Lord, You Are Majestic! Series

Lord, You Are Majestic

Psalms 8

Picture a young boy, alone with sheep in the desert, late at night. In the utter darkness of moonless nights, the only lights were in the heavens above. Far away from city lights, with a clean atmosphere, the sky must have been dazzling.

David stood in awe and worship, thinking of the Great God who created the heavens above. This is David's memory and the setting for this Psalm. This psalm was either written by David during his youth or written as a reflection of David's youth.

The contrast in this Psalm is the greatness of God compared to the lowliness of mankind.

Psa 8:1 To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith. A Psalm of David. O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.

1. The superiority of God’s name, and thus his personality and character.

Notice in most of your translations the use of the word “Lord” in upper and lower Caps….”LORD, Lord, O Yahweh, our Adonai. O God our Master.”

Our God us the owner and ruler of all things, whether acknowledged or not. But that acknowledged, He is also our God. The name represents here the character and characteristics. That name is the emphasis…

How excellent, majestic, honorable, glorious, exalted is your personality and character. In all the earth, in our realm, what we see and experience daily, attests to that. This is saying that apart from heaven (what we can’t see), our observations are from what we can see only.

But not limited to what we see, for you have set your glory above the highest point of our imaginations. Above the heavens.

Psa 8:2 Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.

2. The simplicity of the concept.

How great is our God.

No one in these days had to explain man's unworthiness. They understood that without God's direction. Mankind could commit all sorts of evil. They understood sin and man's bent towards it. They saw the sins of the Philistines, Canaanites, Egyptians and those who worshiped idols. They knew about human sacrifices, child sacrifices, forces male and female prostitution in pagan worship, abuse of the most vulnerable in society. They knew the hearts of man were naturally pulled away from God, not to God.

Yet, God was awesome beyond imagination. He is able to take lowly mankind, in our weakest form, an infant and suckling who needed constant attention and was totally dependent on others, and defeat His most powerful enemies. He could even take the utterances of such a dependent fallen creature and defeat His enemies.

No doubt, God makes a majority, and so God plus anybody is a vast majority.

Look at two infant examples, Moses and Christ. (Review, both were set apart from infancy and both brought much change to the world).

Psa 8:3-4 When I look at 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, and the son of man that you care for him?

3. The Splendor of concern.

What brought young David to the heights of his worship of God was a question. “Why would such a mighty, awesome God even be concerned with lowly, sinful mankind?”

When Galileo first gazed through his telescope at the night sky, something occurred to him that was more evident the more he looked at the stars. He made the statement that shook the world, “The earth is not the center of the universe.”

An enraged pope sent him a message, “Cease to attack the theology of the Church or pay the consequences.”

However, the word was out. We were not near as important and central to the universe as misguided theologians had been teaching.

Now we know how true Galileo's statement was. Even with exploring probes and the ability to view a million more times in distance than Galileo's first telescope, we only find out that the universe is far more expansive than we could have known. There seems to be no end to it. And things in space are traveling so much faster than we ever knew.

The more we learn, the more we should worship. At the equator, for the earth to spin into night and day, it must move at a rate higher than 1000 miles per hour. To get around the sun to create the seasons of the year, the earth must travel at 67,000 miles per hour. Our galaxy is said to be moving, around something, what scientists call the “Great Attractor” at 1000 km/sec. That adds 2.3 million miles per hour that I am traveling riding in the galaxy.