Psalm 8 • The God Who Crowns

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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)

The choir has just sung for us the summer Psalm that we are considering today:  That is Psalm 8.
Psalm 8, to look in your bibles.
And I want to show you a picture that's also about Psalm 8.
I took this last night in the church parking lot.
Oh, it's gone already.
There it is.
Now, let me tell you what happened.
I had taken this picture and immediately as I took it, I got a call from my wife saying that our first male grandchild had just been born.
[Laughter and applause]
Now, Psalm 8 is saying, "The heavens and babies declare the glory of God."
[Laughter]
And I thought, "This is perfect."
[Laughter]
It's what Psalm 8 is all about.
Let's stand and honor God's Word as we remember how the heavens and the voices of children declare their Maker's praise.
"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 babies 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 lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"
Let's pray together.
>>> Heavenly Father, when we read such words, we know what David meant when he said, "Oh how I love Your Word," that You point to the beauty of creation and You're reminding us not only of Your greatness but of the care that made us too.
So help us be encouraged this day.
We recognize the purpose of this Psalm itself is to give us confidence in Your hand.
We act--, actually in this moment now depend upon You to lead and guide us by Your Spirit to the truths of Your Word.
We pray for this in Jesus' name.
Amen.
>>> Please be seated.
A wise man once said, "There are two ways to live:  one, to live as though nothing is a miracle, and the other way to live is as if everything is a miracle."
Now, in an age of science and technology where there are materialistic explanations for everything, certainly a lot of people can live as though nothing is a miracle.
And many people perceive that if you think there's a miracle, you're just misperceiving natural processes and are just naive about science.
That's why it's so important to me that the man who said, "You actually can live as though everything is a miracle," was that naive scientist known as Albert Einstein.
And, of course, seeing wonder around you in the world is not just reserved for scientists and mathematicians.
Songwriters can see it too.
Think of Louis Armstrong, "I see skies of blue, red roses too, I see them bloom for me and for you, and I think to myself, it's a wonderful world."
I like that.
Even science and sentiment come together to say, "There are wonders all around us."
But how far does that get you?
Okay, you know, in the mess, in the muck, maybe I can occasionally see some wonderful thing.
So what?
Well, the "so what" is explained by the world's most famous former atheist, Andrew Flew, who wrote these words before his death:  "I think that the most impressive arguments for God's existence are those now supported by recent scientific discoveries."
Isn't that interesting?
Of course, he was excoriated and scorned by many of his peers for giving up on an atheist perspective of the world by saying, "No, there's too much irreducible complexity, too much that couldn't have happened by chance; there must have been a designer of some sort."
But if you believe that, how far does that get you?
I mean, okay, what if there was that ancient clockmaker who long ago set things in motion?
What if there really is a divine hand somewhere out there?
What does that really get you, to believe that there are wonders that are being orchestrated by somebody, something far away?
It doesn't really get you what you need to make it through life.
We don't really understand what it means that this psalmist is saying, "The God who made the stars made you," is saying there is a framework for existence that God has made and you fit in it, so that He is not something distant and remote but present and real and powerful in your life.
And the reality of that, and the importance of it, is explained not by scientists or mathematicians or former atheists, intellectuals, but by a mom.
The mom's name is Nicole Cliffe and she recently wrote an article called "How God Messed Up My Happy Atheistic Life."
[Laughter]
She writes, "As an atheist since college, the idea of a benign deity who created and loves us was obvious nonsense."
She ran a popular feminist blog and wasn't always against religion; she sometimes actually ran religious commentary because, she said, she thought about Christians:  They were simply charming in their sweet delusion.
She wrote of herself, "I did not wish to believe.
I had no untapped, unanswered yearning.
All was well.
And then it wasn't.
It's a simple story," she wrote.
"I was going through a hard time.
I was worried about my child.
One time I said out loud, 'Be with me,' to an empty room.
It was embarrassing.
I don't know why I said it or to whom.
I brushed it off.
I moved on.
And the situation resolved itself.
But the door to belief had cracked open."
Not just the door of consideration of a divine Maker but of a divine presence, that the one who had made all things, that huge framework of the universal creation was the same God who not only had a framework for her life but had placed her in that framework, so that that God could actually be approached and spoken to and you would believe that that God was still working beyond the natural processes for the good of those that He loved.
That God is the God that Psalm 8 is talking about, not just the God of great creation, which causes us to love this Psalm.
I'm just guessing for a lot of you Psalm 8 may be your favorite Psalm in all the Bible, because it's what we think about when we're on camping trips, we're out under the stars and we just kind of go, "Wow, the heavens declare the glory of God.
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"
And we just love that.
But the psalmist isn't stopping there.
He's saying ultimately the reason you know God did not make no junk, including you, is because the God who made those stars made you, and He's right here now with you.
And that reality is what's causing the psalmist here to praise God with such wonderful and glorifying words.
He just begins by looking at the creation itself.
You see that in verse 1, right?
"O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens."
He looks at the glory of the stars and said, "Whoever made those must be greater than they."
So the glory of God is on display is even greater than the stars, greater than the heavens and their display.
And when you recognize he's saying, "Everything that God has created is part of that display of the glory of God," it's just wonderful to think about.
"O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"
I can remember when that praise song was popular in our culture, and lots of us loved singing, you know.
 7 O Lord our Lord  7
 7 How majestic is Your name in all  7  7
Now, my favorite time of singing that song was on top of the highest dune in the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.
I had for hours walked through rock and river and sand to get to that very highest dune.
And as you got to that very highest dune, you could look over miles and miles and miles of sand dunes rimmed by mountains beyond them, framed against a blue sky painted with white clouds, and then far away millions of miles but bright and intense the glorious sun.
And as I was there sweating, I just wanted to sing with my friends:  "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"
And as I led my friends in singing, in my mind I wanted to have the voice right at that moment of Caruso or Placido Domingo or Paul Miller.
You know, I just wanted to.
[Laughter]
But, you know, it's.
[Chuckles]
It's windy there.
And the sand's blowing in your face.
And it's kind of thin oxygen.
So I wanted to sound like Caruso, but it sounded more like Alvin the chipmunk and.
[Laughter]
And I recognized that in the face of the greatness of God's creation, I can just feel incredibly small and insignificant.
And maybe that's the same path of David's thought here, as, having observed in verse 1 how great is the creation that brings glory to God's name, he begins to think then of the little ones, of babies.
Verse 2, "Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger."
It's almost as though the psalmist, having felt small in the face of creation, thinks of the smallest expression of humanity, even babies.
And then his mind goes one step further to think, "God is so secure in the majesty and the glory and the wonder of His power that He's not ordaining praise just from the great things but even from babies."
I mean, the intricacy and the intimacy of a baby's care is itself an expression of the majesty of God.
Now, because I'm, again, a grandparent as about 14 hours ago.
[Laughter]
And was preparing this message, some of the words about the miracle of birth caught me from the science writer, Jeffrey Simmons.
What does a baby's cry actually say to you?
What is it declaring about the majesty of God?
Simmons writes, "How can you hear a baby's first cry and not believe in the miracle that God has produced?
At nine months after conception, the baby's brain sends a hormone through the placenta into the mother's pituitary gland.
Although it's a complicated chemical, its message is simple:  I'm ready."
[Laughter]
"It's time.
All the baby's complex systems, lungs, heart, gastrointestinal, nerves, brain, they are ready to make it on their own.
But the baby's skull is not yet fused, so it can be pliable enough to fit through the birth canal.
As the process starts, the baby's adrenal glands add a shot of stress hormones to the baby, so that it can bear the stress of the delivery.
The child will not breathe until it's cleared the birth canal.
If it breathes too soon, it would suffocate.
If it waited too long, it would suffer brain damage.
And just before the mother and child separate, the newborn gets a last minute blood transfusion through the placenta and the umbilical cord that the placenta has stored 'til this very moment that has just exactly the right chemicals and nutrients for the baby to survive the first moments."
"O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
The stars and babies declare your praise."
I mean, even the secular songwriter knows it.
Louis Armstrong sings also what?
"I hear babies cry, I watch them grow, they'll learn much more than I'll ever know.
And I think to myself, it's a wonderful world."
"O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"
You create the stars.
You create the mountains.
And the babies are Your miracle too.
O, what wonder.
How amazing.
As the psalmist begins to think of just the created things and now has moved to thinking about the children, he begins to think even of the glory of those children compared to the created things.
And the psalm moves from just talking about creation's glory to the creature's glory that God has made.
The psalmist begins to talk, verse 3, about two amazing wonders.
"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, the son of man that you care for him?"
Alright.
The first wonder is, I think, I can actually see the amazing aspect of what You have made.
That's a wonder.
When I consider the heavens, I'm just amazed at who You are, God.
But right with that amazement comes, "And that you are mindful of me."
In light of the expanse of what You have made, how could You possibly care about me?
And, yet, You do.
And that's a glory too.
When I consider the heavens:  What would it actually mean if you, with what technology provides you now, could actually think of the heavens from the perspective and the proportion of God?
Because of the Hubble Telescope, we can see an expanse of heaven like generations before us would never have dreamed being possible.
We estimate now that there's something on the order of ten billion, that's with the B, ten billion galaxies, each with on average a hundred million stars, which, according to whatever map I couldn't figure but was in the article I read says that means there are a billion trillion stars.
I don't know if that's counting the quasars, the pulsars, the white dwarfs and all that, but a billion trillion s--.
Now, hear the big number.
And its impression, but I don't know what it means.
Some researchers at the University of Hawaii tried to make it plainer to us.
They said, "That number is so large, the number of stars, a billion trillion, that if you were to count the grains of sand in every beach and desert and dune in the world," hear that, "every grain of sand in every desert and beach and dune in the world, there would be more stars than that."
Now, you think of that this summer when you're on the beach, right?
[Laughter]
Look at all the sand:  There are more stars than that.
And our God created all of that.
And you may get just some sense of why there is wonder in the psalmist when he says, "When I consider the heavens, what is man, who am I, that you could think about me and that you would be concerned for me?"
And that's supposed to happen in some measure, to humble us before the greatness of God and yet to create the wonder that He still cares for us.
I mean, there's a commonly told story about William Beebe who was an explorer who fascinated United States President Teddy Roosevelt.
And so Roosevelt invited Beebe to a vacation home that the Roosevelt's had.
And they sat out under the sky and looked at the stars and got in the habit of repeating a litany of what they were experiencing.
They would look up to a familiar portion of the sky where was this little smudge of light, and in looking at it, one of them would say these words:  "That is the Spiral Galaxy Andromeda.
It is as large as our Milky Way Galaxy," according to the science of their time.
"It is one of a hundred million galaxies.
It is 750,000 light years away.
It consists of a hundred billion stars, each larger than our sun."
And then they would go silent for a little bit.
And then Teddy Roosevelt, the President of the United States, would grin and he would say, "Okay, I think we feel small enough.
Let's go in to sleep."
[Laughter]
Yeah, it does make you feel small.
And make you wonder if there is so much, if it's so big, how can He care for me?
And the psalmist doesn't say it lightly or easily.
He makes it clear how deep and careful and intimate is that love of God for us.
Verse 4, "What is mah--, what is man that you are mindful of him?"
The word "mindful" there is a word that means consistent in consciousness, as though there is a constant consciousness of God for those of us that He has made.
And that constant consciousness is even reflected in the next phrase, "What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man," there the words for talking about the generations of people that God has made, "and the son of man that you care for him?"
Some of you were raised on the King James Bible or you may still have King James translations in front of you.
And it doesn't say, "care for," there:  It says, "visit."
"Or the son of man that you visit him or care for him."
Because it's a Hebrew word that means to come close, not just to care for in the abstract but to come as a presence into the life of another.
"What is man?"
God, You've got so much to do.
What is man, this little person in this billions of people world that You would know me and care for me and visit Your presence into my life as a caring, regarding God for all that I need, for all that is eternal?
How could You possibly do those things?
And the wonder begins to be not simply that God is so big but that He can come so close, that He's not saying, "Listen, don't bother me; I've got to keep Andromeda spinning over here."
[Laughter]
I'm always conscious of you, and I come into your reality, I come into your existence, because I care for you.
Part of the wonder of the creature, the creature's actual glory is that God pays attention to us.
But another dimension of our glory is that we not only have heaven's attention but we have earth's dominion.
I think these may be familiar words to you in verse 5 and following.
"You have made him," that is the son of man, "a little lower than the heavenly beings, crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you put all things under his feet."
Verse 7, "The beasts of the field."
Verse 8, "The birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea."
These are reflections of the very opening of Genesis, where we understand that God is saying, "Not only is humanity the last of My creation:  It is the apex of My creation."
That God has given us dominion over the world.
It's not to abuse things:  It's to steward and take care.
But to recognize that God has not made anybody else in His image.
God has not determined an eternal relationship with any other aspect of His creation.
If heaven and earth shall pass away, you and I shall not.
We are eternal beings, made for that new heaven and that new earth existence, that God has designed to go into all eternity with us.
And in doing so, He's saying for this time and for the ways in which He has devised and designed things, He is working all things together for our good, that there is a dominion, an apex purpose of the fish in the sea and the birds in the air and the beasts of the field and the way the world turns and all the events in it:  that God is working all that together for the good of those that He loves, that we are the apex design of His purpose.
And that means, I don't mean to just sound like your kindergarten teachers, but you are special.
You are special to God.
And while that may sound kind of saccharine and sentimental, I want you to recognize that it's the thing we must hear at the low points of our lives.
When as a young person I'm concerned that didn't make the team or didn't make the grades or didn't get the relationship or my body is not what I expect and all the things that we recognize can be so damaging to young people that cause them to enter into patches of anorexia or bulimia or cutting or self harm, just to numb or to control something or to take care of this self loathing that I feel:  I don't love me right now, but Jesus does.
The God of all creation is mindful of you.
The God who made all of that thinks you're actually the apex above it.
He has crowned you with glory and honor.
He has said, "You're more important than all the things you can see."
And He's actually designing all that's in earth for your eternity.
And it's not just a message for young people.
It's the message for those who think life has passed them by or they are now past life.
God is saying, "I am mindful of you."
Yes, there are things that happen in this fallen and difficult world, and part of that is age, so we prepare for the ages to come.
As we see the struggles that people have, as we see people wonderfully, sacrificially caring for homebound family or friends and we recognize:  Unless Jesus tarries, that's a path many of us will go down.
And so we prepare our hearts not just for this world but for an eternity to come.
And all of this that God is doing through our lives, through our hurts, through the beasts of the field, the fish of the air, the fish of the air, interesting.
[Laughter]
The fish of the sea, the birds of the air:  All of that.
[Laughter]
Is God making us aware of His hand beyond our own, so that we will ultimately, ultimately turn to His Son.
Because if we consider all that this psalm is saying, it's not just talking about creation's glory nor even the creature's glory for our hard times, but is ultimately talking about a crowning glory that proves His care.
Listen, as I read verses 5 and following, "You have made him," that is the son of man, "a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor," surely as the early Hebrews were reading this, they were only thinking about their own position as humans before God.
After all, "son of man" is just a Hebrew phrase that means human, that God has made humans with dominion over all other things:  the last of His creation, the apex of His creation; that's who we understand that we are, as the humans of His design.
But as you begin to see these words, you begin to wonder:  Wait, has anybody really fulfilled their potential?
"Crowned with glory and honor, dominion over the works of your hands; a little lower than the angels but ultimately crowned with glory and honor," that's sometimes the song of the son of man here in the eighth psalm, as we are celebrating what God has made us to be by His divine work.
And as you think about it, you wonder if there's anything more intended.
The son of man, made a little lower than the angels, yet given dominion over all things and ultimately crowned with glory and honor.
That's reminding me of somebody else.
Who was the one in the Bible that called Himself Son of Man more than any other?
Who was that?
That was Jesus.
Now, I'm just making it up, just pushing things beyond their scriptural intent.
If you will, if you still have your bibles open, look at Hebrews chapter 2.
Hebrews chapter 2 in verse 6.
It begins this way:  "It has been testified somewhere, 'What is man, that you are mindful of him.'"
Now, first take the encouragement.
"It has been testified somewhere."
Isn't it great that even a biblical writer doesn't know the reference?
[Laughter]
No, that's not true.
[Chuckles]
We sometimes don't know the reference, but there's something common in Hebrew understanding.
"It's been testified somewhere":  Everybody knows where.
This is a psalm well known to the Hebrews.
"'What is man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him?'"
Just quoting Psalm 8.
Verse 7, "'You made him a little lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet.'"
That's all familiar.
Now things change a little bit.
"Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he," that is God, "left nothing outside his control.
At present, we do not see everything in subjection to him.
But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone."
The great proof of God's love for us, the One who made the expanse of the stars and is in the work of making babies cry:  That same God sent His Son, so that He who was behov--, above all the heavens was made a little lower than the angels and came among those of us who were human and tasted death for every one of us so that we who by sin would deserve it would never taste it eternally but would be made right, because He ascended to the highest heavens again and was crowned with glory and honor at His resurrection.
When you and I recognize what God has done, we say, "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"
Because You have set Your glory in the heavens but have called Your people so precious to You, that You would send the very One who created to suffer and die on behalf of the creatures.
If I begin to wonder, "Does God value me?" I say, "Not only because He's mindful of me but because He gave Himself for me in the person of His Son."
It's what you already sang this day:  It's the beauty and the wonder of what it means to say, "I see the expanse," and then begin to feel the wonder of the intimacy of His care.
"O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds Thy hands have made.
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee:  How great Thou art!"
"O Lord, my Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"
"And when I think that God His Son not sparing, sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in; That on the cross, my burden gladly sharing, He bled and died to take away my sin.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee:  How great Thou art!
How great Thy art!"
"O Lord, my Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!"
Let's stand and sing what we know of our God."