Psalm 8 - What Is Man?

I’m not sure if you know this, but as of Tuesday at 5 PM, there were over 7.6 billion people on this planet! That’s a lot of people. And there’s over 326 million in the United States. So, when you feel crowded by people, yes, it’s happening. On a typical day, we gain about 228,000 people per day! That’s a lot of people.

We’ve been talking about Psalm 8. Last week we saw how huge our universe is, and how small planet Earth is in comparison. Yet, we saw how God loves us and cares for us and the fact that as Jeremiah tells us ~

17 Ah, Lord God! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you. – Jeremiah 32:17

Now, I want to remind you of what David said in this 9 verse Psalm. There’s so much to what David is saying, and today I want to concentrate on verse 4 and keep us moving to the end of the Psalm.

David was tending the sheep and was looking up at the night sky and marveled at God’s creation and he sung these words ~

1 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.

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

3 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?

5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet,

7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,

8 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

9 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! – Psalm 8

David looked to the sky and while picturing all that God did, he asked this question to God . . . and then he went ahead and answered as well!

He asked ~

4 what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? – Psalm 8:4

That’s a great question. Sometimes we ask that question too. God! Why do you care about me? What is there about me that you even want me around? Lots of questions we can ask God about who we are and why we’re even here.

If we took an evolutionary approach, we would say we were kind of a chance occurrence. That some one celled amoeba mutated and became 2 cells and so on and our not so distant cousins are the apes.

When you think about it this way, we aren’t all that different than the birds and fish, dogs and frogs, cats, rats, gnats and bats, baboons and racoons, and slugs and bugs.

That’s us - - - We’re really nothing more than all of these. And if that’s the case, we really don’t have much value and not much value to God. A relationship with God is really inconsequential in our lives.

And there may be times we might agree with that evaluation.

There are times we don’t think we’re worth very much.

Times we think that we’ve messed up so badly - - no one could want us around.

Times when we wonder if anybody would even miss us if we were gone.

Sometimes we may even wonder if it matters that we even exist.

But the Bible doesn’t agree with that.

The Bible teaches that you are NOT an accident

You were planned and you have a purpose. You have value because God created you. You see, you were created in God’s image. In Genesis 1:26, we read ~

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens

and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” – Genesis 1:26

Do you see that? Firstly, God said LET US MAKE man in OUR image, after OUR likeness. That’s the first reference in the Bible to the Trinity . . . to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

But notice that we are the only part of creation made in the image of God. Nothing else was made in God’s image. Not the beagle or eagle, not the deer or steer, and certainly not the moose or goose. Nothing else was created in God’s image. After every day of creation, God said it was good, but when He created man, God said it was very good!