INTRODUCTION
A. Our culture, I am sure you need not be told, has forgotten God.
1. In Christian Reader magazine, a woman from Oklahoma told this about her daughter:
Our nine-year-old recently received her first autograph album and immediately began recording personal data. We could tell she has lived in a remote area of Alaska with no television or movies when we saw her answer to the line "Name your favorite star." Without hesitation, she wrote "North."
Jack Eppolito, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Christian Reader, "Kids of the Kingdom."
2. I saw this in another way when I was in college – looking back, it was beginning even then. Some of us were on a trip for some reason that I had forgotten and were at Turkey Run State Park in Indiana, when one of my classmates, Randy Evans, looked out over the beautiful scenery and said, “Thank you, Big Bang.” Oh, yes, we could be facetious in college. I can still be. Many people, though, would rather believe it more likely that a big explosion could bring our universe into being rather than an all-powerful God.
• Since my college days, I have seen some far more beautiful sites than Turkey Run State Park, and I am still awe-struck by them.
B. This Psalm expresses the greatness of God in creation and in man.
1. The Psalm demonstrates who man is in comparison to God and to our world.
2. As is the case with Psalm 1, which we looked at, and Psalm 23, along with some others such as Psalms 19 and 100, this is one of the most familiar Psalms.
3. This Psalm is again written by David, and we will talk in a moment about what might have caused him to write it.
4. The inscription says David wrote the Psalm to the director of music “according to gittith.” That word means a winepress, but it comes to designate a stringed instrument, which originally may have been shaped like a winepress. If you follow the word’s history far enough, it becomes our English word guitar.
a. David himself may have used such a stringed instrument when he sang under the stars while watching his sheep and when he later played music for Saul in order to soothe Saul’s troubled spirit.
b. Ray Stedman says, “We are therefore in the prophetic succession when we have a guitar accompaniment to these psalms. They were designed to be sung to the music of a guitar.
5. The Psalm is clearly written in four stanzas:
a. Vss. 1,2 view the majesty of God from the viewpoint of creation.
b. The middle two sections, vss. 3-4 and vss. 5-8 consider the nature of man and our position in God’s creation.
c. Vs. 9 closes the Psalm with a concluding refrain that repeats the psalm’s first line.
6. As we examine this Psalm, then, ask yourself how you view God and how you view humanity in light of God.
KEY STATEMENT
Consider how David shows us the majesty of God.
I. CONSIDER GOD – Vss. 1-2.
A. David begins the Psalm by referencing the Lord himself.
1. In vs. 1 and again in vs. 9 David uses two great words for God. Literally, he says, “O Jehovah, our Lord.”
a. The first word we bring into English as Jehovah. It literally is a word that cannot be pronounced. David uses it to show the greatness of God. He is beyond anything that we can even imagine.
• He is so beyond everything that God would tell Moses his name “I am who I am.” He is the one who simply is. He is not past, present, or future; he just is.
• Jesus would attach this name to himself in John 8:58 when he said, “Before Abraham was born, I am.”
b. The second word is best translated “Lord” and is used to show that everything is subservient to God. That is how great he is.
2. God, as Jehovah, is so majestic and his glory so great that his glory is “above the heavens.”
a. David’s son, Solomon, helped us understand this in his great prayer at the dedication of the temple: He said, “The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27).
b. The reason the creation, as wonderful as it is, cannot exhaust the glory of God is that God is its maker. So although creation expresses his glory, it is only a partial revelation of the surpassingly greater God who stands behind it.
c. If God has set his glory above the heavens, it is certain that nothing under the heavens can praise him adequately.
B. Yet, even children can recognize the greatness of God – vs. 2.
1. We can understand the meaning of this verse from the single time it is quoted in the New Testament, in this case by Jesus.
• This is a good time to tell you one of my axioms about study of the Old Testament. Whenever the O.T. is quoted in the N.T. we should look at that and consider it an inspired commentary on that O.T. passage. That is what we have in the case of this verse.
2. This verse is quoted in Matthew 21:16. In that chapter, Jesus had entered Jerusalem in triumph on Palm Sunday. While he was in the temple area, healing the blind and lame who came to him, the children who had observed the triumphal entry continued to praise him, crying, “Hosanna to the Son of David.”
3. This made the chief priests and teachers of the law indignant. Jesus replied to them by quoting this verse from the Psalm.
4. Now the leaders became even more indignant, for by identifying the praise of children with Psalm 8, Jesus not only validated their words, showing them to be proper (that is, he was indeed the Messiah), he also interpreted their praise as praise not of a mere man, but of God., since the psalm says that God ha ordained praise for himself from children’s lips.
C. If children can see the greatness of God, David is also holding his greatness up for us to see.
o President Teddy Roosevelt grasped the greatness of God:
President Theodore Roosevelt’s love of the outdoors is well documented. He was responsible for the creation of several national parks and monuments. In his first inaugural address, he spoke freely of the blessings of God upon our nation, saying, "I reverently invoke for my guidance the direction and favor of Almighty God."
It is said that when President Roosevelt entertained diplomatic guests at the White House he was fond of taking them out to the back lawn at the end of the day. As the president stood gazing at the night sky, all eyes would eventually be cast heavenward, as his were. In his day, the vast array of stars was not dimmed by the city lights, and the magnificent display of God’s brilliant creation would overcome the party. After a long moment, Mr. Roosevelt would say, "Gentlemen, I believe we are small enough now. Let’s go to bed."
II. CONSIDER MAN – Vss. 3-8.
A. God cares for man.
1. People often overestimate themselves like The Three Christs of Ypsilanti:
Psychologist Milton Rokeach wrote a book called The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. He described his attempts to treat three patients at a psychiatric hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, who suffered from delusions of grandeur. Each believed he was unique among humankind; he had been called to save the world; he was the messiah. They displayed full-blown cases of grandiosity, in its pure form.
Rokeach found it difficult to break through, to help the patients accept the truth about their identity. So he decided to put the three into a little community to see if rubbing against people who also claimed to be the messiah might dent their delusion—a kind of messianic, 12-step recovery group.
This led to some interesting conversations. One would claim, "I’m the messiah, the Son of God. I was sent here to save the earth."
"How do you know?" Rokeach would ask.
"God told me."
One of the other patients would counter, "I never told you any such thing."
Every once in a while, one got a glimmer of reality—never deep or for long, so deeply ingrained was the messiah complex. But what progress Rokeach made was pretty much made by putting them together.
It’s a crazy idea, taking a group of deluded, would-be messiahs and putting them into a community to see if they could be cured. But it has been done before. "A reasoning arose among them as to who should be the greatest," Luke tells us about Jesus’ followers.
2. David, on the other hand, saw man’s insignificance in comparison to the magnificence of the universe.
a. We do not know when this Psalm was written. Some think it may have been written on one of those nights that David watched his sheep under the stars. Or, the Psalm may have in later years grown out of his memory of those nights in the fields staring at the stars.
b. Most of us live where the city lights cast so much of a glow into the night sky that we do not have the clear view of the sky that David had. But, if you have ever been in the country and taken a long look at the night sky, you know how majestic the heavens really are.
c. We may not take the time that David had to stare at the night sky, but the great scientific knowledge that we have helps us here, and can give us an even greater appreciation for our universe.
d. Consider, for instance, the great distances in our own solar system:
If the Milky Way Galaxy were the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would fit in a coffee cup. Even now, two Voyager spacecraft are hurtling toward the edge of the solar system at a rate of 100,000 miles per hour. By 2006, they had been speeding away from Earth for almost three decades, approaching a distance of 9 billion miles.
In the early 1990’s, Voyager II reached Neptune, the last of four planets it passed and photographed it. Neptune is now considered the outermost of planets. Pluto, which is beyond it, has now been labeled a plutoid by the International Astronomical Union. Plutoids are not defined as celestial bodies in orbit around the sun, farther away than Neptune. They must have near-spherical shape, and must not have swept up other, smaller objects in their orbits.
Anyway, the radio waves sent back to earth from the Voyager spacecrafts when they were near Neptune at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) took four hours to get here. Today a message from the two spacecraft takes 13 hours. So it takes over a day to send a command to one of the spacecraft and to receive a reply back.
Our solar system with its sun exists with several hundred billion stars in Milky Way Galaxy, one of perhaps 100 billion such galaxies in the universe. To send a light-speed message to the edge of that universe would take 15 billion years.
3. Despite the greatness of the universe, the marvelous thing about man, David says, is that God cares for him.
a. This can be seen in the effect nature has on people:
America is swimming in a sea of Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil! In 2006 alone, over 190 million prescriptions were given for antidepressants. The swim is a little expensive, though. On average, each pill costs between $2-3 for the patient. To add to the burden, the side effects of antidepressants can sometimes be negative.
Researchers at Britain’s Essex University have found a much cheaper alternative with few side effects: nature. Seventy-one percent of those suffering from depression said a 30-minute walk outdoors "made them feel better about themselves." Of the 108 patients who took part in conservation projects, went cycling, or hiked, 94 percent said the activities brought about greater mental health. Researchers are calling the new treatment ecotherapy.
b. David Gushee, a moral philosopher, in an article in Christianity Today tells how he came to understand how God cares for us:
Early in 2006, my 18-year-old daughter, Holly, pulled in front of a Chevy Tahoe on a rainy, windswept night and got "T-boned" on the driver’s side at about 50 mph. Holly was pulled unconscious from her Pontiac Sunfire. She had suffered a broken pelvis, a chipped tailbone, a cracked collarbone, extensive facial lacerations, and, most importantly, a "brain shearing" injury that left her with damage to her frontal lobe and other parts of her brain.
Everything changed for our family that night, as we were involuntarily ushered into a new community of those whose family members have experienced catastrophic injuries. More specifically, we joined the thousands of families that are affected by traumatic brain injury.
When we first saw Holly, and for three long days following, she lay unconscious—bloodied and bruised and deeply silent. Every step after that was a step forward. She opened her eyes after three days. For 11 more days, she drifted between wakefulness and sleep, a mute witness to the family and friends who rotated through her room, keeping watch. And then, joy; on February 11, she rasped to her caretaker, "Could you rewind the movie, please?" By later that evening, she was talking happily with school friends. As I write, she seems to have recovered most of the "self" that existed before the accident. Hardened professionals describe her progress as "miraculous."
As a professor of Moral Philosophy, my most recent book was about human nature. But I must say that I learned more about human nature in one month than in all prior months combined. Many things I said in the book took on a whole new meaning. A wise friend called this the difference between knowledge and experience.
In that book, I emphasized how deep and mysterious the interconnections are between people, and how sacred is human life. I had no idea how true that was until I saw my Holly in the ER, sat by her bedside, and wondered whether she would ever wake up. The experience of the "near-miss," of getting her back as if from the dead, awakened me to her immeasurable value, and by extension (because everyone is someone’s child, and all are made in God’s image) to the immeasurable value of every human being. I knew that before the accident. Now, I know it.
B. God crowns man.
1. Not only does God care for us, but he has crowned us with glory and honor.
a. Just on a practical level, we know what this means from looking at man:
Experts at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are just completing the building of the fastest computer in the world. It is called The Roadrunner after New Mexico’s speedy state bird. Components for the computer began arriving in the fall of 2006, and 36 moving vans full of equipment will be needed to complete it. The computer fills a room the size of a hockey rink and consumes as much power as a small town.
Its goal is to be the first computer to break the "petaflop" barrier—to do a quadrillion calculations a second. How fast is that? It is roughly a billion times faster than today’s generation of desktop computers!
Even more mind-boggling than these feats is that the human brain processes information even faster! Some scientists estimate that the brain carries out 10 quadrillion operations a second—10 times faster than a computer the size of a hockey rink!
b. David makes this point by using the word glory, which he first used of God, of man. God’s glory surpasses that of the heavens. Now he says that God has crowned us with glory and honor. David identifies us with God. Man reflects God’s glory in a way that the rest of creation does not.
c. Then David emphasizes man’s special significance by speaking of his role as “ruler” over the world and all creatures. Rule is something normally ascribed to God, but Psalm 8 says that God shared his rule with man.
2. The sad thing here is that even though God has given us this great position, we have turned our back on God. Since people will not look upward to God, they actually look downward to animals, and so become increasingly like them.
a. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, whose story is told in Daniel demonstrated this. He turned his back on God and declared his own greatness – Daniel 4:30. It is a classic statement of secular humanism. The words were still on his lips when God spoke and told him his kingdom would be taken from him – Daniel 4:31-32. So it was that he became insane.
b. This is the way our culture has gone. We have lost sight of God, so we no longer see men and women as creatures made in God’s image whose chief end is to glorify him. Our culture has eliminated God from its collective conscience. This is what evolution does. Eliminate God, and evolution is the only theory left, and since we see ourselves as beasts, we begin to behave like them.
3. But this Psalm means far more than a critique of the world’s view of God and man. We see this when verses 4-6 are quoted in the New Testament Hebrews 2. Hebrews intends to establish the superiority of Jesus, and the writer begins by describing how the Son is superior to the angels. In chapter 2, he tells that God has not subjected the world to the angels, and quotes these verses from Psalm 8. Then he applies the Psalm to Jesus; he is the one who was made a little lower than the angels in order to come into our world and die for us. As a result, God has “crowned him with glory and honor and put everything under his feet.” Now “God left nothing that is not subject to him.”
CONCLUSION
A. So Psalm 8 is about Jesus and whether you and I have submitted ourselves to him.
B. So remember who you are:
On May 28, 1972, the Duke of Windsor, the uncrowned King Edward VIII, died in Paris. On the same evening, a television program recounted the main events of his life. Viewers watched film footage in which the duke answered questions about his upbringing, his brief reign, and his eventual abdication.
Recalling his boyhood as Prince of Wales, he said: "My father [King George V] was a strict disciplinarian. Sometimes when I had done something wrong, he would admonish me, saying, ’My dear boy, you must always remember who you are.’ "
It is my conviction that our heavenly Father says the same to us every day: "My dear child, you must always remember who you are."
Let us constantly remind ourselves of who we are [in Christ.]
C. When we remember that life is all about Jesus, then we can say as David does in closing the Psalm: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”
