Psalm 8 (Summer of Psalms #5)

Happy Fourth of July weekend. All the high school and middle school students in the room just realized we are halfway through summer, and every parent is silently begging me not to bring that up again.

We are in our Summer of Psalms series, so open your Bible to Psalm 8 — whether that is a physical copy or an app on your phone. We just want you to have a Bible in front of you.

As the worship gathering director here, I love that we are working through the Psalms this summer. And in case the fact that I am the music guy was not a dead giveaway, let me explain why this book means so much to me.

The Psalms contain many distinct yet interconnected prayers and songs that have helped God’s people worship him rightly for generations. They help us lift our praises to him. They give voice to our joys, our pains, and our griefs. They lead us to thank him. And ultimately they highlight God’s glory.

I would also argue that Psalms is probably the most approachable book in the Bible. Because as we read these Spirit-inspired words, there is a deep sense that as God met the writers, he meets us too. These were the songs of God’s people throughout history. So we not only get to experience a personal relationship with God on that level — we get to do it on a historical and traditional level as well, in community with the saints, past and present.

The Text: Psalm 8

“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, and 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!”

Where Psalm 8 Sits

Before we dig into the words themselves, I want to share some surrounding context so we get a better sense of what is actually being said.

In the Bible there is a massive scroll of Hebrew poetry we call the Psalms. If you have a physical Bible and split it down the middle, you will probably land in it. And the Psalms are actually made up of five books. Psalm 8 sits in Book 1, in the second grouping. We are going to look at the first two groupings.

Group one: Psalms 1–2

The first group is a two-part poem — Psalms 1 and 2. Together they are about God’s promise to deal with evil, with violence, with the injustices of the world, by raising up an anointed king for Israel.

The Hebrew word for anointed is mashiach. You may know that word better in its Greek form, the one we hear every Christmas: Messiah.

This points back to the promise God made to David — the same David who wrote Psalm 8 — that a future king, a Messiah, would come from his line. Psalm 2 says this future king would confront the wicked rulers of the world and become a powerful, protective fortress for everyone who takes refuge in him.

Group two: Psalms 3–14

The next grouping runs from Psalms 3 through 14, and Psalm 8 sits right in the middle of it — which is enormously important to how the group is structured.

Psalms 3 through 7 reflect on David’s past, when he was powerless and had to run and hide from his enemies. Here David is crying out to God to rescue him, deliver him, and restore him to his role as king.

Then in Psalms 9 through 14, David is joined by a group described as the poor, the innocent, the helpless, and the afflicted. Like David, they are oppressed by wicked rulers, and like him they cry out to God to confront the violence being done to them and restore everything that has been taken.

And despite David and these people being powerless — seemingly insignificant — God chooses to work through them and rule the world.

Which is exactly what Psalm 8 is about.

The Bookends

Verse 1 opens: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

And verse 9 closes with the very same line.

What David is doing here is a literary technique called an inclusio. By bookending the psalm with the main idea, he signals what the whole song is about: the majesty and magnificent power of God displayed throughout creation.

And when David says “your name,” he means God’s reputation, his glory, his power. He is saying: God, your power and your glory are known throughout the whole earth. Everybody knows it.

But remember the context. David and the people are not exactly experiencing the height of God’s power right now. They are being pursued and plundered. So what is he doing?

Strength Out of the Mouths 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.”

The Hebrew behind “you have established strength” carries the sense of God setting up the foundation of a fortress. Interestingly, in the Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Old Testament — that phrase gets rendered as to give you praise.

So you might be thinking: Let me get this straight, God. You are going to use babies and their babbling nonsense to silence your enemies and put them to shame?

Yes.

David is hitting a note he will keep hitting: God routinely subverts our worldly human expectations of what is strong, what is beautiful, what is powerful, and what is reasonable. He flips it on its head and uses it to accomplish far more than we could fathom.

So not only will God establish his strength through the weak and lowly — his praises will be sung by the most vulnerable among us.

Hold on to that. We will come back to it.

Have You Ever Felt Small?

Verses 3 and 4: “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?”

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever felt small? Insignificant?

Maybe someone put you down. Maybe someone embarrassed you in front of your peers. Maybe you moved from a small Iowa town to a big city — going from a culture where everybody knows your name to a culture where nobody even registers that you are there.

Have you ever felt small?

Now look at what David is doing here. He is reaching all the way back to the creation account in Genesis 1 — specifically the passage where God sets lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate day from night and mark signs and seasons and days and years. God makes the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night, along with the stars, setting them in the expanse to give light on the earth. And God saw that it was good.

Reading that with Western eyes, we tend to think: this is simply retelling how God created the heavens, placing the stars and the moon. So what does that have to do with anything?

Some biblical scholars think the creation account in Genesis could also have been read by its ancient Near Eastern contemporaries as a polemic — a strongly worded argument or denunciation against the gods of the surrounding nations.

One Old Testament scholar makes the point this way. In the religious thought of the ancient world, the sun and moon were leading deities, frequently the most important gods in the pantheons of the ancient Near East. Genesis pointedly avoids the ordinary Hebrew words for sun and moon — which doubled as the names of those deities — and instead calls them the greater light and the lesser light. In other words, the great objects of ancient worship have been reduced to physical products of God’s creative work. Ancient religion was almost always chained to the natural rhythms of time, inseparably tied to the personification of sun, moon, and stars. Genesis demotes those personified powers to mere lamps, rising and setting at the command of the Creator.

Now remember, David and the people are not experiencing God’s power in any obvious way at this moment. If you look back across the Old Testament, for generations before and after David, God’s people were periodically enslaved or exiled under other nations. Which could easily have fueled the narrative that the God of Israel had fallen — or had simply abandoned his people.

And yet in Psalm 8, in the middle of all his affliction, David is able to recount how God is far greater than the powers that be.

And not only is God infinitely more powerful — his heart is also infinitely more tender toward us.

Because the mighty hand of God, the same fingers that delicately placed the stars and the moon throughout the cosmos, are the same fingers that formed Adam from the dirt. The same hands that intricately and sovereignly wove us together in our mother’s womb. Hands that are incredibly mindful of us and deeply care for us.

So no matter how small or insignificant you may feel in the great expanse of the universe: God has placed his image in you — a relatively tiny, fragile creature. He loves you endlessly. And you are more important to him than the most mind-blowingly astounding galaxies.

That is what Hebrew poetry gives us. Is that not beautiful?

Made a Little Lower — and Crowned

David goes on: “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.”

Again he is drawing on Genesis 1 — on humanity being created by God himself as his image bearers. God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” and gives them dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, the livestock, and every creeping thing. And then God blesses them and tells them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

I want you to notice something in that passage where God is literally handcrafting humanity. It is framed like poetry — even like a song, with a rhythmic feel and a kind of stanza structure:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

What is that doing there? We are reading a creation account, and suddenly a poem drops right into the middle of it.

Here is part of the answer. While Hebrew does not employ scientific terminology or philosophical vocabulary, it gives nearly every word a concrete, physical meaning. It is poetic by nature. That does not mean every instance of Hebrew in the Old Testament is a poem, or that we cannot take it seriously or treat it as legitimate.

The advantage of Hebrew is that it makes the Word of God nearly universally accessible.

If you have tried reading dense philosophers — and I am guessing most of us have not — you know they are not a walk in the park unless understanding philosophers is literally your job. Unless you are a scientist, you will not be able to understand the most prestigious medical journals of the past fifty years, and that is just the ones written in English.

Hebrew, by contrast, was accessible to just about everybody. Not only to men, but to women, to children, to the illiterate, to the ordinary everyday person. And biblical scholars note that the Hebrew we find in the Old Testament is adaptable to nearly every human emotion imaginable, from the most delicate to the most energetic.

So as we look at that Genesis narrative: God so deeply cares for us that while he was creating human beings for the very first time, he could not help but recite poetry.

In fact, it is no wonder that when God introduces Adam and Eve to each other, Adam’s first recorded words are literally a poem — that this at last is bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. I know that is not the poetry we are used to, with rhymes at the end of every line. But come on. It is still poetry.

God’s affection for his image bearers is so tangible that our relationship keeps getting woven together with song.

How many of you couples — married or dating — have your song? I see some of the women nodding. And I see some of the men looking nervous. Do not let her know you forgot.

All of that to say: God is that personal. God is that intimate. And more.

God Has Made Us His Under-Kings

But in Psalm 8, David is not only pointing to God’s power over everything, or even to his tender care for us. He is also pointing to how God has made us like him.

Verse 6: “You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet.”

What verses 5 through 8 are describing is how God has made us like himself by sharing his authority. Not that we possess the same degree of power and authority as God — but, as one of my former professors put it, God has made us his under-kings.

We are not merely carrying his image around the world. He has made us his vice-regents. His representatives. Which means that however we live and interact and engage throughout God’s creation, we are to do it with the same shared authority, the same protection, and the same care that God himself would bring.

We are to rule the way God would rule — despite being feeble, fragile human beings.

So Where Does This Take Us?

This poem shows us how God’s love is on display, and how he displays his power by elevating the powerless so that he can rule through them.

Whether it is babbling infants or lowly, afflicted people, God loves to choose the weak. He chooses people like David, and people like the afflicted ones, to set the pattern for the Messiah presented back in Psalms 1 and 2.

And that Messiah will rule over everything.

Matthew 21: The King on a Donkey

Turn to Matthew 21, where we read about Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

When you picture a king making a grand entrance into a city, what comes to mind? Maybe a parade down the street, horns blasting so the whole city knows, flags waving in the air, the king carried in on a throne of sorts. Or if the king is a war general, maybe he rides in on his warhorse to ransom the oppressed from their oppressors.

Jesus rides into Jerusalem as the king who is going to confront Israel’s leaders. But instead of a warhorse, he rides a donkey. And instead of fanfare and flags waved by Jerusalem’s finest, it is palm branches in the hands of children, the poor, and the oppressed.

And Jesus does it this way because he is going to ransom his people from their sins and rescue them from the wages of sin, which is death and eternal separation from God.

Then Jesus enters and cleanses the temple — the famous scene where he overturns the tables of the money changers, who were running that operation for profit and personal gain. And the blind and the crippled come to him for healing.

The chief priests and the scribes watch all of this. And then they hear children in the temple shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David!”

They must be thinking this is outrageous. This is blasphemy. So they go to Jesus and say, Do you hear what these children are saying?

And Jesus answers: Yes. Have you never read, “Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise”?

In case I have not made it obvious enough — he is quoting Psalm 8:2.

God is enthroned on the praises of his people, especially from the least of these. He is worthy of praise because even though we sinned and turned and ran, Jesus took our sin upon the cross. He suffered. He bled. He died in our place for our sin. And three days later he rose to life again, victorious over our sin, ultimately redeeming us for a new life in him.

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

Let Us Pray

God, we confess our sin before you. We know we have rebelled against you and that we deserve the just punishment of your wrath. But we also know that because Jesus lived blameless and sinless, because he died in our place as our ultimate sacrifice, and because he rose again to life and glory, you are a God who cares deeply for us — a God who redeems his people as his prized possession.

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. We bring you praise. Help us to trust in you. Help us to trust in the finished work of your Son, Jesus. Amen.

Come to the Table

We are going to move into a time of worshiping God through communion.

If you are a follower of Jesus here with us, we invite you to participate and worship with us this way. There are tables to the left and the right with the elements — a cup containing both the bread and the juice. The bread represents the body of Christ, nailed to the cross in our place for our sin so we could be reconciled in relationship with our heavenly Father. The juice represents the blood of Jesus, shed for our sin — by which our sins are not only washed away, but we ourselves are washed clean and purified, white as snow.

If you are here this morning and you are at a place where you feel like this is not a story you can believe, or you are not sure you can identify with it — first of all, we are so glad you are here and that you chose to spend this time with us. We love you. And we would actually invite you to abstain from taking the elements. We do not want you to feel pressure to take the bread and the cup and try to be part of something you cannot identify with.

Instead, we would ask you to consider and ponder what has been shared this morning, and what the songs have declared. And if you sense God stirring something in your heart — drawing you toward a deeper relationship with himself — we would love to walk alongside you in that. Come talk to me, or to any of our pastors or elders. We want to pray for you. If this is the day you have your spiritual birthday, the day you are born again in Jesus Christ, we want to honor that. We want to celebrate it. And we want you to know you are not alone in it.

So let us take communion together.