OPEN: Psalm 8 is an intriguing Song of Praise to God. It begins and ends with the words that inspired a popular worship song. I’d like you to sing it with me:
“O, Lord, our Lord how majestic is Your Name in all the earth
O, Lord, our Lord how majestic is Your Name in all the earth
O, Lord, we praise Your Name. O Lord, we magnify Your Name
Prince of peace, mighty God - O, Lord God Almighty (sing through twice)
This Psalm was written by the Shepherd boy whom God made into a King. By a boy who became the man known as the man after God’s own heart. A young man that we know by the name of David.
You can almost imagine him (as a young man) laying on a hillside. His father’s sheep are bedded down for the night, and David looks up into the night sky and begins to be filled with wonder.
ILLUS: Abraham Lincoln once wrote: “I never behold (the heavens filled with stars) that I do not feel I am looking in the face of God. I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up, into the heavens and say there is no God.”
There’s something about a clear night filled with a huge moon and bright shining stars that creates a sense of wonder in most people. And this is probably what inspired David to write:
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” Psalm 8:3-4
ILLUS: A father told of taking his family to the Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. He said the sky seemed more brilliant than they had ever seen it, and the stars were so close you felt as if you could touch them.
Their 3 boys decided that they would put their sleeping bags out on the ground so they could go to sleep watching the stars.
The man and his wife had just settled down for the night when their youngest came into the tent, dragging his sleeping bag with him.
What is the matter?" we asked. "Is it getting too cold?"
"No," he answered. "I just never knew I was so small." (Reader’s Digest, 9/81 p. 126)
And so we can imagine David looking up at the majesty of the night sky and being filled with awe… and suddenly he feels REALLY small.
How could a God who has created all this beauty be concerned with him? How could such a God be mindful of him or care what happens to him?
It doesn’t make any sense!
And, David was right – that didn’t make any make any sense! That’s what Arthur C. Clarke, author of “2001: A Space Odyssey” thought when he said: “If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can’t be very important gods.”
He was saying: we’re so insignificant that any God worth the name wouldn’t give us a 2nd thought.
And that sentiment was echoed in a different way by one of the leading astronomers and atheists of the past century – Carl Sagan. On his popular science program “Cosmos” he said this:
“We live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star, lost in a galaxy, tucked away in some forgotten corner of universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."
Sagan painted a portrait of a trivial planet… inside of a dismal solar system… located in a backwater galaxy that was… dwarfed by bigger and more impressive systems throughout the cosmos.
Sagan not only asked WHY would anyone be impressed with mankind? He asked WHY would anyone even be impressed with our planet, our sun or our solar system?
And why would Sagan say that?
Well, 1st – he was an atheist. He didn’t believe in our God, so he had no reason to believe that our world would have any significance at all.
But 2nd – he’d seen and heard a great deal about the universe. And what he’d seen and heard made him scoff at our galaxy having any importance. As an astronomer he knew that there were upon billions upon billions of stars, and many of those stars are 1000’s of times brighter than our sun.
And of course he would know that our sun was called a yellow DWARF star. Do you have any idea why our sun is called a “dwarf” star? It’s because it’s a really small star. It is literally dwarfed by the size of other stars in the known universe.
(At this point I had a picture of the sun compared with other stars in the universe. The picture I used came from “http://mostodd.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/will-the-earth-get-a-second-sun/46-betelgeuse-vs-sun/” and compared the pinprick size of the sun – called “sol” here –with Sirius, Pollux, Arcturus, Rigel, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse and Antares. And those stars are overshadowed by “Canis Majoris” {literally “the Big Dog” star} whose mass would cover that of all these other stars).
The fact that our sun is dwarfed by so many other stars in the universe has caused some scientists to say “The Sun is a rather commonplace celestial object. It is a star of ordinary dimensions and of ordinary brightness.” (http://solar-center.stanford.edu/vitalstats.html)
These folks look at the heavens and not only say we SEEM insignificant… they believe we really ARE insignificant.
But David didn’t think that.
David never believed that.
Why not?
Because David knew that God had created this world for us.
He wrote: “You made (mankind) ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet” Psalm 8:6
As far as David was concerned – if God made this world for us (including the sun/ moon and the stars) you can count on the fact that it’s NOT some humdrum planet in a backwater galaxy.
Sagan, and Clarke and all the other scientists who think that our earth is trivial have their telescopes pointed in the wrong direction. Because it’s in the heavens that God writes His love for us.
ILLUS: For example: astronomers have discovered that universe has a center.
And guess where it’s at?
According to the “Hubble Law” there’s a concentric pattern to the universe that implies our galaxy is very near the center of the cosmos. http://www.icr.org/universe-center/
“O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.”
ILLUS: Then, of course, there’s our humdrum, “ordinary” star we call the sun.
It’s actually not all that ordinary.
Back in 1974 the McMath Solar Observatory at Kitt Peak in Colorado began a 32 yr study of the stars. By 2006 they had studied a number of stars (including our own) and arrived at the conclusion that of all the stars they studied - our sun was one of the most stable.
Whereas most stars give off wild fluctuations in flares and eruptions that would endanger any life that anywhere near them they found that our sun only varied by 6 one-hundredths of a percent during the entire 32 years they recorded period they observed it.
In other words any other kind of star would have fried us by now.
But the Sun (as we’ve observed all our lives) we have NO reason to fear it. David F. Coppedge* http://icr.org/article/3512/
“O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.”
ILLUS: Then there’s our solar system.
(I had a picture of solar system I obtained from “http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/index.cfm”)
Take a close look at this picture.
There’s Mercury, Venus (about the same size as our planet), Earth with our moon, Mars (about half our planet’s size), an asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Now a question – where are all the “big planets?”
They’re at the outside of our solar system, further away from the sun than we are.
Now, that alone is peculiar, because in the solar systems astronomers have discovered up to this point, the big planets are often much closer to their star than ours is. So why would God plant these huge planets farther away from the sun than we are.
Well, the Bible doesn’t say, but I think I’ve got a pretty good guess.
You see this item right here (pointing to a comet that is part of the picture I had on the screen)? Scientists spend hours upon hours worrying that some interplanetary comet, asteroid or meteor is going to careen into our solar system and crash into our planet destroying all life as we know it.
But over the centuries that type of collision has rarely happened.
Why?
Well, look at those big planets.
Any extra terrestrial debris that would head toward our planet would have to get past those four huge planets.
Whether there are meteors and asteroids or any other large rock flying at us… they would have get by those planets. That would be a tall order in itself.
But, then notice something else.
See that Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Any meteors and asteroid would not only have to get past those 4 huge planets would have to penetrate that belt to get to us… and few do.
But if they get past those huge planets… and that vast asteroid belt … we have this little thing here we call the moon.
Have you ever seen the moon through a telescope?
What do you see on that moon? (Craters)
How did those craters get on the moon? (Meteors/ asteroids)
If anything got past those huge planets and the asteroid belt not much would get past our moon.
But if anything did…
Well, have you ever seen a “shooting star”?
Do you know what a shooting star is?
Those “stars” are really interplanetary rocks that literally burn up entering our atmosphere. As a result, very few large objects from outer space have ever made it to our earth.
ILLUS: Back in 2005, five secular planetary scientists met at the American Museum of Natural History and agreed that our solar system appears special. One commented, (Fritz Benedict of the University of Texas)
"The older I get, the less likely it seems to me there’d be a bunch of places like our solar system." http://crev.info/2005/04/panel_majority_agrees_our_solar_system_is_special/
“O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.”
I could go on... and on… and on about how special our galaxy, solar system, sun, and planet is in the universe.
1. Our galaxy sits close to the very center of the universe.
2. Our Sun is one of the most stable stars in the universe.
3. AND our Solar System is uniquely designed to protect our planet from the ravages of space.
But you know… David didn’t know all that.
All David knew was that God cared for him.
And he could tell it by the beauty of the skies at night, and the warmth of the sun that met him each morning.
And because David knew that God loved Him, throughout the Psalms, David said things like this:
“The LORD is gracious and compassionate; slow to anger and rich in love.” Psalm 145:8
“When I said, ‘My foot is slipping,’ your love, O LORD, supported me.” Psalm 94:18
“I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.” Psalm 13:5
“Many are the woes of the wicked, but the LORD’s unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him.” Psalm 32:10
And therefore, David wrote: “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever.” Psalm 136:1
What David was saying in Psalm 8 was this: If you look up into the skies and begin to think you are too small, too insignificant for God to care for you… you’re not. David wrote that he knew that because God created this world JUST for HIM. In Psalm 8:5-8 David praise God with these word:
”You made (man) a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.”
God – you created ALL of this JUST for US.
And that proves (says David) just how much God really loves us.
So if that’s all true - How come we don’t feel all that important and valuable?
How come we don’t feel like we deserve God’s love?
Well, the reason we don’t feel worthy of God’s love is - because we don’t.
Something inside of gnaws at us, because we KNOW we’ve done things, thought things, said things that would embarrass us so much that we’d want to crawl into some dark corner and pull something over ourselves to hide.
And because we know that’s true… we know that the verse that says “we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” is TRUE!!! We have fallen short. We have sinned. And we know that there must be a price to be paid for our sins. And we know from scripture that our sins condemn us and the price for those sins is death.
WE DON’T DESERVE GOD’S LOVE!!
But God loved us anyway.
And God went one step further to prove how much He loved us.
Yes, He created all of this world just for us, but God knew we’d need something more. A something that would help us deal with pain of our own failures. So God sent His only begotten Son, to die on a cross just for you… and me.
(At this point we showed a picture of Jesus on the cross)
Ephesians 2 tells us that “…because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”
On the cross, Jesus proved the truth of the words in Ps 103, where David wrote
“The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth (REPEAT THIS LAST PHRASE FOR EMPHASIS), so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” Psalm 103:8-12
ON THE CROSS - God did that for us.
ON THE CROSS – God proved how much He loved us.
ON THE CROSS – God gave us a message of hope. A hope based on the fact that God was offering to forgive us all of our sins. To cleanse from all of the filth of our past lives. To free us from all of our guilt and from all of our shame. And to give us a new life and a fresh start.
God did all of that ON THE CROSS.
And the message of the cross was the message of hope God wrote in the heavens.
(PAUSE as we showed a picture on the overhead of the Whirlpool Galaxy which we found at http://jesuslovesdaisy.blogspot.com/2010/05/whirlpool-galaxy.html)
This is the Whirlpool galaxy.
It is positioned in the heavens 33 million light years away in such a way that it faces toward us. It is such a beautiful and perfectly formed galaxy that it one of the favorite places for astronomers to train their telescopes on and study.
It’s perfection puts it in a class of galaxies known as the “Grand Design Galaxies”.
Since it is a favorite of astronomers, it was no surprise that astronomers used Hubble Space telescope to target this very galaxy. And as the Hubble telescope looked into the black core of the whirlpool galaxy they found this image staring back at them:
(Picture of the “cross galaxy” which we found at http://jesuslovesdaisy.blogspot.com/2010/05/whirlpool-galaxy.html)
“O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.”
It’s in the heavens that God wrote His love for us.
INVITATION
