God Has Reason Not To Like Us

TITLE: GOD HAS REASON NOT TO LIKE US

SCRIPTURE: PSALM 8 / JOB 7:17-18

I want to challenge us this morning with an unsettling statement as our thought for the morning – “God Has Reason Not To Like Us.” I will give you a moment to squirm in the pew. This Psalm of David begins and ends with the same phrase, “O LORD, OUR LORD, HOW EXCELLENT IS YOUR NAME IN ALL THE EARTH.” It frames the content of the Psalm in the praise of the majesty of God. The Psalm goes on to ask a penetrating question, “WHAT IS MAN THAT YOU ARE MINDFUL OF HIM, AND THE SON OF MAN THAT YOU CARE FOR HIM?”

In comparison to God’s grandeur, we are nothing.

• We are infinitesimal

• We are little specks of dust on a spinning ball

• Yet God grants us significance

• He takes of His grandeur and stamps some portion on us

• So David says He crowns us with Glory and Honor

Understand that Glory and Honor is from Him – it is derived; it is not intrinsic to us. We have no Glory, we have no status apart from what God has given us.

• What is a human being that God is mindful of him?

• How do we define humanity?

• This question has exercised the minds of men to our times

Mark Twain published a book in the year 1906 with the title - what is man? It is a dialogue between a Young Man and an Old Man regarding the nature of man. The Old Man asserts that the human being is merely a machine, and nothing more. The Young Man objects and asks him to furnish his reasons for his position. Twain appears to uphold the view of the Old Man.

Isaac Asimov wrote a short story entitled “…THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM.” Two robots debate the subject of what is man and conclude that they as robots are a superior form of being that should usurp the authority of their makers.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a sermon soon after his ordination entitled “WHAT IS MAN?” based on Psalm 8. He stated, “Although there is widespread agreement in asking the question, there is fantastic disagreement in answering it.”

• There are some people,” he continues, “that believe man is little more than an animal”

• There are those who would lift man almost to the position of a God

• There are then those who would combine the truths of both and see within man a strange dualism, something of a dichotomy

Both David and Job pondered why God, having such greater power and majesty, should take interest in the human race.

• The rhetorical question of Psalm 8:4 emphasizes that man is an insignificant creature in the universe

• Yet God cares for him immensely

• It amazed David that the Lord of the universe even thinks about man

I would suggest to us this morning that the question is not rhetorical at all. So many of us live our lives so far removed from God that we have forgotten that God made us “IN HIS IMAGE, IN HIS OWN IMAGE HE CREATED [US]; MALE AND FEMALE HE CREATED [US].” And so many of us haven’t the foggiest idea why it might be important that God made us according to his own likeness. We forget that our creation in God’s own image is an expression of God’s love for us, an embodiment of the goodness of creation, and an assurance of our own special place in terms of proximity to God’s heart, and not on the food chain, that the story of creation is meant to tell.

• Like all children, we have been free to take our parent’s love for granted

• And like all children, our propensity to do so has rendered us no less needful of that love

In the modern era, we have generally adopted an attitude of suspicion toward God. We suspect that God is possessed of a certain hardness of heart that causes Him and his church to treat the world and its people with a certain cruelty. And those of us who want to think better of God find ourselves constantly trying to make excuses for him. But Jesus knows that the hardness of heart is all ours.

I wonder at times what God must think of us with all of our faults and failures to live up to what He has designed for us. After all He started out by giving us some guidelines to live by just 10 of them. Not 20-25-50. Just 10 Commandments, and we could not even do that. Many of history’s greatest tragedies – such as american slavery - such as the holocaust – have come about because one category of mankind decided another category had -