Psalms 139:15-16

15, 16. Substance Literally, My strength; referring to the bones, or osseous system, as the solid basis of muscular strength. Their growth is a mystery. Ecclesiastes 11:5.

Made in secret “Made” is the same word here as in Genesis 1:26, and the mediate making here is no less a mystery and the work of God than the immediate creative making there.

Curiously wrought Literally, embroidered. Here is the variegated network of the human frame referred to.

Lowest parts of the earth A delicate description corresponding to the “in secret,” just mentioned. The idea, not the word, is that of a sheol of darkness. Psalms 63:9. Perhaps it has also a pointing to “the dust of the ground,” Genesis 2:7.

My substance The word denotes something rolled up, as a ball, literally, my infolded, or undeveloped substance.

Thy book A figure conveying the minute accuracy of divine knowledge.

All my members Hebrew, all of them. There is no better way of explaining this obscure passage than by referring the suffix pronoun them, (in כלם , kullam,) to the parts of that “substance,” or threads of that rolled up ball, just mentioned. Our version has it “members,” which is the idea, though not a translation.

Which in continuance were fashioned Literally, During the days when they were fashioned.

When as yet there was none of them Hebrew, And not one of them, or, not one amongst them. That is, not one member of the complicated arrangement failed, or was omitted. All was accomplished as it had been written in God’s book. The descriptions of Psalms 139:13-16 belong to a region of thought on human existence the most mysterious and difficult, whether viewed in the light of physiology or theology. The student in church history will at once recall the controversy on “traducianism” and “creationism,” and will observe the leaning of the psalmist toward the latter. The statements are as delicately and beautifully given in poetry as they are true to science. While the laws of antenatal physiology, as guarding the species, are admirably recognised, the presiding forethought of the Divine Creator, stamping individuality and adjusting it to a graciously proposed destiny, is equally confessed. The subject belongs to the abstrusest domain of theological anthropology, and the passage stands as a perpetual rebuke of the shameless atheism of modern evolutionists. See Lecture vii of Bishop Alexander, Bampton Lectures, 1876