This morning we continue our Advent meditations in the Psalms as we consider today the eighth psalm. If you would then please, keep your Bibles in hand and turn there with me to Psalm number 8. If you are using a church Bible, you can find that on page 450. Psalm 8 is a masterpiece of sacred poetry. On its surface, it is a lyric meditation on the creation account of Genesis chapter 1. And it celebrates, it marvels really, in light of the greatness of creation, the dignity and honor bestowed upon human beings by their Creator.
If you’ll look at the psalm just for a moment, you’ll see that it revolves around, it moves around two poles. It has two centers of gravity, as it were. The first has to do with God Himself – His glory and His praise. And the second has to do with who we are and why we are here. And we are going to consider each of these two themes in turn. First, we’ll look with the psalm in a Godward direction and we’ll notice what we’ll call “the irony of doxology.” The irony of doxology. That is, God is worthy to be praised, He’s worthy of doxology, but His praise, as we are going to see, comes in some surprising ways and serves surprising ends. The irony of doxology. And then we’ll follow David as he turns next toward the contemplation of humanity. And here we are going to notice the paradox of dignity. The paradox of dignity. Human beings are small and apparently insignificant, considered against all the vastness of the cosmos that God has made. And yet, the psalm says, our smallness and insignificance notwithstanding, we have been crowned with glory and honor and given dominion over the creatures. We bear the very image of the Lord our God Himself. And so these are the two, the two themes. I hope you’re already beginning to see them in the text. The irony of doxology and the paradox of dignity.
And given our focus on Advent in these weeks leading up to Christmas, what is so very striking about these two themes is that they each point in their own way to the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, who came to be the last Adam and the new man, to make all things new. So that’s the focus of the psalm. Before we unpack it a little together, let’s pause and pray and ask for the Lord to help us. Let us pray.
O Lord our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth. You have set Your glory above the heavens, and now we pray that You might open our eyes to behold the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ from this portion of Your holy Word. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
Psalm 8, beginning at verse 1. This is the Word of God:
“To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith. A Psalm of David.
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!”
Amen.
Looking back, I have to say that for me as a kid, a great deal of the excitement of Christmas presents had to do with the wrapping that covered the gifts under the tree. The more beautiful and elaborate the wrapping, the more eager I was to find out what was inside. If the paper was thick and shiny, if there were ribbons and a bow, if the present has been wrapped with precision and care, well then this gift must really be something special. The wrapping makes you long for the gift inside.
And in some ways, that’s what is happening in Psalm 8. It is a gift wrapped in declarations of the divine majesty on every side. Do you see that? If you look at the psalm with me in verse 1, and again at the end in verse 9, do you see how the psalmist sings the praises of God? “O Lord, our Lord,” he says. “How majestic is Your name in all the earth.” David packages his poem in a way that is intended to awaken in us a sense of wonder at the greatness of God, and make us long to know more about the gift this packaging presents.
I think it’s worth noticing at this point one of the things that’s really special about Psalm 8, amongst all the psalms, it’s one of the very few psalms that is addressed entirely and solely and exclusively to God. Isn’t that striking? Almost all the other psalms speak to God and to the nations, summoning them to worship, for example, or to Israel, or to the enemies of God, or sometimes even to the psalmist himself. But this psalm, almost alone among all the psalms, speaks only to God. The more David reflects on things, the more he keeps coming back to God in wonder and love to express his joy and his adoration at the marvelous gift he has been given. And so he begins in verse 1, as we have seen, dwelling on God’s worthiness to be praised. Look at verse 1 with me again for a moment. His name is “majestic in all the earth.” And then he adds that God has “set His glory above the heavens.” So earth and heaven – those two words are meant to comprehend and sum up the whole of the created order. And David says it all displays the glory of the One who made it. Actually, he says God’s glory surpasses the brightest glories of the created order completely. His glory is “above the heavens.”
I was in rural Tennessee last week on a retreat with some very dear friends in the ministry, and at night we lit a fire in the firepit and we sat under the stars talking. And on those crisp, clear nights, with very little light pollution from the city, you can really see the Milky Way. There were the stars in all their glory. It was dazzling. Breathtaking, really. But God’s glory, David says here, God’s glory is above the heavens. The glory of the heavens is lesser and of a different order. It is, at best, a dim reflection, a mere echo of the all surpassing greatness of the majestic glory of the Lord our Lord.
The Irony of Doxology
And then look at verse 2. Here’s where things take a surprising turn. God’s majesty, David says, is displayed “in all the earth.” His glory is “above the heavens.” His praises are mounting up higher and higher; they are soaring higher and higher. And so we expect that to continue to build, or at least to reach some sort of crescendo. But look at what we find in verse 2. Here is the first thing to see. It is the irony of doxology. “Out of the mouths of babies and infants, You have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.” God, in all His infinite glory, in all the dazzling radiance of His majesty revealed throughout the earth, transcending the heavens, this God has ordained that His might and His power should be shown forth – how? What would you say? Well, His glory is extolled by the mighty angels who surround His throne and dwell in His presence and never cease to sing day and night His praises. That’s true. The wise men and the prophets and the great theologians who know the Scriptures so well, they fill their mouths with the glories of God’s strength and might, and that’s true. We expect all of that. What we don’t expect is that this great God should appoint little children to be His heralds. “Out of the mouths of babies and infants, You have established strength.”
Actually, we have all seen this to be true. Haven’t we? Objectively, we know this is how God operates. The simple confidence of our children. That the Lord is God. That Jesus is the Savior. That the Gospel is true. That His promises can be trusted. How often it has shamed us in all our pretended sophistication and cleverness. Here they are, full of faith and joy, and there we go, riddled with doubt and misery. “Out of the mouths of babies and infants, God has ordained strength.” That is objectively something God does and we’ve all seen it. Our question is, “Why does He do it? Why would the majestic “Lord, our Lord,” set things up this way? After all, little children are naive and simple and vulnerable and weak. Why, after painting His glory in the stars and in the oceans and in the mountains and the sunsets would He make infant simplicity the crowning instrument of His praise?
Well what is verse 2 saying? Look at verse 2. “Out of the mouths of babies and infants, You have established strength, because of Your foes to still the enemy and the avenger.” What is David’s point? What is he telling us? He’s telling us the same thing Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 1:25 and following. First Corinthians 1:25 – “The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” That’s how God loves to work, isn’t it? He loves to display His greatest glory by the weakest instruments in order to silence the boasts of those who oppose Him.
And nowhere is that pattern more clearly seen, of course, than in the first Advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. He was Himself born a helpless infant, exposed throughout His early years to the vulnerabilities of a peasant life, and eventually to the depredations of political tyrants. His public ministry was the target of unceasing controversy and open ridicule from the elites of the religious establishment. He had no access to the usual levers of human and worldly power. The rabbis and the teachers of the Law rejected His claims and they all conspired against Him. But do you remember what happened in Matthew 21 when Jesus arrived at the gates of Jerusalem one day? Who was it that took up the palm branches and began to sing, “Hosanna to the Son of David!”? It was not the mighty or the learned or the elites. Who was it? It was the little children. And when the authorities heard them, what they were saying, they were scandalized, not just by what they said but by the very fact that they were the ones saying it. In their minds, you see, no true rabbi would ever allow this. The testimony of children would have been considered an embarrassment, not an endorsement. And so they asked Jesus, “Have You heard what they’re saying about You?” And in reply, Jesus quotes Psalm 8 verse 2. “Yes,” He says, “Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies, You have prepared praise’?”
You see, the Pharisees heard in the cries of the children another reason to hate this unorthodox and scandalous Galilean teacher called Jesus. “How embarrassing; how uncouth. Look at the behavior of those children.” But Jesus heard in their welcome the very praises ordained by God in Psalm 8. And notice this very carefully. He heard in their “hosannas,” praises that are due, according to Psalm 8, to the one addressed here as the “Lord, our Lord, whose name is majestic in all the earth.” And that praise, that praise is being directed to Him. Had the Pharisees really had their ears open, they would have found even more grounds for scandal, for these little children were identifying the One riding on a donkey and the Lord Jehovah their Redeemer made flesh. That’s the amazing point that Psalm 8 makes. Who was this baby born to a virgin and laid in a manger with none of the trappings of majesty surrounding Him? Who is this Man, riding on a donkey, humble, welcomed by little children yet shunned by the mighty? Who was He into whose hands the nails were driven as they hung Him between two thieves on a Roman cross? Who is He the lips of little children declared Him to be, the Lord our Lord who has come down as one of us in Jesus Christ? God has ordained – do you see the principle – God has ordained weakness to generate praise and His glory to be displayed on the lips of the least and the smallest.
So let’s apply this for a minute. Maybe it feels futile to you, perhaps even a little foolish sometimes, to sing our Christmas carols and decorate our homes and sing about, “Good news of great joy for all the people!” when our world is as bleak as ever. It leaves us open, doesn’t it, to the kind of scorn in our generation that the little children at the triumphal entry when Jesus came to Jerusalem so long ago had to endure. But let’s allow Psalm 8 to teach us the great irony of doxology and to revel in it for a moment or two. The mouths of enemies are stopped by the praises of children. God has chosen the weak things to shame the strong and the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are. Our Gospel seems like a puny instrument, a tiny flickering candle flame surrounded by the oppressive darkness of the world. We need to remember that Jesus, the true light that gives light to every man, was coming into the world. “And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” This weak, foolish Gospel, about a weak, crucified Savior, on the lips of weak, insignificant people, overcomes the world. It overcomes the world. The irony of doxology. Can you see it in the psalm? Take heart and rejoice. Your weak Gospel about a crucified King is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe. The irony of doxology.
The Paradox of Dignity
Secondly, look at the next major theme in the psalm. Notice the paradox of dignity. The paradox of dignity. The contemplation of the heavens has led David to reflect on and celebrate the greatness of God. “He set His glory above the heavens.” And we’ve all joined him in that celebration from time to time, haven’t we? It’s instinctive for us when we see the beauty of the created order and we glimpse His intricacy and the vastness of it. We can’t help but sing, “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds Thy hands have made. I see the stars. I heard the rolling thunder. Thy power throughout the universe displayed. Then sings my soul, my Savior, God to Thee! How great Thou art!” That’s the natural resonance that we feel in our hearts as we see God’s glory displayed in a sunset, in a mountaintop scene. We can’t help it. That was David’s experience in Psalm 8.
But there’s another experience we share with him here. Contemplating the heavens now leads David not only to see something of God’s greatness but to feel profoundly something of his own smallness. We tend to loom awfully large in our own eyes, don’t we? Don’t we? And we forget, really, how puny and insignificant we are, at least when compared to the uncountable stars and the incalculable distances of space. And then we get, at some moment or other, just a little glimpse of it all and it has a marvelous way of putting us in our place. And suddenly we are struck by how tiny and miniscule we are. Look at how David expresses that point in 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?”
At the suggestion of astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, when Voyager I was about 4 billion miles away from the earth, sailing on to the outer edges of the solar system, it paused to take one look back, last look back as it were, at planet Earth; take a final picture of our planet. And the image it sent back was almost entirely a blank, black frame with nothing in it except one tiny, tiny pinprick of light – 0.12 pixels in diameter. That was all that Voyager could see of planet Earth in the vastness of space. It led, the image led Sagan to write his book, Pale Blue Dot, in which, in his own way, he was moved to ask the same question as the psalmist here. “When I look at the heavens, the moon and the stars, what is man?” But do listen for a minute to Sagan’s answer to that question. “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena,” he wrote. “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” What is man? An obscure species without a privileged place in the universe, living only on a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark with no help coming from elsewhere to save us? That was Sagan’s view.
Looking at the same image, Candy Hansen, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked on the Voyager imaging team said, “I was struck by how special Earth was as I saw it shining in a ray of sunlight. It also made me think about how vulnerable our tiny planet is.” That’s an interesting juxtaposition, these two atheists reflecting on the world and this tiny pinprick of light in all the vast dark of space. One says we are insignificant and there is no one coming to save us. And the other one says we are special. There’s the paradox. It’s a paradox that rings in every single human heart.
But look how the psalmist deals with that paradox and expresses it. His answer to the question, “What is man?” is ultimately quite different and far more satisfying. First of all notice that David knows what neither Carl Sagan nor Candy Hansen can see. He knows the heavens and the earth belong to the God who made them. In verse 3, he calls them, “Your heavens…the work of Your fingers…the moon and the stars which You have set in place.” This is the handiwork of God who stands apart from and above and is independent upon the created universe which He has made.
And then when it comes to human beings, look at the first half of verse 5. David says two things are true at the same time. Here’s the paradox of dignity. On the one hand, he says we are, yes we are small, even puny. “What is man that You are mindful of him? You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings.” Heavenly beings, angels, are creatures of pure spirit. They are mighty and holy and beautiful. Human beings, on the other hand, we are creatures of flesh and blood. We get tired, we wear out, we grow old, we die. Certainly, certainly among creatures we are greater than at least – well I won’t go there – we are greater than slugs or spiders and dogs and fish and birds. But we are still a little lower than the angels. David isn’t wrong to ask God, “What is man that you are mindful of him? The son of man that you think of him? After all, if Your fingers have made all these stars, if You uphold the universe by the word of Your power, why would You ever be interested in me, so small and insignificant a thing am I.”
But there’s another side to this. Puny creatures of dust we may be, but David says we are, nevertheless, endowed with a remarkable dignity. Look at David’s language, echoing very clearly the themes of Genesis chapter 1 and the creation of Adam in the Garden of Eden. In verse 6 he says, “God has 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.” Glory and honor there almost always are used as attributes of God, descriptions of God, but here they are used for human beings. This is David’s way of saying human beings are made in the image and likeness of their Creator as Genesis 1 reminds us. And the language of dominion over the animals also comes straight out of Genesis 1 and it reminds us that Adam, our first father, was made to rule, to be God’s regent in the world, to govern and steward and care for all things. The problem, of course, is that Adam didn’t do his job. Did he? Instead of ruling, instead of exercising dominion over the serpent, he was deceived by it. Instead of crushing Satan’s head under his feet, he capitulated to temptation. And ever since, sin has warped and distorted our relationship to the world and to one another and to God. We are guilty sinners in the sight of God and we constantly fail in our duty as stewards of the created order.
And really all the psalms on either side of Psalm 8 are very clear about that reality. We are broken, guilty, rebel sinners. But isn’t it remarkable that Psalm 8 doesn’t mention any of that stuff? If you were reading Psalm 8 without the rest of Scripture in mind, you might think that Adam had never fallen and that the world was never broken. And that’s because Psalm 8 is thinking about the way things are supposed to be and longing that it might one day be that way again. In Hebrews chapter 2 that Jamie read earlier, beginning in verse 6, the writer quotes a version of Psalm 8. “What is man that You are mindful of him? The son of man that You care for him? You have made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet?” And then the writer to the Hebrews raises the same question that we are wrestling with now. “How can Psalm 8 say all of this about human beings having dominion over all things, when the truth is, the world is chaos and sin runs amuck and the natural world is broken? At present,” he says, “we do not yet see everything in subjection to Him.” That’s right. That’s not the way things are.
So how do we make sense of what Psalm 8 is telling us. It doesn’t seem to be describing the world that we know, the world that we live in, does it? Well listen to Hebrews 2:9. “We do not yet see everything in subjection to Him, but we do 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.” Psalm 8 is about Jesus. Jesus was the One who was made a little lower than the angels, born of the virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. God the Son, lower than the angels. And now having done what the first Adam should have done and did not do, having triumphed over Satan, crushing him under His feet at the cross, now Jesus is seated at the right hand of God and is crowned with glory and honor.
So listen, we celebrate Advent because the Lord who came down, came down to be another Adam, a new Adam, a last Adam. And to be the author of a new humanity and to bring a new creation and to put things back the way they were always meant to be. He came to make a new beginning, and that new beginning erupts right into the middle of the old mess of our sin. That’s what Psalm 8 is describing – the world made new; a way back to Eden, as it were. Because of Jesus’ first coming, the sin-marred image of God in us can now be restored. Because of Jesus’ first coming, the original design of God for your glory and honor can now be achieved. Because of Jesus’ first coming, there is a new start available. Don’t you long for a new start? What a Christmas it would be if you came to know the Lord Jesus Christ and received from His nail-pierced hands a new start.
You’re not so small and insignificant, are you? You’re not unnoticed and you’re not unloved. Here’s how loved you are. The God who stands above the heavens in glory, whose fingers hung the stars, vast, immense and incomprehensible, this God became a baby, was mocked, ignored, crucified and rose, and now He reigns on heaven’s throne so that you might be at last who God made you to be through faith in Him. That’s what Christmas is for. That’s what the Christian Gospel offers you in Jesus Christ – a new self, a new beginning, and one day, as you trust in Jesus, a place in a whole new world. Jesus came to make you a new creation. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone and the new has come.” So you don’t need to stay outside like a kid looking in at the toy store window, you know, at the Christmas display with his nose pressed up against the glass, longing to go in. Jesus welcomes you in; come on in. You’re invited in. What a Christmas it would be if you took Jesus at His invitation and trusted Him to give you a new life, a whole new life through Jesus Christ, the second Adam, who came to make a new beginning.
The irony of doxology and the paradox of dignity. May God give us all grace today to come and to entrust ourselves to Jesus, that we might begin to experience both for ourselves.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, we thank You that though being the eternal God, You became a man so that You might rise in glory and bring weak, broken humanity to its glorified majesty at last. So that now, seated on the throne of eternity, is the God-Man, our King and Redeemer, who not only purchases pardon for us but blazes the trail of our destiny ahead of us that we too, one day, will join Him in a new creation with all things under our feet, crowned with glory and honor. How we long for that day and cry with John, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” And we pray for those in our midst who are still strangers to the new life You came to give. We ask You today to take away their hearts of stone and to give them hearts of flesh, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.