STUDIES IN THE PSALMS No. 7

Psalm 8

February 15, 2004

Review

We have been paying attention, of late, to the petitionary or lament psalms of which Psalms 3, 4, and 5 are fine examples. We’ve noted their characteristics divisions and features. We considered the importance of noticing that, in the case of these particular psalms, they are psalms of David the king, the Lord’s anointed, and so have significance for us as contributing to the typology of the Messiah, that elaborate preparation for the coming of the King of Kings, those enacted prophecies that foretell of his life and work.

Now we move on to another class of psalm, the psalm of praise. By one count, about 100 of the 150 psalms in the Psalter fit rather neatly into one or another of these distinct forms or types of psalms: petitionary, acknowledgement, or praise. Many of the lament psalms end with the promise that if God will come to the psalmist’s aid, he will acknowledge publicly the Lord’s help and mercy. The acknowledgement psalms pick up that pledge and discharge it. [Waltke] Then, from the individual, particular experience of God’s grace and goodness, one rises higher to consider God’s character, his ways, and his works more generally. These are the praise psalms, such as we have before us tonight in Psalm 8.

Typical features of praise psalms are a call to worship, an enumeration of the reasons for praising God, and some concluding doxology or a renewal of the call to worship God. We find these divisions very clearly in Psalm 8.

The title is like others we have already noticed. It is a hymn for the use of the church, another reminder that the Psalms are the “libretto of the Mosaic ritual.” Remember, as we said before, the Mosaic regulations give us the forms of worship – the places, the actions, the personnel, the seasons, the institutions – the Psalms give us the words that were spoken or sung. Not all the words, of course, but many of them. The meaning of “According to gittith” is obscure as, remember, are virtually all the technical terms that appear in italic type in the NIV’s psalm titles. Thinking about the possibilities for the meaning of gittith provides an illustration of how intractable the problem of the interpretation of these technical musical terms really is. Gittith is a feminine adjective derived from Gath, the name of one of the five principle Philistine cities. The word “gath” itself, however, means “wine-press.” So, gittith could refer somehow to wine and, perhaps therefore, be a reference to the grape harvest associated with the Feast of Tabernacles. On the other hand, it could have something to do with the procession of the ark from the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite, the house of that Obed-Edom who was from Gath, to Jerusalem (of whom and of which procession we read in 2 Sam. 6). Or, perhaps it refers to a tune whose name is taken from that word “Gath.” Some have suggested that it is a musical instrument, perhaps some kind of flute that David carried away from Gath on one of his successful military forays into Philistine territory. Or, perhaps it means something entirely different that no one has yet thought of. How would one ever tell? It is a happy demonstration of the antiquity of the Psalter that these terms are so obscure and were already in the 2nd century before Christ. In any case, the 8th Psalm is a psalm written by David as are virtually all the psalms in the first book of the Psalter, Psalms 1-41.

Text Comment

v.1 You will notice that this sentence is found at the end of the Psalm as well. “Lord our Lord, etc.” is, therefore, an inclusio. We have seen inclusios often in the Old Testament. It is a literary device by which the theme of a writing is indicated. Appearing at the beginning and at the end of a document it tells us what the material inside is about. You have, for example, “‘Meaningless, Meaningless,’ says the Teacher. ‘Everything is meaningless’” occurring at the beginning and the end of Ecclesiastes and by this means the Teacher tells his reader that the theme of the book is the “meaninglessness” of human life, which means as the author’s argument unfolds, the apparent meaninglessness of life, our inability to detect the meaning of things and to explain why human life unfolds as it does. Well here, in Psalm 8, the majesty of God in all the earth is the theme of the psalm.

According to one count, 75 psalms employ the rhetorical device of inclusio. We have already noted the inclusio that begins Psalm 1 and ends Psalm 2 and draws them together as a pair. The inclusios of the Psalter are not usually, however, precisely the same statement at the very beginning and the very end of the psalm, as here in Psalm 8.

David is the author, so when he says “Lord our Lord,” he is including the people together with their king. This is the first psalm in the Psalter in which the song is the utterance of a number of persons, the church as a whole, and not a single individual.

The reference to “Lord” [Yahweh] is interesting and important. Yahweh, as you know is the covenant name for God, the name most often preferred when the Lord’s name is mentioned in reference to his people. Elohim, translated “God” in the English translations of the Bible, is the divine name preferred when the reference is to God’s relationship to his creation as a whole. You have a precise delineation of these two divine names in Psalm 19, which begins, “The heavens declare the glory of God” and whose first half is about the revelation of God as it is given in nature; but the second half of that psalm begins with “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” and concerns the Lord’s saving relationship to his people. Here in Psalm 8 comes the important confession that it is our Lord, Yahweh, whose glory and majesty is revealed in what he has made. The Lord of the covenant is not our God only, he is the living God, the only God, the God of heaven and earth.

President Bush got into some hot water recently with some evangelical spokesmen when, in answer to a reporter’s question during his trip to Great Britain, he said that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. One spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention and another from the National Association of Evangelicals took him to task for implying that the God of Islam and the God of the Bible is the same. However, there is but one God and both Muslims and Christians claim to worship that one God. The question is not whether the God of Islam and the God of Christianity is the same God – it is not as if there are two gods out there and we are choosing which one to worship – the questions are rather: what is God like and how is he to be served and worshipped. Here we are told that the God who created all things is the God who is in covenant with his people, the God who revealed himself to Abraham and who chose David for his king and, in time, sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to be the Savior of the world. [Cf. R.J. Neuhaus, First Things 140 (Feb 2004) 72] The living God whose glory is revealed in nature is therefore known to the entire earth, however human beings may have corrupted their knowledge of him.

v.2 “Children and infants” is a pairing found six other times in the OT and always with the thought of the helpless in the face of powerful and ruthless enemies. The great and glorious Almighty God, whose glory is revealed in the heavens, has chosen the weak and the foolish to shame the wise and the powerful – his enemies. Paul makes the same point, remember, in 1 Cor. 1:27. That though mighty enough to create and rule the heavens God should exercise his sovereign rule on earth through the weak is a still greater demonstration of his wisdom and power.

Now, vv. 3-8 explain that short opening statement in vv. 1b-2.

v.3 The great German commentator Franz Delitzsch called Psalm 8 a “lyric echo of the Mosaic account of creation.” [148] The great heavens, the stars in all of their glory, took only God’s fingers to create!

v.4 The creation being so great, so vast, what is man that God should reveal himself to him and what is man that he should address the Lord as my Lord and my God? What is man that he should be given to know God and converse with him, that God should take a tender interest in his affairs. Only man, of course, knows to ask the question; only man can realize how astonishing a thing it is to know God, the Maker of heaven and earth.

v.5 It would be the most natural conclusion to come to: that compared to the vast reaches of space, compared to the mighty forces God has set in motion in the creation, puny man is nothing before this. But he is not. God has made him the center of it all and has given to him a status and position in creation second only to his own. However weak, however dependent, God has not forgotten or ignored man, but made him his vice-regent in the world. He is only a little lower than the angels (in the glory of his being; he is actually higher than the angels in other ways) and he is crowned with honor as the Lord’s image-bearer. He is the only God-like creature in the world. The angels are ministering spirits whose great task it is to help in the salvation of man! That is a point, remember, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews makes.

C.S. Lewis said of Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 that the pressing of that large, heavy crown on that small head is symbolic of the situation of all men: great responsibilities to be fulfilled by weak and little creatures.

v.6 If man is a king, then he has a territory and a kingdom: this world and its inhabitants are his to rule. [Delitzsch, 155]

You may remember that vv. 5-6 are cited in Hebrews 2:8-9 in reference to Christ. The idea there seems to be that Christ is the Man, the representative man, and that in and through his life and work the promise of human life and of man’s service as God’s vice-regent will finally be perfectly realized.

v.9 The final “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth” carries now still greater meaning. The Lord’s glory is majestic not only because of the splendor of the heavens he created but by his condescension and goodness to mankind. [Alexander, 40]

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One commentator sums up the Psalm by saying that the main thought of the psalm is that “the God whose glory the heavens reflect, has also glorified Himself in the earth and in man…” [Delitzsch, 150] We know, from passages like Romans 1:19-20 that the natural order provides an argument both for the existence of God and something of his nature as wise and powerful. It is an argument so clear and so persuasive that the unbeliever is left without excuse if he does not acknowledge God his creator and worship and serve him accordingly. But Psalm 8 is not apologetics, it is not addressed to the unbeliever. It is believers who are speaking and they are delighting in what the nature tells them about their God and Savior as well as what it tells them about themselves. [C.J. Collins, Syllabus: Psalms and Wisdom Literature, 47] There are other psalms that are devoted to this same theme, such as 29 and 104.

There is in the psalm the recognition that all do not recognize the living God and their creator, and many oppose him. But, so powerful is God and so much does he honor his children, that he is able to deal with his enemies and overcome them with the weakest of human beings: children and infants or adults who are as weak as children and infants.

Now this is a point Christians find very natural to make. We are given some sight of God in the magnificent universe he has created, in the world in which we live, and in ourselves, God’s masterwork. We know very well that the revelation of God as it comes in nature is insufficient. We cannot learn by looking at a night sky, either with the naked eye or with the world’s most powerful telescopes, nor can we learn by admiring the unbelievable intricacy of the biochemical machines that make the human body work, that God is triune, that Jesus Christ is God incarnate, that the way of salvation and the only way is through faith in him. But God’s revelation in nature is not, therefore, of no consequence. Nature not only shows us the power and genius of God, it creates the possibilities of our understanding God in more spiritual ways.

C.S. Lewis made this point very helpfully in The Four Loves [37]:

“Many people – I am one myself – would never, but for what nature does for us, have had any content to put into the words we must use in confessing our faith. Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how the “fear” of God could have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable crags. And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the “love” of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed.” [Cited in Collins, 49]

You see Lewis’ point. What would glory mean to us, a term that refers to the “weight” or “worthiness” of God – after all, the divine glory is usually represented in the Bible by some form of brilliant light – if we hadn’t some idea of light that is beautiful and powerful and breathtaking: a sunset on the seacoast; a blazing summer sun in the desert; a dazzling pink sunrise over our own Mt. Rainier? And most of us have had experiences of being awestruck or overwhelmed with deep longing and many of those experiences were called forth by beauty that we saw in the world, by the sight of what God has made. Nature won’t teach us much theology, to be sure. It is very limited in what it can teach us. But it can help greatly to show us what our theology means and how it is to be felt. [Collins, 49]

I don’t know if you have had quite the same experience I have had, but I think about this from time to time. At our Colorado summer cabin we enjoy, looking from the front of the house, whether inside through the picture windows, or outside sitting on the deck, a gorgeous vista: tree covered hills flanking a high mountain whose summit is far above the timberline and nearer, and on one side, an amazing collection of high granite towers shaped by thousands of years of ice, rain, and wind. During our summer holiday, I catch myself all the time simply staring at this view. It changes of course with the weather. It is one sort of beauty in a storm, another sort altogether at sunset on a clear evening. Sometimes the clouds lower and frame a part of this vista and sometimes the sky is so blue and the green so deep that the contours of mountain crest and rock towers stand out as if cut by a knife. And through a month’s vacation I sit there times without number and catch myself just staring at the same scene I have known for 50 years of my life. I never get tired of it. I suppose I spend hours of my summer just looking at that beauty.

I know that some of you have homes here in the Northwest that have gorgeous views of the magnificent vistas for which our area is justly famous. And I suspect you find yourselves doing the very same thing. Just staring at what you have seen countless times before. Happy just to look again!

The attraction of the beauty and majesty of creation and at the same time our capacity as human beings to appreciate its beauty, to reflect on its majesty, to be amazed at its perfection is certainly, as Paul says it is, a revelation of God, his power and his wisdom. Nothing so reveals the power of sin to blind human beings to the light of the noonday sun that there are so many people in the world – not a great many relatively speaking but a considerable number – who actually will argue that both are an accident – both the unutterable majesty of nature and the capacity of human beings to glory in that nature with such emotional and intellectual sophistication – all is in their view a happenstance of space and time utterly devoid of meaning or consequence. I am sure that at the last judgment one of the most damning evidences of man’s rebellion against God will prove to have been his steadfast refusal to accept the evidence of his own eyes for what it is, the incontrovertible demonstration of the glory of God. Only the Devil, originally a great angel himself, only a being of such power and sophistication could convince a human being – and it would have to be a most eagerly willing human being – that this world says nothing and reveals nothing about a Maker, a Creator.

But for the believer, who looks at the world with a believer’s eyes, the universe, the world is a lesson in the theology of both God and man.

As the church father, Basil the Great, told his congregation:

“I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that, wherever you may be, the least may bring to you the clear remembrance of the creator.” [Homily 5:76]

But, as we learn in Psalm 8, it is not only lessons about the Creator and the remembrance of his majesty that nature provides us, but, at the same time, a message about ourselves. If nature is so glorious, if the vastness of the spaces of the universe take our breath way, what then must be a human being whom God has made the greatest of his creatures, upon whom he bestows the privilege of communion with himself, and to whom he gives the immense privilege and responsibility of the government of this world. A monkey has been known to warm himself at a stranger’s fire, but he has never been known to throw more wood on the fire, still less to lean back and contemplate the stars and what message they tell us about God and about ourselves.

Our nation, you know, is spending billions in the search for other life in the universe. That search is predicated – like it or not – on the assumption that there is nothing all that marvelous about human life. After all, if the development of human life arose here, it must be the kind of thing that should have happened in other places too, the mindless laws of nature being what they are. And so we send out signals and Jody Foster listens for a reply. The primary purpose of the Mars-landers – and no one should decry the extraordinary accomplishment these landers represent, the astonishing evidence of man’s ingenuity and creativity and intellectual power as God’s vice-regent – is to search for signs of life. One of the reasons it has taken them so long to send these new, still more sophisticated probes to Mars is because the last ones found no evidence of life at all, to NASA’s keen disappointment and some general embarrassment. Quite apart from the demonstration of the very great unlikelihood of finding such life anywhere else, even assuming that evolution is true and that human life arose by accident here on earth – a conclusion demonstrated in a celebrated book by two University of Washington professors not long ago –, quite apart from our confidence, growing all the while that the so-called evolutionary sciences are wobbling and must soon topple altogether, there is this terrible and destructive implication involved in all of this expensive search for life elsewhere: that human beings are not God’s masterwork, that they are not the pinnacle of God’s creative genius, and that God did not plan an empty and meaningless universe but created instead a home for his family, a home surrounded by exquisite beauty that would remind human beings of their Creator, their calling, and the happy privilege of their existence.

When asked why he was so resistant to the conclusion – suggested by so many converging lines of evidence – that man may well be the only intelligent life in the vast universe, Stephen Hawking replied, “The human race is so insignificant, I find it difficult to believe the whole universe is a necessary precondition for our existence.” [In Fred Heeren, “Home Alone in the Universe?” First Things 121 (March 2002) 38-46] So today human beings do these amazingly creative things to explore the universe in hopes of denying their own unique and special place in it! Here is the futility and the self-destructiveness of human beings in their rebellion against God!

But for us who believe, who know that God created the heavens and the earth, the universe is a constant witness to our own privilege and our own calling.

“Oh what a solemn thing it is to be a man! Made so exalted, fallen so low, capable of being raised again so high.” [“Rabbi” Duncan, in Moody Stuart, 38]

But that is what we are. The stars are nothing to us, to any and every human being, made in God’s own image, made to be like God and to know God and to be loved by and to love God, and to serve God.

Even fallen, as he is being viewed in Psalm 8, man is still astonishingly great. The world is full of fallen, dethroned princes, showing their glory even through their depravity, their pettiness, and their venality. We see it everywhere we look. A Pakistani man, bright enough to develop a nuclear bomb for his country, sells the secrets to other nations, not for political or ideological reasons, for no such high-sounding cause, but to live the high life, to enjoy a lavish lifestyle, so his wife could shop without worrying about money, unconcerned really as to whom and how many might be harmed by the secrets he was selling.

But if that is half the story, the other half is that Christians, those who know God, should be living as restored princes. [Duncan in Moody Stuart, 38] And if it seems at first that we are too small for that, too weak, too insignificant, that we cannot see ourselves as but a little lower than the angels, then remember that with God at work in you, even a comparative infant is more stronger than the most powerful enemy of God.

We know as parents how important it is for children to grow up with a strong sense of their own worth and how necessary it is for parents to be always reinforcing that sense. It is essential to human beings in general. They have been made worthy, important, supremely valuable. It is part of their created nature to need to understand and appreciate that.

Otherwise the foundation for all right thinking about themselves and their lives has been removed and human life must become a grand inconsistency, a welter of instinctive convictions of his own value and his own high purpose that man can no longer understand or justify. So, with unbelievable skill and technological sophistication we operate on fetuses in the womb, if they are wanted, and kill them if they are not. We want to clone human beings, even if it means bringing them to life in order to kill them, precisely because such technology may hold promise of extending human life, a goal so precious to us that we are quite ready to take any and every moral risk to attain it! Men are princes, intended for better things, but they have forsaken their calling; they no longer understand it, they no longer even believe it, however much they continue to feel it so. They cannot get rid of their royal nature, it is what they are, but its nobility, its grandeur, its dignity now lie in tatters and no one is sure why.

So this poem by the English journalist, Steve Turner:

If chance be

The father of all flesh,

Disaster is his rainbow in the sky,

And when you hear

‘State of Emergency!’

‘Sniper kills Ten!’

‘Troops on Rampage!’

‘Youths go Looting!’

‘Bomb blasts school!’ –

It is but the sound of man

Worshipping his Maker.

        [In R. Zacharias, A Shattered Visage, 144]

What Christian faith and the knowledge of God imparts to human life once again is wholeness. One finds again one’s true place in the world. One comes to understand why he is as he is; why she thinks as she does. We find that the fundamental impressions of our self-understanding are true – our great value, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, that our relation to God our Maker is the source of the significance of our life, that the moral nature of our life, inescapable as it is, is the secret to our calling as a human being – we have been given life in order to be something and do something – and now we know how to put that view of ourselves and our life to work, both for our own fulfillment and for the glory of God. We have come home. We find ourselves where we belong in the universe and we have a calling to fulfill for which we were made.

These are the lessons of nature, taught first and primarily of course in Holy Scripture, lessons accessible only to faith, but wonderfully confirmed by what a man sees when he opens his eyes and looks upon the world and himself in that world. John Keble, the 19th century English churchman and poet, put it this way:

There is a book, who runs may read,

Which heavenly truth imparts,

And all the lore its scholars need,

Pure eyes and Christian hearts.

 

The works of God above, below,

Within us and around,

Are pages in that book, to show

How God himself is found.

 

Thou who has given me eyes to see

And love this sight so fair,

Give me a heart to find out thee,

And read thee everywhere.

You, you human being, are a piece of work in the best sense of that phrase. How special you are ought to take the breath away. The entire night sky, the wheeling galaxies are nothing compared to you. And if this is a truth revealed in nature how much more is it confirmed by the fact that this human life was at last represented by and, at terrible cost, redeemed by no one less than the Son of God himself.