The Glory of God: Psalm 8: Thinking of God Magnificently

Through the ages, people have looked into the night sky and seen in the glorious display of stars the majesty of God—and their own insignificance. But in Psalm 8 the psalmist sees something more.

PSALM 8: THINKING OF GOD MAGNIFICENTLY

Introduction

When I was a child the sky was much darker than it is now because there weren’t many electric lights then. We could really see the stars.
I slept on the sleeping porch during the summers and I could look up into the dark sky and see the bright stars blazing there. I could see the Milky Way as a bright band across the sky.
When we studied the stars in school I learned that what I saw as the Milky Way was the rim of our galaxy. All of the stars are in galaxies, each one having at least 100 billion stars. There are at least 10 billion galaxies.
With powerful telescopes astronomers can see stars that are 100 quintillion miles away from our earth—that’s 100 with 18 zeroes after it. And we don’t know how many stars that we can’t see even with the powerful telescopes.

A famous astronomer was once lecturing on the infinite greatness of the universe compared to our tiny earth. When he finished his lecture, a woman came to him and asked: “If our earth is so little, and the universe so great, can we believe that God actually pays attention to us?”
The astronomer replied, “That depends, Madam, entirely on how big a God you believe in.”

In the psalm I am going to read, the poet looks up into the night sky and marvels at the grandeur of the universe God has made. Then he considers himself and his fellow mortals and marvels that the God who made this vast universe cares so much about human beings.

He could see only a few thousand stars, and he had no knowledge of galaxies and all the rest. But he saw enough to make him gasp in wonder.

Read Psalm 8

I. “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth…”

“How majestic is thy name…” God’s name is his reputation, that part of his nature that he reveals to us. When we praise his “name” we praise him for all that we know of him—his love, his power, his wisdom, and his goodness.

I read in an old book a conversation between a wise father and his son. The father is teaching his son what is important in life. He says, “First of all, my child, worship and adore God. Think of him magnificently.”

This psalm will help us to think of God magnificently.

B. He says that God’s glory is “…above the heavens.”

The beauty of the stars tells the psalmist that God is majestic. Though this poet didn’t know as much about science as we do, he was better at seeing how nature reveals the glory of God.

C. Then the poet drops from the grandeur of the heavens to the babble of children. He says that the praise of mere children is powerful to silence the enemies of God.

We can take this in two ways. We can take it as referring to actual children and infants, or we can take it to refer to mean lowly believers. I take it both ways.

Little children, if they look in wonder at creation and praise God, can do something that even the sun and moon and stars can’t do. They can acknowledge the greatness of the creator. Sometimes children praise God in wonderful ways.

A mother tells about one day when she spent an afternoon engrossed in a piece of sewing.
The waste basket near her sewing machine was filled with scraps of fabric she had cut away from her project.
Her daughter Annika was fascinated with the basket of discards. Her mother noticed that Annica was rooting through the scraps, searching out the long bright strips. When Annica had enough strips collected, she went off.
Finally, the mother took a moment to check on her, she found Annika in the garden sitting on the grass with a long pole. She was fastening the scraps to the top of the pole with great sticky wads of tape.
“I’m making a banner for a procession,” she said. “I need a procession so that God will come down and dance with us.”
And with that she solemnly lifted her banner to flutter in the wind and slowly she began to dance.
That little girl was praising God. She was enhancing God’s reputation. She was helping God put to flight the forces of darkness in the universe.
(This story came from Gertrud Mueller Nelson's book "To Dance with God.")

But we can also take the phrase “Thy glory is chanted by the mouth of babes and infants” in another way. We ordinary believers could also be referred to as “children and infants” when we consider the vastness of the universe, the greatness of God, and our insignificance.

Aren’t we all really babbling infants as we try to praise a God we can’t begin to understand?

And yet God is glorified by our praise because we are reasoning creatures and our praises come from our hearts. Jesus was talking about ordinary people when he said,

“I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea Father, for such was thy gracious will.”

II. The psalmist goes on,

“When I look at the heavens, the work of your hands,
what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?”

A. Some translations say, “When I consider the heavens…“ We can look at something without really seeing it. The poet not only looked at the stars, he considered them. He learned something from what he saw.

A pastor told his son: “If you have only 3 minutes to give to Bible reading in the morning, give 1 minute to reading and 2 minutes to thinking of what you read.” So it is with the book of Nature. The Bible speaks to us, and nature speaks to us, only when we consider what they are telling us.

And when he considers the immensity and grandeur of the universe, he is filled with wonder that God cares about mere mortals, such as himself.

One might suppose that with the universe so huge and human beings so small, God would hardly notice us, but the truth, the psalmist knows, is the opposite.
The gap between human beings is unimaginably great, yet the gap between human beings and the rest of creation is even greater, because we are only a little lower than the God, or, as other versions have it “a little lower than the heavenly beings.”
We are crowned with glory and honor. We are crowned with glory and honor because we are made in the image of God. We have reason, we can create things, and we can love God. No other creature can do those things.

III. Then:
“Yet thou hast made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with glory and honor.
Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the sea.”

A. God has given to his little human beings the rule of his creation.

The psalmist mentions the animals, which human beings have tamed and used as their helpers, and for clothing and for food.
But animals are just one example: human beings also can use plants for food, and fuel, and lumber. They can use the minerals in the earth’s crust: the metals, the oil, the gems, the stones. They fly through the air in airplanes and pass over the sea in ships.

B. Human domination over nature filled our psalmist with wonder and praise, but we live in a different time.

We see cropland as overgrazed and ruined. We see water and air that have been often made poisonous. We know that we are quickly using up the resources of the earth. Human activity has driven some animals and plants to extinction.

We think about how different our world would be if humans had used God’s earth as God intended it to be used.
Something has gone wrong with God’s plan for his earth and the people he has put into the earth.

IV. And that is where we have to go to the New Testament to find the happy ending to the story.

A. In Hebrews 2.5-9 the writer quotes this psalm—and then he says that it is really Jesus Christ who perfectly fulfills the psalm.

Listen. Here is the way the psalm is quoted in the book of Hebrews:

“What is man that thou art mindful of him,
or the son of man, that thou carest for him?
Thou didst make him for a little while lower than the angels,
thou hast crowned him with glory and honor,
putting everything in subjection under his feet.”

And then the author of Hebrews adds,

“Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for every one.”

B. God’s purpose for all men and women has been fulfilled in one man, Jesus Christ.

Jesus is man—as man ought to be—the proper lord of creation.
And we, who are united to Christ and as his sisters and brothers, will someday take our proper place with him as the lords of creation.
One more thing to notice: “We see Jesus… crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for every one.”

This shows us that the glory and honor that God has crowned his humans with in Psalm 8 isn’t success and self-importance but service and self-sacrifice.
Jesus was a suffering servant, and we also are servants of God and of creation.

CONCLUSION

So now we come to the end, and what do we hear? The poet ends just as he began…“Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!”

Everything the poet wrote in his hymn of praise is framed by these words: “Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!”

The psalm isn’t really about the grandeur of Nature or about the dignity of human beings; the psalm is about our majestic God, who is proclaimed glorious by both Nature and also by his human creatures.

“Worship and adore God! Think of him magnificently.”