Psalm 8--God’s Glory, Human Dignity

Psalm 8
World English Bible

For the Chief Musician; on an instrument of Gath. A Psalm by David.
8 Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens!
2 From the lips of babes and infants you have established strength,
because of your adversaries, that you might silence the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have ordained,
4 what is man, that you think of him?
What is the son of man, that you care for him?
5 For you have made him a little lower than the angels,
and crowned him with glory and honor.
6 You make him ruler over the works of your hands.
You have put all things under his feet:
7 All sheep and cattle,
yes, and the animals of the field,
8 the birds of the sky, the fish of the sea,
and whatever passes through the paths of the seas.
9 Yahweh, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

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​I mentioned this Psalm yesterday and that we would get to it today, for it is one of the songs in our biblical songbook (the Psalms) that is a natural response to the beauty of creation that we have been studying from Genesis 1 and 2. We cry out first in adoration of how great the LORD (the covenant name of God “I AM” that was given to Moses at the burning bush). Since He is the Creator of all things, He is their rightful king and Ruler or Lord over all. Because of all He is and all He has done (starting with the fact that He is Creator and made everything out of nothing), He is greatly to be praised in all the earth!

He has ordained praise from the mouths of babes. Even the youngest who have so much to learn naturally see beauty and respond to it with sounds of pleasure and enjoyment which is a form of praise and adoration to the LORD. God accepts the worship of babies and children and uses them to silence the proud and oppose the so-called strength of the wicked. Children inherently understand these things and accept them without any explanation needed—God exists, He made everything, and if He made everything, that makes Him owner and authority over everything. It’s not until people get older and don’t like the moral implications of that (that He is the authority in areas of not just Natural Law, but Moral Law) that they have issues, not before of a lack of knowledge, but because they don’t like the obvious answer, so they look for new answers that will never suffice).

David looks up at the night sky and sees all the stars and the moon, and all the other objects in the night sky and realizes all of them are exactly where God wanted giving light exactly as God ordained, and God knows each and every object that David can see, and all of them that David can’t see. There are too many for David to count, but God knows all of them. There would be too much for any man to keep track of, but God is not a man like us. This task of ruling over the vastness of creation from the big things like galaxies to the small things like the bonds between subatomic particles in each and every atom is not too big a task for Him. “My God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do” as the children’s song says. “The mountains are His, the valleys are His, the stars are His handiwork too.” David looks at the vastness of the universe and feels small and insignificant, yet, He realizes that is not true because God has chosen to take notice of him and all mankind. David is not sure why, but we see this is true—there is this truth called the Anthropic Principle when it comes to studying creation. It appears even from what we have studied so far in Genesis 1 and 2 that God made the earth first and created everything else with the intent of earth being the perfect place for humans who would be made in His image to live and flourish. God cares deeply about mankind because He made men and women different than anything else He made. He made them in His image and gave them an eternal component called a soul or a spirit in the Bible that does not belong to any other creature. It is not simply that God breathed life into them, for He gave the breath of life to all living things, but He made us specifically to have a relationship (an eternal relationship) with Him.

The next phrase is a little hard to interpret. Some versions say that He made man a little lower than the angels, others that He made them a little higher than the angels, but suffice it to say that men and angels are different creatures in different realms with different purposes. Angels are also eternal creatures, but they are different in that they had free will once and only once. Once they made that decision, they were locked in. This is what would have happened to mankind if we had eaten from the Tree of Life after we sinned and it is why Adam and Eve would need to be expelled from the Garden of Eden so that this would not happen (that’s coming up in Genesis 3). Angels serve and worship God, but they cannot understand the mystery of salvation because they cannot repent and be saved. The fallen angels who rebelled with Lucifer (who we call Satan and the Devil) are no and forevermore demons. They will never again be anything other than enemies of God and His Kingdom. The angels that did not fall are ministers of sometimes mediators of the covenant, but they do not fully understand the covenant. How could they when the gospel is not truly for them?

One day, God Himself would become a man, Immanuel, God with Us, so that He could be the Second Adam and the Last Adam. He would succeed where Adam is going to fail. Where Adam brought judgment, condemnation, and death to all who are his natural descendants, Jesus brought grace, peace, mercy, forgiveness and new, eternal, abundant life to all who become a part of His tribe by Adoption (see Romans 5). The angels will see this, marvel at it and give glory to God for it in their limited ability to understand, but the redeemed of the Lord will gather around His throne in worship and sing a song that the angels will not be able to sing with us because they have no experienced it for themselves. Whether that makes the angels a little “higher” or a little “lower” in your mind (that they need no salvation, but they will also never experience the joy of the Lord’s salvation) is debatable, but we do not worship the angels or the demons, for they too are created beings. We instead worship God alone for He alone is Creator and worthy of all glory and honor and praise both now and forevermore.

God chose to make man the stewards and viceroys over His creation. He gave them dominion over all the animals, though sin has made us afraid of many of the wild animals—that was not the original order of things. Animals also are usually naturally afraid of us, and will typically try to avoid us. The general principle remains true though that God has given us dominion and with great authority comes great responsibility. It is true that we may have to give an answer some day for how we used the resources God gave to us, but misuse or mismanagement of these resources is not the greatest sin, nor will we be able to destroy the planet or make it uninhabitable for mankind. The Bible is pretty clear that it is an act of God, not an act of man that brings about the end of the world. We should be careful to consider the consequences of our choices, but we should remember that the rest of creation is there to serve our needs, not for us to server its needs (we are its master, not its slave). This includes domesticated and wild animals (both “clean” and “unclean” animals) as well as all the birds of the air (both “clean” and “unclean”) and all the animals (generically “fish”) of the sea (both “clean” and “unclean”).

David ends exactly where he started, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your Name in all the earth!” This should be a call to worship for us as we too look at creation and marvel and respond in worship. We should desire for all of creation, but especially all of mankind, to join the grateful chorus. We’ll come back to Psalm 148 a little later this week to talk about how creation does, in its own way, praise the LORD right now, and calls us to join it in doing so.