Our Majestic Lord

OUR MAJESTIC LORD

PSALM 8:1-9

INTRODUCTION... adapted from www.sermonillustrator.org/illustrator/sermon8/never_ending_sermon.htm

I would like us to pause for a moment at the beginning before we read the passage for today and ponder the boundless expanse of the universe. We need to do that to understand a little of what our passage will speak about today.

The moon that we see most nights orbits the Earth roughly 239,000 miles from the earth If we traveled by plane at about 500 miles an hour, to the moon, it would take nineteen days. Let’s continue to think about this... the sun is 93,000,000 miles from the earth. If you boarded a jumbo jet today and traveled to the sun, your journey would take over twenty-one years! That’s nonstop too! Where were you twenty-one years ago? That’s a long time. Can you imagine flying that long without a moment’s break in order to reach the sun? For those who prefer driving ... well, it couldn’t be done in a lifetime. It would take roughly two hundred years, not including any gas or rest stops!

Let’s leave the sun and move on to the nearest star. The nearest star to our planet is 4.3 light years from the earth. Not going into too much scientific information... that is really far. To reach this closest star by airplane would take approximately fifty-one billion years, non-stop!

Scientists estimate there are billions of galaxies, each of them loaded with billions of stars. Galaxies tend to group together. Andromeda Galaxy and our Milky Way are part of a cluster of at least thirty galaxies. Other clusters could contain as many as thousands of galaxies. The Guinness Book of World Records states that in June 1994 a new group of cocoon-shaped clusters of galaxies was discovered. The distance across this group of galaxies was calculated at six hundred fifty million light years! Can you imagine how long it would take to cross such a vast distance by airplane? I cannot... my brain hurts just thinking about it. The Guinness Book of World Records also states that the most remote object ever seen by man appears to be over 13.2 billion light years away. Our finite minds cannot even begin to comprehend distances this immense and yet God can measure all this with the span of His hand! To top it off, the psalmist tells us in Psalm 147:4-5, "He [God] counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by name. Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; His understanding is infinite." Not only can He count the billions upon billions of stars, but He knows the name of each one!

We are not the only people to ever think about such things. David looked up into the sky and reflected on

the Creator that made the sky. David looked at the sea and saw the miraculous animals that God had made. He saw all of these things and so much more and he wrote his thoughts down in Psalm 8.

READ PSALM 8:1-9

I. The Thought (verse 1)

David has an overarching thought that he just cannot get out of his head. It is a phrase that just keeps running in his mind over and over. In fact, David writes it once at the beginning of the Psalm and once at the end. His thought is, "O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!" The word that catches my attention in this statement that David makes is the word ‘majestic.’ I am not sure that this is a word that we use a lot today, I know that I do not use it a lot. There are other words that we use in its place. I might use the word ‘awesome’ before I use the word majestic. I might use the word ‘glorious’ before I use the word majestic. I might also use the word ‘impressive’ before I use the word majestic. And yet, all these words mean the same thing. David is thinking about the awesome impressiveness of God.

II. The Proof (verses 2-4)

So what does David see around him that makes his jaw drop in awe of God? What does he see that shows the glory of who God really is? In verse 2, David sees the little children around him and marvels at what God has done. David sees in these children the praises that God deserves.

ILLUSTRATION... personal story

I remember the intense feelings when Abigail, our first child, was being born. I of course was not in any pain or under any duress, but Kelly certainly was. She was doing all the work and I was very much a spectator. I was for all three of ours. Kelly did the work and I watched. I remember after they cleaned Abigail up and put her in the warmer in the nursery, that one of the nurses wheeled the mobile warmer to the window so I could look at her... and I had our new video camera in hand. She was so small. Her feet were so small and wrinkled. Her eyes would open for just a moment and then close. She had the smallest fingers... and I remember saying out loud to everyone standing in the waiting area... "Who can look at this little girl and say there isn’t a God?!" Maybe you have had that experience as well.