Fearfully and Wonderfully Made?
March 27th, 2023 • by Paige Stitt McBride
“Women hate their bodies more than ever before,” reported skincare company Dove in their 2016 global survey on self-image. The study questioned more than 10,500 women in 13 different countries between the ages of 10 and 60. What most of us can affirm by way of experience, this survey confirmed with objective data: body-image is one of the greatest, most common struggles for women today. But Dove was determined to use their platform to fight against the self-demeaning beauty standards that have long held women captive in self-loathe and usher in a new age of self-love and body-confidence. And so it has become: the media, Hollywood, and the beauty industry have all become champions of this self-love movement. And yet, it seems things have only gotten worse since 2016. There are still so many of us who dread looking in the mirror every morning.
As Christians, we have a responsibility to be aware of the water we are swimming in. This self-love culture is so pervasive that many of us do not even realize we too have bought into it. In many cases, the church has failed to offer any distinct perspective on the topic of self-image. We have simply jumped on the self-love band wagon and thrown in an extra comment about how Jesus loves us, all while failing to realize that the self-love worldview is essentially incompatible with the biblical worldview.
While self-love diagnoses the human problem as a lack of appreciation for ourselves, the Bible diagnoses the human problem as a lack of appreciation for our God and our neighbor. The great commandment of our culture is “love thyself!” but the great commandment of Jesus is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:37, 39).
But if we as Christian women cannot really affirm the self-love movement, what can we affirm? Certainly we must say something. For if we do not, we run the risk of believing that God and his Word have nothing to say to some of our deepest struggles.
“The great commandment of our culture is “love thyself!” but the great commandment of Jesus is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.””
The Go-To Body-Confidence Bible Verse
Psalm 139:14 is the go-to verse for most Christian women when they want to encourage someone who is struggling with body-image. It is that great reminder that we are indeed “fearfully and wonderfully made.” But, sadly, this verse is actually a prime example of the ways in which self-love culture has colored our reading of Scripture to the point of distorting its meaning.
Self-love culture teaches us that we need to be proud of our appearance. We need to be confident in our own skin. And so when Christian women take on this belief, we go looking for the Bible to affirm that assumption. What did we find in the Bible to support this notion that women need to be happy with every part of their appearance? We found Psalm 139:14. It says that we are fearfully and wonderfully made! And so we tell this to each other in the face of body insecurity and hope it will fix our problem. But is increased body-confidence what the text is actually talking about?
The Context of Psalm 139:14
As any good Bible reader knows, one of the most important rules for interpreting and applying the Bible is an appreciation for context; you can’t take a verse and isolate it from that which comes before and after it. Context shapes and determines meaning, while ignorance of context distorts meaning. So in an effort to honestly interpret verse 14, let us first consider what precedes it.
Take a look at Psalm 139. In verses one through twelve, two thoughts are looming large in David’s mind: God’s omniscience (he knows everything) and God’s omnipresence (he is everywhere). Meditating on God’s omniscience and omnipresence is “too wonderful” for David to bear. He cannot grasp it. He cannot fully comprehend. It even seems to scare him a little bit! Even in the darkness, God sees David as if he’s in the light.
So when David continues in verse 13 with “for you know my inward parts…” he is giving a reason for that intimate knowledge God has of him. The transitional word “for” signals an explanation. “Why does God know me so well?” asks David. “For he made me!” God’s knowledge is based on his role as Creator. And this leads David to worship: “I praise you!” And why does David praise God? Here comes that word again, “for…I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” The thought that this crazy big God—the God who knows everything and the God who is everywhere—created and knows David leads him to worship. David’s declaration that he is fearfully and wonderfully made is a result of his contemplation of the greatness of God.
“The way in which God made him inspires David to praise God, not to praise himself.”
The Meaning of Psalm 139:14
But what does it really mean that David is made “fearfully” and “wonderfully”? We often quote this phrase and yet rarely pause to consider its meaning. The Hebrew adverb “fearfully” (נוֹרָא֗וֹת) describes an action that is done in a way that induces “fear.” This same exact Hebrew construction is found in Psalm 65:5, “By awesome deeds you answer us with righteousness, O God of our salvation,” or more literally “by deeds done awesomely…” The deeds, the miracles of Yahweh, are awesome. They cause people to tremble. They cause people to worship. And so too was the “deed” of creating humanity. For something to be done wonderfully is similar. It is something done in such a way that is bewildering, awe-inspiring, dumbfounding, or even stupefying.
Notice that David is commenting more on God than he is on himself. That is why this is given as an explanation for his praise. The way in which God made him inspires David to praise God, not to praise himself. David is worshiping the Creator, not the creation. The text really does not address whether or not David thinks he is attractive or good-looking. That’s just not the point. It's that David’s human body is evidence of the grandeur of his Maker.
That David’s reflection of being made fearfully and wonderfully does not lead him to a heightened sense of self, but a heightened sense of God, is proven by the last section of the psalm. Check out verses 17-24. God’s thoughts are so precious to David that it even inspires him to defend God’s honor, praying vehemently against all those who would not honor God (Ps. 139:19-22). But he also ends with a petition for God to search him further and see if there is “any grievous way” in him (Ps. 139:23-24). This confirms our suspicion from earlier that this psalm has really nothing to do with self-affirmation. Rather, an encounter with the glory of God has made David more aware of the possibility of flaws in himself and he desires God to make those known to him.
The Good News of Psalm 139:14
But does this mean that this passage has nothing to say to our bodily insecurities? Is this passage irrelevant to the girl who struggles when she looks in the mirror? Or is there still a truth in this passage that can set that girl free? I think there is. It’s God himself.
You see, when David looks in the mirror, he sees not himself, but he sees through himself to his God. In the end, what David needs, what the girl struggling with insecurity needs, and what you and I need, is an encounter with the grandeur of God.
We may look in the mirror and see plenty of flaws. Because of the fall of humanity, just as sin manifests itself in the brokenness of our spiritual lives, so too our physical bodies will bear marks of the fallen world. We will not find perfection when we look in the mirror and we need not force ourselves to see it where it isn’t. We simply need to start looking for perfection where it ought to be found, in God.
It is in the transfer of our gaze from ourselves to our God that we can enjoy life and experience wonder. Insistence upon self-affirmation leads to a cage of narcissism and disappointment (disappointment that even the most persistent self-lover cannot conquer). But self-lessness leads to wonder and contentment. The solution to our struggle with body-image is not the love of self, but the love of God, the very God who will one day finish what he started in our salvation by giving us a new, perfected body that no longer carries the flaws of post-Eden living. Praise be to that God, “to the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen” (1 Tim. 1:17).
Paige Stitt McBride is a wife, mother, part-time seminary student at Reformed Theological Seminary and lover of all things discipleship. She spends her days working at her local church in Sharon, Pennsylvania while teaching dance lessons. She is passionate about helping women engage thoughtfully and carefully with the Scriptures while also helping them define and embrace its teaching within our particular cultural setting. She is author of Beauty Not Beheld: A Daily Guard Against the Lies of Self-Love Culture, her first published work.
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