The File Is Accurate

When the Stasi Records Act came into force at the end of 1991, East Germans could do what no citizens had been able to do before: apply to read the file the secret police had kept on them.¹ More than three million have. Many found it thicker and more particular than they had imagined — a remark made at a kitchen table, a friendship reported by the friend. The terrible thing was not that the file contained lies. The terrible thing was that it was accurate.

Psalm 139 opens a file like that and turns it into worship. "O LORD, you have searched me and known me!" (Psalm 139:1). David does not mean that God is well informed. He means the whole of it — sitting down and rising up, the thought while it is still far off, the word before it is on the tongue: "You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me" (Psalm 139:5).

Then the psalm looks for an exit. "Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?" (Psalm 139:7) — and the Spirit of God is God himself, not a department of heaven with limited jurisdiction. Height, then depth; the wings of the morning, then the far side of the sea; and finally the dark: "even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day" (Psalm 139:12). Every door opens back into the same room.

And then, having shown there is nowhere to stand outside that gaze, the psalm asks for more of it: "Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!" (Psalm 139:23). Read cold, that is a reckless prayer. We are poor auditors of ourselves — a conscience runs loud where it should be quiet and quiet where it should be loud — which is why David asks, "Who can discern his errors?" (Psalm 19:12). Hebrews says the plain thing: "all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account" (Hebrews 4:13).

One man has come through that search. He was examined more thoroughly than anyone in history — by the temple authorities, by Herod, by a governor who kept returning one verdict, "I find no guilt in him" (John 19:6). And then the one clean file was charged with the contents of ours: "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21). The search we could not survive was carried out, and the sentence landed on him.

Which is why Hebrews, three verses after saying we are naked and exposed, can turn and say, "Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace" (Hebrews 4:16). Not a line of the file has been redacted. What changed is the verdict attached to it. The tax collector who would not lift his eyes and prayed only, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13), went home justified, without editing a word.

So the psalm's last verses become prayable. We can ask to be searched. The file is full, and the last page was written first, at the cross: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1) — seen to the bottom, and kept anyway. The hand that turns the pages is the one the psalm promised would be waiting in the dark: "even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me" (Psalm 139:10).