Humans Rule - Psalm 8:5-8 Series

Psalm 8: For the director of music. According to gittith. A psalm of David. 1 O Yahweh our Adonai, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. 2 From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. 3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 4 what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? 5 You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. 6 You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: 7 all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. 9 O Yahweh our Adonai, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Introduction

What is Man?

In v.4 we see the question, “What is man?” There are a lot of people who think they have the answer to that question. Biologists will talk to you about the human genetic code. Psychologists and sociologists will talk about behavioral tendencies. Philosophers will delve into their speculations. But none of them explain the mystery of what man is. Blaisé Pascal put it well: “What sort of freak then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earth-worm, repository of truth, sinkhole of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe. Who will unravel this tangle? ”

Who can possibly understand the extreme greatness and nobility of mankind, right alongside the unimaginable depravity and evil of mankind? It was man who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and it is man does things like diving on a hand grenade so his comrades can go rescue those being put in those ovens. You hear about the unthinkable things that Isis soldiers or sex traffickers do to people. Then you think about the great heroes of history who do things that bring tears to our eyes when we see him depicted in movie. Same race - humans. You think of the incredible love a mother has for her child. There's nothing in the world like it. Then you hear about a mother who drowns her own children so that her abusive boyfriend won't leave her. Same race. We call the Isis fighters animals, but really what they are doing is far worse than anything any animal ever did. And we see a war hero sacrificing his life to save others and call him an angel, but no angel has ever given his life or his friend. The truth is, we are neither animal nor angels. Angels are spirits without bodies and animals are bodies without spirits. But man is something else. We are worse than animals, and better than angels.

In Prince Caspian, Aslan makes the statement: “You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, and that’s both honor enough to lift up the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.”

Something about mankind is so important that when we are good, it brings sunshine into life; and when we go bad, it’s a kind of bad that just seems to just rattle the very creation. Both our good and our evil seem to be important in ways we can’t even understand. In fact, that’s the conclusion Pascal draws. He says all that about man and then concludes: “Man transcends man.” There is something about us that is way over our own heads. Why do our actions matter so much?

None of the definitions of humanity from biologists, psychologists, sociologists, or philosophers can answer that. But David gives us the answer here in Psalm 8. What all the scientists in the world can’t do in millions of books and studies, God does in 9 verses. Our nobility and our evil are of great significance because mankind is so important in God’s created order. And the reason we are so important is because of how God has exalted man. He makes 4 statements about that in vv.5-6.

The Exaltation of Man

Verse 5

1) You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

2) crowned him with glory and honor.

Verse 6

3) You made him ruler over the works of your hands

4) you put everything under his feet

1) Made a Little Lower than the Heavenly Beings

The first one tells us what we are as human beings. Where we fit in the universe. God made mankind a little lower than the heavenly beings. Evolutionists think we are animals. The founder of PETA, said “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” She couldn’t see any difference between a rat and a human being. They talk about how there is only a 2% difference between the genetic codes of humans and chimps.