The Incomparable Greatness of God
Psalm 8
Philip Yancey, a Christian author, describes his first visit to Old Faithful, a well-known geyser in Yellowstone National Park. He and his wife ate a meal in the Old Faithful Inn, which overlooks the geyser, keeping an eye out the window to watch the large digital clock that stands beside the geyser, which predicted the next eruption in 24 minutes.
As the clock reached one minute, Yancey and his wife joined all the other tourists in going over to the large windows to watch the eruption. He noticed, though, that as all the diners moved to the windows, the waiters and busboys moved instead to refill drinks, remove dirty dishes, etc. Even as the geyser erupted, not one waiter or busboy bothered to look out the window. Somewhere along the way the restaurant staff had stopped being impressed by Old Faithful and took this natural wonder for granted.
How many of us have the same attitude towards God’s creation and towards the role he’s given us in it? We become so self-absorbed, engrossed in the monotonous drone of daily routines and distracted by the latest crisis, that we fail to be amazed at God’s majestic glory that surrounds us in the natural world he has made?
That’s what David helps us do better with this psalm. He steps back from the excruciating crises and trials of his life to savor the incomparable greatness of God, who is infinitely greater than whatever enemies or trials may come our way. There is nothing as great as our God and there is nothing as special (and mind-blowing) as the role he has given us in his vast creation. No matter what we experience in life, we should praise God for his undeniable greatness which surrounds us.
To the lead musician, on the gittith, a psalm of David.
From “to the lead musician” we know this psalm was included in a group of psalms to be used in regular temple worship. “A psalm of David” tells us David wrote this psalm. “On the gittith” is unclear. This term also appears in Psa 81 and 84 and seems to be a musical term specifying what tune or instrument to use for this song. Some even suggest this was an instrument David had taken from the Philistine town of Gath after he defeated Goliath.
Though we don’t know the backstory and we can’t identify the stage of life when David wrote this, we can easily imagine how his experience as a shepherd may have influenced what he wrote here, spending long nights outside caring for his father’s sheep as a child.
The evidence of God’s greatness fills the Earth.
Yahweh, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the Earth –
who has placed your splendor above the heavens!
Psalm 8:1
As we read this psalm, we should recognize from the outset that David spoke to God. We must not overlook this simple fact or take it for granted. As we make our way through life, we must learn to talk to God as naturally and frequently as we breath air into our lungs.
He called God ‘Yahweh,’ which the special, personal name he revealed to Moses at the burning bush as Moses was shepherding his father-in-law’s sheep (Exo 3:14). We would not know this name if God has not revealed it to us himself. It means “I am,” which describes God as one who simply exists and who relies on nothing for his existence. Therefore, whatever else exists relies completely on him for existence.
Though this name reveals God’s eternal, self-sustaining existence, it also reveals something else – the certainty of God’s presence. When God revealed his name to Moses, he did so to reveal not his existence but his presence. That was the purpose for revealing his name to Moses. He said, “I will certainly be with you” (Exo 3:12), just as he had been with his forefathers – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Exo 3:13, 15).
David also called God ‘Lord,’ a title which means “master” and shows respect to someone as being in a place of superior authority and control over the person who is speaking.
- Do you acknowledge the existence and presence of God in your life, the same God whom Abraham, Moses, and David worshipped?
- When you talk to him, do you acknowledge his complete authority over your life and over all things?
- How frequently do you talk to him at all?
A close relationship with God is crucial to a calm and confident life, and such a relationship requires more than speaking to God in general but acknowledging his supremacy and authority over you. We must acknowledge both the existence of and preeminence of God.
David continues to describe the character and nature of God with words like majesty and splendor. Majesty describes God as being most impressive and overwhelming in his greatness. To describe God this way meant David adored God with amazement and awe. Splendor is a similar word but focuses more on who God truly is within whereas majesty focuses on how God appears outwardly. So, God is truly amazing in both his outward appearance and inward nature. In other words, he – who we cannot see – is just as amazing as the natural world indicates, which we can see.
What captures David’s imagination here is how God reveals himself to the world. He has revealed his impressive greatness throughout the Earth, then he has also revealed his internal greatness through the sky and space above and beyond the Earth. If you want to know what God is like – his greatness and his nature – look closely first at the vast world of nature on our planet, then look closely at the vast world of the night sky above.
This points us to what Paul said about God in his letter to the church at Rome: “Since the creation of the world his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse” (Rom 1:20). The point here is that God is not some obscure and secretive being whose existence is difficult to imagine and whose greatness is hard to see. The opposite is true. The greatness and goodness of God is blatantly obvious to everyone in the world. No matter what we experience in life, we should praise God for his undeniable greatness which surrounds us. This was his purpose – to saturate the entire universe with his glory.
Young children see this better than defiant adults.
From the mouth of children and infants
you have assigned praise because of your foes,
to put to silence the enemy and avenger.
Psalm 8:2
David now reflects on how people respond to how God reveals his greatness through the grandeur of mountains and oceans, planets and stars. He points out how young children, even infants, offer the most genuine praise. The point here is “the younger the better” – the younger a child is, the better the praise will be.
How do toddlers, even infants, praise God best? Don’t try to envision young children singing complex, elaborate choral arrangements. Instead, envision them expressing genuine weakness through cries for help and simple statements of fact about the world.
When a young child hurts, she cries and asks for help. When a young child sees a full sky of stars, he says ‘wow’ with greater amazement than his parents, who’ve seen the same sky hundreds of times before and are no longer amazed.
- Have you lost your sense of wonder at the world God has made?
- Have you lost your sense of helpless dependence upon him?
We should never lose the sense of both helplessness and wonder that a young child enjoys when they face problems and see the world that God has made.
“Because of your foes” reminds us that there are people who attack the truth of God’s existence and greatness. From the dawn of Creation, Satan himself has opposed and resisted God and continues to do so today. Yet the helpless cries of infants and children drown out or silence the rebellious schemes of ungodly men. Their helpless cries remind us that we are all helpless creatures in the presence of the self-existing, self-sustaining God who rules over us. They remind us that we all must turn to him for salvation.
Christ himself taught the same thing:
- “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt 18:2-4)
- “Let the little children come to me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt 19:14)
When I was an elementary- and early junior high-aged boy, my father pastored a small, rural church in south central Indiana. During those years, my mother taught a children’s lesson on the front steps of the auditorium during the morning worship service. Children would sit on the steps during her lesson. And sometimes we would take up the offering, come forward to pray, or do other things in the service, too.
One time in a church business meeting, an older lady and the wife of a deacon spoke in an agitated tone to question why children were taking an active role in the worship service. But she was wrong. Maybe that church had never allowed children to be involved like that before, but Jesus would beg to differ. It is young children who show us how to worship God, not the other way around.
Do you praise God with the helplessness and amazement of a child? Consider how David himself, as a young boy, looked up at the stars of night as he cared for his father’s sheep. As a young boy, he would praise God for his goodness and greatness as he admired and marveled at the created world around him. Even as a grown man – as we read in other psalms – he didn’t lose his sense of helpless dependence on the self-existing, ever-present God. No matter how many terrible crises and people he faced, he never lost his profound amazement at the greatness of God, and we should be the same. No matter what we experience in life, we should praise God for his undeniable greatness which surrounds us.
Yet God gives people a prominent role in the world.
When I see your heavens,
the works of your fingers,
the moon and stars which you put into place,
what is humankind that you acknowledge him,
and the son of man that you pay attention to him?
Yet you made him lower than the angels,
and with glory and grandeur you crowned him.
You made him rule over the works of your hands;
you placed all things under his feet –
the sheep and cattle, all of them,
and also the beasts of the wild,
the birds of the sky, the fish of the sea,
and whatever passes through the paths of the sea.
Psalm 8:3-8
Here we can easily envision David laying his back in the grass, hands behind his head, staring up at the starlit sky while sheep slept before him on the hillside. We envision the nighttime sky because David envisions the moon and stars but not the sun.
He calls these lights in sky “your” heavens, which acknowledges God as the one to whom they belong. He calls them “the works of your fingers,” which acknowledges God as the one who made them. He says God “put into place” these stars, which means he not only made them but put them into their precise locations like a watchmaker places the gears, levers, and springs in a watch.
The more we learn about the vast scope and size of the universe, the more God’s overwhelming majesty and greatness comes into view. According to our present calculations of the observable universe, there are approx. 200 billion trillion stars spanning a space that’s 93 billion light-years in diameter.
Then consider that of these stars, our own sun is one of the smallest. It is so large that approx. 1.3 million Earths can fit inside the sun, yet there a billions of trillions of stars up to 100 times larger than the sun. Is your mind blown yet?
With the vast scope of the universe in view and the incredible smallness of human beings by comparison, David marvels that God pays attention to human beings. Acknowledge means something like “call to mind” for the purpose of thinking about and responding to. Pay attention means something like “seek out, long for, take care of.” Why should God think about us and take care of us with such a massive universe in place?
David answers this question by telling us God has given human beings an important purpose. “Lower than the angels” is a challenging phrase because angels is elohim, which we normally translate as God or “heavenly beings.” We translate it as angels because that’s how he writer of the NT book of Hebrews quotes this verse in Heb 2:7.
As a side note, we should point out that when Heb 2:7 quotes from this psalm, it does so to tell us not only that God is preeminent and sovereign over us, but that Jesus Christ is the preeminent human being, because he is both God and man. To fully fulfill our purpose in this world, we must not only acknowledge the greatness of God but the authority of Jesus Christ over all mankind. We must bow to him as our ultimate human king and with him we will rule the world.
David goes on to say that God has “crowned man with glory and grandeur,” which is a way of saying that he has given us a high position of influence and power in his creation from which we should – through our behavior and words – reflect the greatness and goodness of God on his behalf.
Then he explains how he expects us to do this. He has “made him rule” which means to make someone else a lord and master over something by delegation. Remembering how David has called Yahweh our Lord, he is now saying Yahweh has made us lords over his creation for him. We are in an intermediary position to rule over God’s created world, including all other life forms whether they are domesticated or wild.
What’s fascinating here is how God has placed mankind in a uniquely intermediary position. Angels have spirits but no bodies. Animals have bodies but no spirits. As human beings, we have both and are situated at the center of God’s creation to govern and manage and care for his creation on his behalf. We do not exist for our own pleasure but for his. We do not exist to do what we want to do but to do what he desires because he has delegated his authority to us to care for his creation and rule over it.
When we consider how majestic and great God is and how awesome and mindboggling his creation is, we should be overwhelmed at the reason for our existence (Gen 1:26-28). No matter what we experience in life, we should praise God for his undeniable greatness which surrounds us. And we should be amazed at our role in the world, to rule over it and care for it on God’s behalf.
In all that you do in life, you should seek to reveal and magnify the greatness and goodness of God. How should this view of your life influence the way that you work, treat other people, manage your resources, and even enjoy recreation?
The evidence of God’s greatness fills the Earth.
Yahweh, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the Earth!
Psalm 8:9
Our exalted role in God’s creation should not cause us to rebel against him as some do, or to view ourselves as bigger and more important than we are. Instead, we should turn to him in childlike dependence and praise, as David does once again. He began his psalm this way and he ended it this way as well. The beginning and end of this psalm are exactly the same, savoring the greatness of God for all his worth. No matter what we experience in life, we should praise God for his undeniable greatness which surrounds us.
- Are you in awe of God’s greatness?
- Are you relying on God like a child?
