We have been spending time in the Psalms this summer and since the summer is ending, we are also winding the Psalms down to an end. Last week we looked Psalm 90; the whole idea of the brevity of life. I have to admit it was probably a little bit of a downer to talk about the shortness of life. We talked about our mortality, but it also taught us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Today, we are going to look at a more upbeat Psalm. It is actually a very uplifting Psalm because it uplifts the name of God. Not only that, it elevates man and woman to the status that they deserve. A status where they find themselves under the authority of God while being over the authority of all of God’s creation. We will be looking at Psalm 8:1-9. (Scripture read here.)
Hopefully, you can see that this is a Psalm of praise. if you were paying attention you will also see there is a repetition here. Verse 1 and verse 9 were composed of the same words. It says “Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” The psalmist is using a poetic device that puts brackets on this particular Psalm. Other than that, he is making a statement about God. He is saying God you are majestic. Your majesty brackets everything. Your majesty encompasses everything out there. Really more than that, what it is also saying for us is we find our source of identity, our sense of worth right smack in the middle of God’s majesty. In other words, we answer the question “what is man?” Before we consider what is man, we want to spend a few minutes considering who is God. That is what the psalm writer David was doing. In fact, he was so excited about writing this Psalm he just kind of belts it out. “Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” He understands that God is majestic. We don’t use the word majestic that much, but really majestic has this idea of greatness. It has the idea of royalty. It has the idea of infinity. It has the idea of power. Really, majesty is a word we use when we can’t think of other words to use when we are trying to describe something like God. It is a word that should be reserved for God. We might look at a king and say your majesty, but really even an earthly king should not be called majesty. Only God should be called majesty. David knows this and he belts out this Psalm. “Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” He belts it out. He is just not sitting there like some of us do when we sing. He is not doing that. He is belting it out. He is so full of the wonder and the awesomeness of God that he can’t help but just begin to praise and worship.
As a side note, until we really understand the awesome nature of God, the majesty of God, our worship is always going to be hindered a little bit. We are always going to hold back a in our worship. The thing that is kind of cool is that the Psalm tells us that every single person was wired for worship since the day they were born. He goes on talking about the little kids. He says “You have set your glory above all the heavens. From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies to silence the foe and the avenger.” What he is saying is kids are wired to worship. This week we start the week of Vacation Bible School. There has been a lot of work put into it. What is cool about it is that first night, if you have ever worked a Vacation Bible School, the kids come in and some of them don’t feel like worshipping. They need a little kick or whatever, but they are definitely wired. You just have to take that energy and focus it and put the songs up there and before you know it all the kids are jumping around and worshipping. By the end of that week they know all their songs and they have learned how to worship. They don’t care who is watching them. They just enjoy worshipping. Somehow along the line, they lose sight of what it means to worship. We don’t know how that occurs, but over time that idea of worship that we have inside us begins to diminish. We all become adults and no longer is it cool to worship. It’s not cool to stand even in church and worship because you are thinking about what the person next to you might be thinking or saying. We lose that sense of wonder and that sense of worship that we see in little kids. God says if you don’t want to worship, I will just let the kids worship and they are going to be the ones that are actually going to turn back the nonbelievers, the atheists, back to me. That is an amazing thing. I want to show a slide from The Message which is a contemporary translation of the same verse, but I like how he says it. “Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you; toddlers shout the songs that drown out enemy talk, and silence atheist babble.” Isn’t that awesome? The little babies in the nursery when they are gurgling and spitting up on themselves, they are just praising God. You work the nursery and you get spit up on your shoulder, praise God. I have been praised by God all over me. That is what he is saying. He is saying I don’t need the scholars. I don’t need the preachers. I don’t need all this stuff. I am just going to let the little kids do it. That is why we are sold on children’s ministry. We know if we get the kids, we will eventually get the parents. Some of you were there right? Those little kids become little mini Billy Grahams, little evangelists walking around because what happens is they get their CD from VBS. They get their songs on Sunday. They come home and they just sing it. They want to sing about Jesus all day long. The parents are participating and over time the kids start looking at the parents. Mommy how come you aren’t singing about Jesus? Don’t you like Jesus? Don’t you believe in God? About that time it gets a little complicated. The poor parent realizes I have to sit down and talk to the kid. I have to explain our perspective. If you think the sex talk is hard, try explaining to a kid about evolution. They just don’t get it. A parent sits down with a kid and says we don’t really believe in God around here. Let me explain why. What we believe is that billions of years ago, there was absolutely nothing. Nothing existed anywhere but then out of the blue, something happened, a big bang. We don’t know where it started, but it just kind of happened. Then all this cosmic dust and planets started going out for billions of years and over time it started creating planets and stars and all that kind of stuff and eventually you ended up with this thing that we call earth. This thing that we are sitting on in the middle of nowhere. Then out of the most extreme conditions, somehow where no life existed before, suddenly sprung up. Life came from nothing and it developed in the harshest conditions and over time turned into slime and seaweed and everything. Eventually it got legs and crawled out of the muck and then it became birds and giraffes and all that kind of stuff and then there were monkeys and then there was you. At about that time the kid is looking at you like you are an alien, and maybe says something like do you believe that stuff? You answer, yes, I do. So you are saying I am a monkey. Well, not really. Kind of. Then I guess I have an excuse for misbehaving in school. At about that time the adult is scratching their head and says you are right. I don’t believe it. Let’s go to church. So the little kids become the Billy Grahams. All they start out by singing about Jesus. The parents don’t know what to do with it. Basically with little kids they have ordained praise. They shut the mouth of the atheist babble. They don’t need the scholars. God doesn’t need the scholars. He is using the little babies in the nursery and the toddlers. He is using all those kids to proclaim the praise of God. That is the situation. You have David thinking about this.
We don’t know the situation, but David is probably sitting in his palace outside and looking up at the stars. The good thing is he is not looking at woman like he was a few weeks ago. He is looking at the stars. He is just out there gazing away. He has time on his hands. He is looking at the stars and he can’t even see. I guess you can only see like 3,000 stars with your own eyes. He didn’t have the advantage of telescopes. He didn’t have the observatories. He didn’t have the internet. He didn’t have the TV where you can see the land on Mars. He didn’t have an iPhone and he didn’t know there was an app for watching the stars. Did you know that? There is a great app. It is called Skymap. Debbie turned it on to me the other night. Basically, the idea is you hold your phone up to the sky and it tells you the planets and the stars and everything you are looking at right there on your phone. It is amazing. It is really cool. David didn’t have the ability to sit back and look at things and use those types of devices. He just looked at the stars and considered their greatness. He goes on to say “When I consider your heavens and the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place.” We have all this stuff and when is the last time you considered all this stuff. We get so caught up in our own little worlds. We can go days, weeks, and even years without even looking up at the sky. We are just forgetting that we are out in the middle of nowhere. He is saying maybe it is good to consider. Actually what he is talking about is deep reflection. There are so many things to consider.
The first thing we could consider is the sheer quantity of stars in the universe. I admit I went on the internet to find this, but I found a fairly consistent thing. It says there are about 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone, the Milky Way. But there are supposed to be 500 billion galaxies. You do the math and you end up with a number that basically looks like this: 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. I don’t even know how to say that. Some of you accountants are going to check the math real quick. Go ahead. The bottom line is that is a lot of stars. The good news is you can have a star named after every person. In fact, there is a website out there where you can name a star after somebody you love, a boyfriend, a girlfriend. There is a catch. It is $19.95 but for $19.95 you get a certificate with the name of the star. They even say they will stick it on a rocket and shoot it up towards that star. Before you go and spend that $19.95. Come to me for $14.95. I will print the certificate. Meet me at my house late some night. We will get the bottle rockets out and tie the certificate to the bottle rocket and shoot them up there. At least we know they went up there. We don’t need to number the stars because God did it already and calls them each by name.
It is not just about the sheer quantity of stuff out there. It is the beauty of stuff out there. It is phenomenal. We have the Hubble telescope floating around that captures a lot of images. I don’t really know much about it. All I know is we put it out there in like 1990 and it flies around and takes pictures and costs us a lot of money. But I didn’t realize that it is constantly sending pictures back. Photographs of everything it sees out there on a regular basis. You can go to the Hubble site and see pictures of that. I grabbed a couple of those pictures. Here is a picture from the Hubble telescope. This is really just an awesome one. Just unbelievable. What is cool is the psalmist said God did this with his finger. The finger, when it is talked about in the Bible, it represents power, but it also symbolizes God’s creativity. God is doing some finger painting up there. Just drawing this nice little picture for all of us. Some day we get around and get a Hubble out there and we get to see it. There is another Psalm that speaks to that. When we see this thing what it does is it actually gives voice, it speaks to his knowledge, and it speaks to his existence. Psalm 19 says “The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after night they pour forth speech and night after night they display knowledge.” What he is saying is it is constant. It is coming all the time. The knowledge of God just keeps coming and coming.
On one hand, you have the little bitty baby that is spitting up in the nursery proclaiming God. You have the farthest star at the farthest galaxy proclaiming the knowledge of God. Isn’t that awesome? You have a picture here of King David lying outside or whatever staring up at the stars like you might do if you went camping. Laying up and looking at the night sky and seeing all these stars. If you contemplate, if you consider it enough, what happens is eventually it comes back to you. If there are really that many stars up there, what does that say about me? What does it say about my significance? This is really where you have an atheist and a Christian kind of find common ground. Whether you are an atheist or a Christian and you are looking up at those stars, you are just simply overwhelmed by the number of stars, the enormous galaxies, and the universe. Eventually what happens is you begin to ask yourself if I am just a little insignificant person in the middle of the universe. That is what David does. He goes on to say “What is man that you are mindful of them, the son of man that you care for him?” In other words why do you even bother with me? I am so insignificant. This is where it parts ways also with the atheist. The atheist generally would buy into the fact that we are just dust. We are just cosmic dust. The atheist is left there grappling with the implications of believing that they are just a speck of cosmic dust. That doesn’t do a whole lot for your self-worth. It doesn’t do much at all. The Christian, on the other hand, continues to read in the Psalm. We say “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” He goes on and answers that. He says “You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.” It says “You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings.” Now this is a phrase that scholars tend to struggle with. Exactly what do you mean by heavenly beings? Some would suggest that he is talking about angels. He has made us a little bit lower than angels. Some suggest he is actually saying a little bit lower than God. When you look at the original Hebrew, it could be either. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we are special. In God’s eyes we are special.
We know that because we go back to the book of Genesis that you are all familiar with. If you look at Genesis 1:27 it talks about God creating man and woman. It says “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” It speaks of your significance. It speaks of your identity. It speaks of your value in light of all the other creation. Remember that man and woman were created last. Though they were created last, they are first in the eyes of God. They have been given a special place. After creation when he created the animals, it says he looked around and said it was good. When he looked around and saw man and woman he said it is very good. It is awesome because man and woman had been stamped with the image of God. They had been given the crown of glory and honor. Not only that. That crown and glory of honor represents authority over all of God’s creation. He goes on to explain this. He says “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 path of the seas. Everything.” It is kind of cool because we talked about the majesty of God and how he created all of it. He created everything; all the earth. Now he is taking some of that all-ness and giving it to his people; to his children. He is entrusting us with his very creation. We have been given dominion, ruler-ship, authority over all of his creation.
As a side note, this does not mean obviously that we are totally superior to animals, that we are stronger than all animals. We know that is not true. Other than insects and birds and things like that. Animals can give us a pretty good run for their money. I like watching “Swamp People”. I have to admit it. I like watching “Swamp People” because it is so mindless. It is just a way on Sunday when I just want to relax. Debbie is actually the one who really turned me on to it. She really likes “Swamp People”. But “Swamp People” is about these guys down in Cajun country that go out and kill alligators. Those alligators give those guys a good run for their money. In fact, sometimes my money is on the alligator. Those alligators put up a fight. Some of those alligators are 100 years old. They are not going to give up. Finally, Old Willie just takes out a gun and bops him on the head and he’s gone. But that is what they have to do. They can’t wrestle them so they have to shoot him. It says that we are not superior as far as strength-wise. Another side note. We have all watch the Olympics. We are so easily impressed. All these people out there winning all the Gold. We are beating the Chinese but we can’t beat the Jamaicans. Especially in running because the Jamaicans know how to run. Usain Bolt is a Jamaican runner and he hit a record. I was thinking really how fast is this in miles per hour. I went online and found it and it is like 24 miles per hour. I told Debbie why don’t they throw a cheetah or an antelope or a lion in there and see them give them a run for their money. A cheetah runs 70 mph. A horse or lion runs 50 mph. I looked up the top 50 speeds and humans were down at the bottom. They were down there with chickens and pigs and squirrels. We are impressed with 24 mph. On a very good day we can beat an elephant. That is what it said.
Even though we know we are not stronger, I think we all should know that we are superior in many ways, especially intellectually, with a few exceptions. Generally, we are superior intellectually because we have yet to find a chicken or a duck or a gorilla send a man into space and land him on the moon. Send something out there to Mars. Create the Hubble telescope. Create an iPhone. You are not going to see it. You can stick them in a room for billions of years and they aren’t going to figure out how to put together an iPhone or something like that. I think we believe that we are inherently better than the animals at least intellectually. Not only intellectually. We have the ability to show compassion. We have the ability to take our intellect and take our sense of compassion and go out there into the world and begin to solve problems. Solve the world’s problems with poverty issues and homelessness and environmental issues and that sort of stuff. We have that gift of compassion we can couple with an intellect. We also have the ability to love and be loved in a way that animals can’t do. Most importantly, we have the ability to weigh out right and wrong. We have a moral fiber anywhere in the world; we have this sense of right and wrong. We may not practice it, but we have this sense of right and wrong. Animals don’t have that. If an animal was to kill another animal or even a person, we don’t condemn the animal. We might put it to sleep but we don’t condemn the animal because they are just responding to instinct. If we are just animals, you actually could make a pretty good case for going out and committing violence to another person because we could just say it is survival of the species. We know that is not true because we have an inherent sense of right and wrong because we have been created in the very image of God.
I hope what you are figuring out is, when somebody asks what is man, you should be able to give an answer. You should be able to say we have been created in the image of our creator. Our very image. Consequently, we are gifted with things that no other species has. A superior intellect. We have the compassion. We have the free will. We have the ability to love. We have all these things. Not only that. We have been crowned with glory and honor. The very glory of God on us so we become reflections of that glory and then given the authority to go out and rule over all creation. That is what man is. That is what woman is. You say, Chuck, I just don’t see it. What I see is when I go out into the world is people that are not crowned in glory and honor. I see people that have been beaten up and beaten down. I see children that have been abused. When I watch TV I see kids on the North Side just randomly killing each other. I see environmental disasters that we have caused like the oil spill in the Gulf that we caused. I see that sort of thing so I do not see the glory of God. I do not see the crown of glory. I do not see man having control over his or her environment. You are correct, but what we do see is Jesus. We see Jesus. Everything comes back around to Jesus. When Jesus came, he was the new man. He showed us what our humanity was supposed to be like. He showed us our true image.
Let me slow down on that a little bit. At the beginning, I talked about how God has bracketed us with his majesty, which represents the beginning and end. We find our worth right smack within God’s majesty while we are under his authority. At some point, we decided that we didn’t want to sit under that majesty. We decided we are going to step outside that majesty. We are going to try to do things our own way. That is what they call sin. What we see down through history is it all spiraling down. We see mankind just spiraling down. We see all this evidence of a creation that has gone amuck. As I said before, God looked down, just like he did to the Israelites out there that had been in slavery to the pharaoh, he looked down and said I see your problem, and I can fix that. I am going to send my son Jesus down. I am going to send my son Jesus to show you what true humanity looks like. I am going to show you but first of all I am going to allow him to pay the penalty for your sins. I am going to allow him to fix the problem that you created. So he came down and obviously we know the story. He went on the cross and took our sins away, but before he did that, he hung around for 33 years. He showed us what true humanity looks like. He showed the authority he had with the diseases over the people, over the demonic. He showed all that authority. He showed us how to live. He showed us that no matter how much we are tempted, we don’t have to sin. He did not sin once, but he was tempted as a man. In Jesus, we see not only the image of God; we see the image of self and the way we were designed to be. Ultimately, because of what he did, he received the crown of glory. It is interesting if you ever watch the Passion of Christ or any movie about the crucifixion, they put a crown on him. They put a crown of thorns. All the while not knowing that crown of thorns represented the crown of royalty. The crown that God was putting on his very son. That is what was happening there.
You say, Chuck, I kind of get it, but I just don’t see it. Let me show you two more verses that should bring it on home. Basically, it comes out in Hebrews. Hebrews is an interesting book. Let me give you a little background. The book of Hebrews really talks about the supremacy of Christ as opposed to the old law and the old way of the sacrificial system. That is the first chapter. Then in the second chapter what he is doing is he decides to compare the glory of Christ to the glory of man. What he does is actually quotes the middle portion of Psalm 8. The top part says “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the angels. You crowned him with glory and honor and put everything under his feet.” That is the same verse. That is Psalm 8. Then he goes on to say, the writer is talking about man, “In putting everything under man, God left nothing that is not subject to man. Yet, at present, we do not see everything subject to him but we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” That is an awesome verse. We were looking at it at the Men’s Bible study this week and Roy taught and did a phenomenal job. I didn’t even make the connection until showing up that night with this verse how he pointed back to Psalm 8. It is an amazing thing because what he was saying is that what we failed at was completed in Christ. This entire Psalm that was meant to be for us was ultimately fulfilled in Christ. That is incredible. Right now, everything is not under our authority. “Yet, at present, we do not see everything subject to him but we see Jesus.” So right now because of what he did, everything has become under his authority. He has been crowned with glory and honor. Someday, we are going to see it. We are going to get our inheritance. We are going to officially get that crown of glory if we stay the course.
As a side note, this has to do with an idea that scholars talk about. It is called the now and not yet aspect of our salvation. There is a certain part of our salvation that we get to experience right now. There is a certain part of our divinity that we get to experience right now. There are good things that we get to see. But someday, we are going to get to see it all. We are going to get to experience it all. There is a verse that this ties to very well. It is verse 1 John 3:2 where it says “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” You say, wow, I kind of get this. God has started me and crowned me with glory and honor and made me in his image. But because of sin I have lost that. I have stepped out of that. Christ came in as the new man and showed us how to do it. All we have to do is step in and follow him. Right now, we don’t get to fully experience it, but someday we are going to get to experience it the way we were designed to experience it. But in the meantime, the thing we hold on to is that now, as it says, we are children of God. We are children of God. If you have accepted Christ as your Lord and savior, you are a child of God, which means that you have a very special status. In other words, you are special, which means you don’t go through life trying to get your sense of significance by your hobbies, by your job, by your wealth, by your smarts, or even by the number of golds that you put around your neck. You get your significance because you were made in the image of God. You have been given that new identity. Although you do not experience it right now, what you do the minute you step out of the baptistery is you begin to walk in that new identity. The old way is gone, the new has come. Christ was the new. You follow Christ. You become like Christ. You don’t get it perfect. You are never going to get it perfect but you begin to walk, which means right off the bat you don’t go seeking those things of the earth. You go out there not to get your significance from the world. You have significance so you go out to your jobs, you go into your homes, wherever you are sent, and you do the best you can do because you know that you already have self-worth and you want to please the Father. You go and you keep walking. When you go, because you know that ultimately you are a dominion over the environment and of all God’s creation, it means you are a good steward of the environment. It has to do with everything from the way you handle even an animal to the way you handle God’s creation, the rest of the world. That is what you are called to do. When you do that, you are making a statement to the world. You are saying I get it. Even though I don’t see my full image right now, I see Jesus. I see the one that came down from heaven. I see the Son that himself became a little lower than the angels. He came incarnate and took on flesh. I see him. I see the man who came and walked this earth for 33 years and basically put together a book to show me how to live. I see Jesus. Yes, I may not see everything yet but right now I am a child of God with an eternal destiny that gives me a hope and a future and a way to live right now. I know that someday, when I get to heaven with the littlest babies and David and everybody else, I am going to be up there too singing that song. I will be saying Majesty, “Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the world.” Let us pray.
