Psalm 8
Let’s hear God’s Word together
as we read from Psalm 8. It’s the Psalm of King David. And it says, O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth. You have set your
glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babes and
infants, you have established strength because of your foes
to still the enemy and the avenger. When I look at 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 and
the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him
a little bit lower than the heavenly beings. You have crowned him
with glory and honor. You’ve given him dominion over
the works of your hands and you have put all things under his
feet. all sheep and oxen and all the
beast of the field, the birds of the heavens and the fish of
the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. Oh Lord,
our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. Let’s
pause and pray together for just a moment. Our God, this is your
holy scripture. We pray now that you would bless
it. to our minds and our hearts and our hands so that we can
better serve you, better worship you, better know ourselves, and
better reflect the glory that is ours as we bear the image
of Christ Jesus. This we ask in his name, amen. How many of you have looked through
a microscope Okay, a good number of you have been through seventh
grade science probably. You’ve looked through and you’ve
seen things through that scope that you couldn’t see with your
eyes. How about microscopes? Any of you look through a, or
I’m sorry, a telescope. Any of you look through a telescope?
Have you been to the planetarium or for Christmas one year, you
got one of those little stargazing kits, that sort of thing. And
how many of you study things with your eyes? What you can
see unaided. Or if you’re like me, you got,
glasses, right? Have you ever considered from
telescopes to microscopes and all that is in between, God has
made quite an amazing creation. He’s made quite a world. He’s
made quite a thing for us to study. And I would guess that
men and women from all ages with the aid of different instruments
have attempted to study the world and figure it out. And it still
blows our minds we can see only so far into the heavens. and
can only begin to understand the galaxies and the stars and
all that’s out there. And then we can only see so small.
We can only see the smallest of things with the aid of special
instruments. There’s more out there that we
can’t see and there’s more inside the little things that we can’t
see. But we also miss a lot with our eyes. We don’t see as well
as we could. And particularly, I think that
is the case with man. The question before us this evening
is what is man? That’s the question of the psalmist.
What is man that you are mindful of him? What is man that you
would consider him at all? Just sometime recently, somebody
was telling me about studying sociology. And as I listened
to what this person was saying, I thought, what a bunch of hooey.
because it’s divorced from who God says we are. You know, you
can study patterns of people by sitting out in front of Starbucks
and watching them or going out in front of maybe Zach’s Hot
Dogs and watching what people do. You can sit out in front
of Walmart and study people. You’ll get quite an eyeful. But
unless you look through the lens of scripture, you cannot answer
the question, I mean, what are the stars without being detached
or without being attached to God, or what is a cell without
being attached to God? But you really, really, really
can’t answer the question, what is man, unless you know what
God says of man? It’s an important question. It’s
an important task for us. So David, King David asked this
question in Psalm 8. Now this is the first of the
Psalms we’ve gotten to after several, where David’s not fussing
about something. or he’s not complaining about
something, or he’s not in trouble for something. This is King David
probably laying out under the stars, keeping sheep, remembering
back to his shepherd days, something of that nature with his soldiers
in camp, you know, no target parking lot lights, no airport. scan light, no artificial lights
to ruin. They could literally lie on their
backs and see the constellations perfectly, barring clouds and
weather. We don’t get that privilege nowadays,
but sometimes that’s what we’re able to do and it makes us think.
And so what does David think? Well, notice first, you see it
in verses one and nine. He speaks to his covenant God,
his covenant Lord, and he speaks of how majestic is your name
in all the earth. It’s the bookends of this psalm.
He begins with, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in
all the earth. And he ends with the same. So he’s been looking
up, he’s been studying. And then as we get through verses
two through eight, he comes back to that, O Lord, our Lord, how
majestic is your name in all the earth. But let’s begin where
David begins. How majestic is your name in
all the earth. Let’s look at what he says about
a majestic Lord. How many of you in 2011 got up early and
watched William and Kate get married. I don’t know why we
were awake, but we did. Anybody do that? Okay, it was
early, like six in the morning or something. I’m usually asleep
then, but somehow. How many of you watched Diana
and Charles get married in the 1980s? Go ahead and raise your
hand, or at least watched it. All right, now here’s a real
test. How many of you were around when
QE2 got coronated as queen? Queen Elizabeth II. Anybody around? You didn’t watch it. Of course,
y’all didn’t have TVs back then, right? Y’all were still cranking
your water out of the well with a bucket. What’s that? 53? Is that when
that was, 1953? Yeah. But these were events of great
majesty. The robes, the length of the
train, the pomp, the circumstance, just the setting, Westminster
Abbey. You know, the swell of the multi-thousand
pipe organ, the military dress, the on and on, the pomp and circumstance. It was a majestic event. And
you think about the majestic events of the scriptures. Remember Isaiah, saw into heaven. What did he say? I saw the Lord.
High and lifted up and his train filled the temple and the seraphs
cried, holy. starting to sing a little song
now. The seraphs cried, holy is the Lord. Or how about Ezekiel?
He saw the throne and the wheels and the majesty. How about John
on the Isle of Patmos, a prisoner for the Lord? He saw into heaven
and he saw the elders, the 24 elders surrounding the throne,
night and day, worshiping God, the sights and the sounds and
the lights and the The flashes and the beauty and majesty of
heaven was majestic. And we don’t often think of that.
We’re so, we’re so profane in our world, right? We, you know,
we go out and buy jeans that have holes in them. I never have
figured that out. But we, you know, we, we hardly
wear a suit. We hardly, we hardly dress up.
We, we’re just, we’re casual, right? Maybe there’s a place
for all that. But we don’t get a sense of majesty anymore. I
remember somebody saying, this was when George Bush, number
two, became president for the second time, they said, why should
we inaugurate him when he’s already in office? And I forget who said
that, it was somebody, I was in the discussion with them,
I said, because we need to show the power and the majesty of
that office. to remind ourselves that this
person has been elected and is being set apart, though he’s
been it once, he’s being set apart again to be the president
of a great country. There’s something about it. We’re
becoming an anti-ceremonial bunch these days, but there’s something
about majesty that we miss. And so I think it’s amazing that
God gives us glimpses of what’s happening in heaven. It’s also
why we worship the way we do, right? Worship is something different. It’s not casual. It’s not, hey,
God, what’s up? But that’s what’s out there these
days, isn’t it? This is God saying, hey, you sit down and come face
to face with me. I want to have a meeting with
you, a reckoning with you. And so there’s something about the
weightiness and the majesty of Almighty God. We ought to recover.
Well, John Calvin says very well, we can’t know ourselves until
we know God. And if we don’t know ourselves
well, we can’t know God well. If we don’t know God well, we
can’t know ourselves well. And so here’s David saying, I’m
about to ask the question of who am I? But first I say, who
is God? And he is majestic. He is Lord. What does he literally call him?
If you look in your English translations, he calls him, oh Lord. And how
are those letters? They’re all caps. And what does
that mean? He’s saying Yahweh. Yeah, He’s calling the divine
personal name, the name the Hebrews would not mention or even pronounce. He says, Oh Yahweh our Lord,
Yahweh Adonai. You’re the King of the universe
and you’re my Lord. That’s how He addresses Him.
Jehovah our Lord. And what’s interesting as David
says these words is we begin to realize very quickly that
there is no theater, there’s no stage, there is no place that
can contain the majesty of God. There is no stage large enough,
no arena big enough. You know, today’s the big race
at Bristol, right? What is it, the last American,
last great Coliseum they call it? I read a thing in the paper
this week, it says it seats 161,000. And they probably hardly fill
it. But you think about God and his
majesty and his glory, thousands upon thousands upon 10,000 are
created to serve him, the angels and the elders and the creatures.
And then not only that, redeemed humanity. And so he cannot be
contained on a stage. No stadium would suit his needs
for his glory and his majesty. were made to worship Him. And
in Christ, we have been remade to worship him. And so that’s
the first thing he teaches us. Here is God, our covenant Lord,
and he is not only our maker and our redeemer. And what does
he say in verse, at the end of one, he says, you have set your
glory above the heavens, out of the mouths of babes and infants,
you have established strength to still the enemy and the avenger.
And so God’s worship is high above us. His majesty is high
above us. The earth cannot even contain him. But he has established
his praise even in the mouths of babes. Do you remember Jesus
when he made his triumphal entry, riding along on the donkey? And
what did the scribes and the Pharisees say? You need to tell
these little kids to hush. And what does Jesus say? He says,
Psalm 8, you have set your glory above the heavens out of the
mouths of babes and infants You’ve established your worship. And
then he says, if they won’t praise me, guess what? The rocks will
cry out. And so we see the importance
of understanding and seeing and noticing the majesty of almighty
God. Now, if you don’t like God, and
there’s plenty that do, what do they care about his majesty?
What do they care about his glory? What do they care about his immensity?
His largeness, we might have to say to modernize it. They
could care less. But what about we who love the
Lord? We should study His majesty. We should study His creation.
We should look with a telescope. We should look with a microscope.
We should look with our eyes and we should see His majesty
in all the earth. We’ll come to Psalm 19 in a few
weeks and we’ll see that the heavens declare the glory of
God. The stars above proclaim His majesty. And so there’s a
lot for us to look at and see His majesty. Well, the second
thing we bump into in this passage is David, after seeing God, he’s
apparently lying on his back, looking up in the stars, and
he says, look at all this wonderful creation. Now, David didn’t know
about the Hubble telescope or the International Space Station.
There was no Hebrew version of NASA. Even at that point, there was,
what, no Galileo? I mean, the Greeks and the Romans
were doing their thing, maybe, or even thinking about it, but
they didn’t know what we know. And so for David to lie on his
back out under the stars, somewhere in the Jordan Valley, and to
stare up at the Big Dipper and the Orion’s Belt and all that
business, probably had to overwhelm and amaze him. And so when he
does that, he says, oh, look at all that. No, wait, look at
little me. I am so insignificant. in the midst of all that God
has created. We see this in verses three and
four. He says, when I look at the 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? And so he’s overwhelmed by the
grandeur of God’s creation and maybe underwhelmed by his smallness. You ever thought how puny you
are? in light of creation. Have you ever thought about how
tiny you are in light of how big are the planets? Or how giant
is an elephant? Or maybe you go to the zoo for
the day and you look at God’s creation. You really start to
feel puny. But David doesn’t stay there
very long. He’ll move on to something else
in a minute. But he’s staring at the solar
systems. He’s looking at things which take light years to get
from there to here. sees the galaxies, he looks into
a world that in ancient Near East was quite unknown and he
says, it is an amazing thing that God would make all that
and then puny, tiny, little me. And so that’s an appropriate
way to feel, isn’t it? God made the world and everything
in it and he made even me. Quite a thing to consider. Well,
the third thing he says is that Yes, God is majestic. Yes, the
world and its creation is immense. But he says, look at me, I’m
designed for dignity. I’m designed for big things.
And we read that in verses five through eight. He says, you have
made man a little bit lower than the heavenly beings. You’ve crowned
him with glory and honor. You’ve given him dominion over
the works of your hands. You have put all things under
his feet, all sheep, all oxen, all the beast of the field. the
birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, whatever passes
along the paths of the seas.” And so he begins to realize,
yes, I’m teeny tiny, yes, I’m puny in light of the stars and
the galaxies, and especially in light of God and his majesty.
But he says, I’m designed for dignity. God has made me for
a purpose. No other creature, no other creation
has been called by God to do the things he’s called us to
do. Now, you fellows who are in the men’s lunch and the Thursday
night little study. We’re going through the masculine
mandate and we’re looking at these very ideas. Who are we
in God’s eyes? He’s made us in his image. He’s
made us to be fruitful. He’s made us to multiply. He’s
made us to rule the earth and to have dominion over the creatures.
And so I like to use the example of having lived in the Charlotte
area where it’s a banking center. And so smart men and women have
capitalized on, you know, they’ve used their brains and they’ve
tackled a market. Or you go just up the road from
Charlotte and they’ve harnessed the Catawba River with the Callens
Ford Dam. And not only that, there’s the
McGuire Nuclear Station there where they’ve taken fission and
fusion and they’ve created electricity. And not only that, they’ve dammed
up a lake which was formerly a mud pit, and guess what? They’ve
created a real estate market that’s made some people very
wealthy. So you see what men and women
and boys and girls are able to do. We read of stories of, was
it Ben Franklin strapping the metal key onto his kite? And
what did he discover? Yeah, that it hurts too. But
we think back to Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone. We think
of Henry Ford and the not just the Ford car, but what was it,
the assembly line? Yeah, we think of all these things.
It came from men, not all Christians, but it came from men and women
and boys and girls who said, I’m gonna take what God has made
me to be and I’m gonna use it to have dominion and to build
and to innovate and to do wonderful things. How many of you’ve had
laser eye surgery? I know Lola has. Isn’t that quite
the thing? You can see better, right? It’s
amazing what can happen. How many of you wear these plastic
things on your head? I’d be blind without them, wouldn’t
you? It’s amazing what God can do. Or you’ve had your appendix
removed by emergency because it wasn’t doing what it was supposed
to do and it was going to do something you don’t want it to
do, right? It’s amazing what God is able to do through other
men. And so David says, no other creature,
no other creation can do what I can do. I’ve been created by
God to do amazing things. Yes, I’m little, but maybe to
sound like a kid, you ever heard a kid say, I’m little, but I’m
big? That’s how we should think of ourselves. Yes, I’m puny,
but I’m also big. I rule the earth. That’s what
God says to us, rule the earth, have dominion. Another way to
look at this is, we’re not angels, though I think some people think
that when we die, we turn into angels, and that’s a bunch of
hooey. But we’re also not beast. We’ve been made a little bit
lower than the heavenly beings. So we’re not angels, we’re never
gonna be, so don’t think of yourself as a future fat tyrant, because
that’s not what you’re gonna become. But we’re also not beast,
you’re not a bull, you’re not an elephant, you’re not a monkey.
And you didn’t come from monkeys, by the way. But God has made
us special. We’re somewhere in between the
beast and the angels, but we’re the only thing that bears his
image. We’re the only thing he breathed
the breath of life in personally and made us living beings. Now,
what happens when sin enters? We do become beast. What do we
say sometimes when we watch the news? We say, what animals? What beast, what mongrels, what
have we become? And friends, that is what sin
does to us. It takes us from the place of
dignity where God has made us and designed us. And we strip
man of dignity by sin and by becoming worse than animals. Sometimes animals show better
sense than humans. But we become beast and we are
in need of redemption. Do a quick study of the world,
maybe go to the local college or the local coffee shop and
watch. People are extraordinarily narcissistic, aren’t they? I
mean, what other generation has said, I must take a picture of
myself and post that picture of myself and then comment about
myself and then watch and see what other people say about myself? I mean, what other generation
would do that? Something is wrong. And we think
that’s so cute, don’t we? We think, oh, what cute pictures
those are, but it’s self-centeredness. It’s no longer worshiping God,
but worshiping me. Now, not every selfie is self-worship. The last time I said something
in a sermon about somebody taking selfies, two people took a selfie
of themselves, and I was way in the background, and they posted
it on Facebook, you know that? So, don’t do that tonight. But
we are a self-centered world and we don’t often say, oh Lord,
our Lord, how majestic is your name? We look at pictures of
ourselves and say, oh me, oh me, how majestic am I? And so friends, we need to be
very careful about how we see ourselves and how we see God.
Yes, God is majestic. God is high and holy. We do bear
his image, but we must walk carefully and in humility. So how does
God solve this problem of our beastliness? How does he solve
this problem of our depravity, our derailment of humanity? He does it through a man. Okay, he didn’t send Jesus, the
eternal God, to do a man’s work. He sent Jesus, the eternal God,
in the form of a man. He became man. in order to restore
humanity. So when we look at Jesus, we
don’t look at Jesus as simply the Savior who died on the cross.
And if I look to him in faith, I’m gonna live forever. I got
my train ticket in my pocket and my passport, whatever. We
look at Jesus as the, yes, that’s true. We look at Jesus, though,
as the prime example of what humanity should be like. He is
the new Adam. Adam was made and designed and
put in the garden and given a task to do. Thanks a lot, Eve. She kind of goofed that up. It’s
his fault too. But in Jesus, we see a man who
does not fail. And so how does God redeem men
who turn themselves into animals? He does it through sending a
man. And it’s a man who is the picture of all that we should
be. You probably can’t remember back
in maybe October, but as we began our study of Hebrews, and it’s
speaking of Jesus, It says in Hebrews chapter 2, beginning
at verse 7, it quotes Psalm 8, it says, you made Jesus, you
made him for a little while lower than the angels, and you have
crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection
under his feet. The writer of Hebrews takes Psalm
8, and instead of speaking in human terms, it speaks in Jesus
terms. For a little while, you left the glory of heaven and
became lower than the angels. to become like men who are lower
than angels, to redeem them so that they might then be exalted
back in heaven just as you, Jesus, are now exalted back into heaven. So Jesus was made momentarily
lower than the angels so that we might be able to live and
have life. And so, maybe some of you are
Coke drinkers, Pepsi drinkers, Mountain Dew drinkers. We don’t
really drink out of cans anymore. But if you take a Pepsi can and
you bend it up, crinkle it up, can you straighten it back out?
Maybe blow into it? It might expand a little bit.
You might be able to sneak your air compressor hose in there
and blow it out. But guess what? The paint is
chipped. It still has crinkles and cracks in it. And that is
what’s happened to us as we have been bruised and broken by the
fall. We are made in God’s image, but it’s bent, it’s broken, it’s
cracked, it’s dented. And it cannot be fully restored
into heaven. But guess what? by His person and work and the
power of the Holy Spirit is in the business of making all things
new. He is remaking you. You are being
conformed into the image of Christ. And so one of the ways you can
reflect that as you grow in grace and grow in the Spirit is to
rule the earth. Take over, have dominion, create, be creative,
work hard, you know, take advantage over a little part of God’s kingdom
where He’s told you to serve. And maybe you’ll be the president
of the United States. Maybe you’ll just be the manager
of your tiny home that nobody ever knows about. But significant
and insignificant as it may be in the world’s eyes, that’s what
God’s asked us to do, is to rule like Him over the earth. And so, what is man supposed
to be? He’s supposed to be whole again.
And that’s through the gift of faith in Jesus. He makes us new. Again, we are new creations.
And so there’s a challenge for us as we’re walking towards heaven
to be more and more renewed in the image of God after the image
of Christ Jesus. How does he do that? He gives
us his word, he gives us his spirit, he gives us repentance,
he gives us faith, he gives us growth, he gives us hardships,
and all these things shape us. And then how does David end this
psalm? What’s his perspective at the beginning? It seems to
be the same at the end, but do you think he probably says verse
nine a little louder than he says verse one? I mean, probably
pretty amazed at verse one, but even more amazed as he’s talked
through it at verse two. And so he ends saying, oh Lord,
our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. Let’s pray and give thanks to
our God. Our God, we thank you that you have made us and that
you have designed us for dignity and yes, that is bent and broken
and bruised by the fall, but we pray for your redeeming grace
to be evident in our lives as we seek first your kingdom, as
we live your word and love it, and as we submit to the power
of your Holy Spirit to save us and to make us whole again. We
can’t wait for the day when we get to heaven, where we will
rule and reign with you. We thank you that we can serve
here now. Help us to be gracious servants who bear your image
in this world. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen. Let’s stand together
as we sing Psalm 8 together from the Trinity Psalter. O’er earth, O’er heav’n, O’er
the earth, Thou wast so much for me. You are my love and success,
O splendor of Your face. From the clouds I’ve been fetched
You. ♪ That leads us to where we first
used to be, Jesus ♪