has beaten faithfully since before you were born without a single day off?

There is also a quiet apologetic here. Every human being you meet is a walking argument for the Creator. The atheist who declares the universe meaningless does so with a brain of such staggering intricacy that it refutes him mid-sentence. Wonder is the natural response to human beings honestly observed, and wonder, followed honestly, walks all the way home to God.

From Wonder to Meditation

Notice what David does with the doctrine once he has stated it. He does not move on; he lingers. “How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand” (Psalm 139:17-18). The man who knows he is wonderfully made finds himself dwelling on the Maker’s thoughts, and discovering that the attention flows both ways. God has been thinking about you longer than you have existed, and in greater detail than you have ever managed about yourself.

That is worth sitting with in an age of distraction. We scroll past a hundred faces a day and give sustained thought to almost none of them, and then we assume God’s attention works the same way, skimming the surface of eight billion lives. Psalm 139 will not allow it. The God who counted your unformed days counts His thoughts towards you in numbers likened to sand. You have never once been out of His mind.

And the psalm ends in surrender: “Search me, O God, and know my heart… and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23-24). The right response to being known so completely is not to hide but to open the doors willingly. The Craftsman who wove you can be trusted with the workings of what He wove.

So, now what?

Settle it in your mind that you are wonderfully made, and let the truth do its double work. Let it humble you, because you did not make yourself, and let it steady you, because the God who embroidered you in the womb has not lost interest in the finished piece. Treat your body as entrusted craftsmanship rather than disposable packaging. And next time you catch yourself despising your reflection, or despising someone else’s, remember whose work you are criticising. Would you say it to the Weaver’s face?

“I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.” (Psalm 139:14, ESV)