Seeing God and Seeing Ourselves
Last week I said that one of the reasons we need to study the Psalms is because the Psalms meet us where we are. They touch on all the major themes of our lives. Another, more fundamental, reason for us to study the Psalms is because they help us see God more clearly. The Psalms paint some of the most beautiful portraits of God’s character in all of Scripture. The Psalms show us ourselves and show us the glory of God.
Sometimes this happens in the same Psalm, such as Psalm 8, our text for today. Psalm 8 helps us see God and see ourselves. We can summarize Psalm 8 like this: God is majestic and he has placed some of his majesty on us, his supreme creation.
The Majesty of God
The theme of Psalm 8 is the majesty of God. The Psalm starts and ends the same way, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (vv. 1, 9) There are several things in this short verse that we need to see about God.
First, notice who David is singing to. He’s singing to “the Lord,” or Yahweh. This is the personal name of God, the “I Am” who Moses met at the burning bush. The absolute God who simply is. The One without beginning or end. The One who is totally self-sufficient and free.
David says next that the Lord is “our Lord.” He is self-sufficient and doesn’t need anyone, yet he enters into relationship with his people so that he becomes “ours.” David is singing this truth to remind the people that the Lord is theirs and that they are the Lord’s. This is a corporate confession of faith in Yahweh as their “Lord.”
True faith in the Lord has always had a corporate aspect to it. God never called people to trust him and follow him without also asking them to connect themselves to the covenant community of faith. This is one reason why becoming a member of a local church, rather than just attending church, is so important. Church membership isn’t about earning your salvation or being part of a religious club. It’s about joining the people of God and corporately declaring that the Lord is “our Lord,” not just your Lord. The Bible knows nothing of worshippers of God who aren’t formally connected to the worshipping community.
Notice next that David says that it’s the Lord’s “name” that is “majestic.” God’s “name” in the Bible refers to his identity, character, nature, and reputation. It’s the same as when your name or my name is mentioned and people automatically think things about our character and reputation. Who we are is connected to our name.
David says that the Lord’s “name” is “majestic…in all the earth.” Notice that the Lord’s name is majestic in “all the earth.” This is a crucial aspect of who God is. The Lord is not a tribal god or a territorial deity. He is supreme over all the earth. His glory is “above the heavens” (v. 1).
The Lord is not just God of the Jews or God of the Americans or God of white people or nice people. He is the Lord over all the earth. This is one reason we should do international, cross-cultural, missions. God’s name must be declared to all the people of the earth because he is Lord over all the earth. His name and his glory and his gospel need to be told to people on the earth who don’t yet know of his greatness, who’ve never heard about him.
What does David mean when he says that the Lord’s name is “majestic”? This is an attribute of God mentioned throughout the Bible. Psalm 93:1, “The Lord reigns; he is robed in majesty.” When Peter is remembering when he saw the glory of Jesus at the transfiguration, he says, “We were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Pet. 1:16).
What does this word tell us about God? Our word “majesty” comes from a Latin word that means “greatness.” So when we ascribe majesty to someone, we’re acknowledging greatness in that person, such as when British people address the Queen as “Her Majesty.”
When the word “majesty” is applied to God, it serves as a declaration of his greatness, grandeur, magnificence, splendor, and excellence. This is also what the Bible means when it speaks of God as “on high” or “in heaven.” It’s not that he’s far from us in distance. The idea is that he’s far above us in greatness.
J. I. Packer, in his book Knowing God, points out that one of the ways that we can get our minds around the greatness and majesty of God is to compare God with things that we think are great. This is what’s happening in Isaiah 40. In Isaiah 40, the Lord, through Isaiah, is speaking to a despondent people who’d lost hope. The Lord’s approach to these despairing and frightened people, people like many of us, was to remind them of his greatness. And the way he did it was to compare his greatness with things in the world that we think are great.
Turn over to Isaiah 40 and look at a few of these examples with me. In verse 12, the Lord asks them if they’re able to do the things that he’s done with his creation. In verses 15-17, the Lord tells them to look at the nations. The super-powers of that day, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, nations who had vastly more resources and much bigger armies than Israel, are “like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales.” The Lord reminds Israel that he’s greater than the great nations that they’re afraid of.
In verse 22, the Lord says that he is to his creation as we are to grasshoppers. The world may dwarf us but God dwarfs the world. In verse 23, the Lord reminds his people that he is greater than the great men of the world. Those who make laws and policies that effect millions of lives, those who lead nations into war, those kings and dictators and presidents who determine the way the world will go are not greater than God. As Packer says, “God is greater than the world’s great men.”
In verse 26, the Lord tells us to consider the stars. I love what Packer says about this verse:
“The most universally awesome experience that mankind knows is to stand alone on a clear night and look at the stars. Nothing gives a greater sense of remoteness and distance; nothing makes one feel more strongly one’s own littleness and insignificance. And we, who live (in) the space age, can supplement this universal experience with our scientific knowledge of the actual factors involved – millions of stars in number, billions of light-years in distance. Our minds reel; our imaginations cannot grasp it; when we try to conceive of unfathomable depths of outer space, we are left mentally numb and dizzy. But what is this to God?…It is God who brings out the stars; it was God who first set them in space; He is their Maker and Master: they are all in his hands, and subject to His will. Such are His power and His majesty.”
Back in Psalm 8:3, it says that God made the heavens with “his fingers.” If God made the stars with his fingers, then he’s much bigger than the stars. God’s greatness is greater than the stars, greater than all his creation, greater than the great men of the world, greater than the great nations of the world. There’s nothing greater than God. Do you believe that? Has the greatness of God captured your attention and your affections? If there’s anything greater than God, then that’s what you should worship.
God’s Majesty Came Down on Us
In Psalm 8, we see God as majestic, as great and greater than every great thing that we know. But in this Psalm, David goes on to say something remarkable. He says that God put some of his majesty, some of his greatness, on mankind (vv. 3-5).
Mankind, or “the son of man,” or “human beings” (NIV), though small compared to the greatness of “the heavens…the moon and the stars,” are supreme in God’s creation. God made us “a little lower than the heavenly beings (or angels)” and has “crowned (us) with glory and honor” (v. 5).
More than anything else in creation, we reflect the glory and beauty and wisdom and power of God. God’s majesty came down and rested upon us when he created us in his image. Nothing else in all creation carries God’s image. Only us.
The Lord is so secure in his majesty, that he’s willing to give some of it away. God didn’t horde his majesty, he shared it. We hold tightly onto everything we have. God, however, isn’t this way. He loves to share. He’s self-sufficient, so he doesn’t need anything. He has everything he needs within himself, so he’s able to share his glory without suffering loss.
Jonathan Edwards used the analogy of a fountain to describe this aspect of God’s nature. He says, “Surely it is no argument of the emptiness or deficiency of a fountain, that it is inclined to overflow.” All creation, especially man and woman, is the result of the overflow of the glory of God. God’s glory has overflowed onto us so that we’re “crowned with glory and honor” (v. 5).
The implications of this for human dignity are many and I’ll let you think them out.
Man’s Responsibility
As image-bearers of Almighty God, we’re highly privileged in God’s created order, but we’ve also been given great responsibility (vv. 6-8). These verses are a restatement of what God says to Adam and Even in Genesis 1:26-28. God makes man in his image and then he immediately says that they’ll have “dominion” over everything else that he’s made.
Although God has all authority because he made everything, he delegated some of his authority to us, his image-bearers. God made us in his likeness and then he gave us the responsibility of taking care of the earth that he created.
Man’s Failure
It didn’t take long for man and woman to fail to live up to the high calling of God on their lives. Instead of humbly obeying God’s commands and fulfilling his purposes for them, they believed the lie of the serpent that God was holding out on them, and they disobeyed God’s word.
Everything in creation was effected by the sinful rebellion of our first parents. Creation itself was broken, the relationship between man and woman was broken, and most importantly, the relationship between God and man was fundamentally broken.
But God immediately started to unfold his plan on how he was going to make things right, how he was going to redeem what’d been lost. He said to Eve that her offspring would crush the head of the serpent and in the process his heel would be bruised (Gen. 3:15). God would defeat evil and redeem what was lost through the offspring of the woman, through a baby.
Strength through Weakness
This brings us back to Psalm 8. Look again at verse 2. What are these babies and infants doing in this Psalm about the greatness of God? Well, they’re “establishing” God’s strength and “stilling” God’s enemies. Simply put, these babies are defeating the enemies of God.
After Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, he goes into the temple and begins to drive out the money-changers and heal the sick. His enemies hear the children praising Jesus and aren’t happy about it. In response, Jesus quotes this verse from Psalm 8 (Matt. 21:14-16).
It’s the children who understand who Jesus is, not the enemies of Jesus. It’s the weak ones who “establish strength”, or “prepare praise,” not the strong and arrogant religious leaders (the LXX, which Jesus is quoting, translates “strength” as “strength given to God through song,” or “praise”). It was the weak ones who perceived that God was doing something great through Jesus. This is what God loves to do. Paul says it this way in 1 Corinthians 1:27, “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”
Redemption through a Baby
The coming of Jesus into the world was the most profound display of God’s greatness, but his greatness was revealed through weakness. God, in all of his greatness and power, lowered himself and came to us in the form of a helpless baby. When God became a baby, his majesty came down. His greatness came down to meet us where we are.
Many of us feel as though God is distant, that he’s removed himself from our lives. But the gospel tells us that God has come near. Because he’s so great and holy, he can’t be around us in our sin. Because we’re so small and unholy, we can’t be around him in his greatness. So he sent himself to come and do for us what we could never do for ourselves in order to bring us back into his presence.
Out of mercy, God sent his majesty down to us. Colossians 1:15, 19-20, “He (Jesus) is the image of the invisible God…in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” In Jesus, God shows us that he’s mindful of us, that he cares for us. In Jesus, the majesty of God has visited us, and through his death, Jesus “made peace” with God for us. In Jesus, God’s majesty is revealed through mercy, his greatness through goodness.
Though we’re all “crowned with glory” as image bearers of God, only those who bow to his Majesty, Jesus Christ, in faith and repentance, trusting in his work on the cross for the forgiveness of their sins, will be further crowned with grace.
Have you trusted his Majesty, Jesus Christ, who came down from heaven? Have you submitted your life to his care and his rule? He has come near to you today through his Word and has a crown of grace for all who know they need it.