Psalm 8 Commentary

Psalm 8 swiftly sums up something that the Israelites found as amazing as anything else they could think of.  Yes, the psalm is about the majesty of God and that is awesome enough.  And the psalmist sees that majesty of God chiefly in the things that this great God created and most especially the wonders we see overhead in the night sky.  In those days long before there was such a thing as light pollution that obscures most of the stars above for anyone living near an urban center, when the Israelites looked up, they saw a staggering number of stars.  So that all was indeed highly majestic.

But that is not what bowled them over the most.  No, what they found truly staggering and mind-blowing is that that Almighty God who is full of majesty and might actually notices little old us on earth.  God is able to see us in our littleness.  Indeed, God desires to see us, to care for us, to crown us with glory and honor.  Each one of us seems to mean more to God than all those billions of stars in the sky.  And just that was the cause of the greatest joy the Israelites knew.

The majesty of God is not just seen in the created splendors above and around us.  The majesty of God is not just the sheer size of God and the galactic power and might at his disposal.  The majesty of God is found also in God’s lovingkindness toward humanity.

In the years since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit—and now with the more recent launch of the James Webb Telescope—we have all been awed by the sharp and colorful images that have been displayed of the far reaches of the universe.   When some of the first images came out, including the one above of mind-bogglingly giant pillars of stars and gas that are many lightyears long and wide (and remember that even one lightyear = 5.9 trillion miles), various people observed that this image alone should show how foolish religious people have been in thinking that human beings matter in the grand scheme of things.   We are not the center of the universe!  Even if there were a god out there somewhere, how could that deity even tumble to noticing us on this cosmic speck of dust known as the earth?!

Well, it is true that what we now know about the actual size of the known universe is vastly so much more than the ancient Israelites could have guessed.   Indeed, honesty compels us to admit that it is rather sobering to realize how small we are in the midst of all that vastness.  We are tiny just on the scale of our own Milky Way home galaxy but now we know that the Milky Way is one of billions of whole other galaxies spinning out there in the vastness of the cosmos, each containing billions of stars like our sun and most of those stars are so much bigger than our own sun that you can hardly grasp it.  On the image below comparing the size of known stars, our sun is one of the little fellas in the upper left-hand corner.

And yet . . . as people of faith we are still willing to look at all that and yet know that somehow, some way, and by the mystery of God himself, we are known and loved by the God who created all that.  If it was a plucky thing for Israel to claim thousands of years ago, it is all-the-more plucky now since we understand so much more of what we see in the starry sky over our heads.

How and why can we assert this?  We have the audacity to assert it because we hear the voice of God when we read the Word of God and there it is revealed to us that God made us in God’s own image—a  little lower than the angels, Psalm 8 claims, and crowned with glory and honor.  We dare assert our God’s love and care for us because we believe that somehow our Savior Jesus Christ lives in us by the Holy Spirit.  The answer to how we dare believe this is contained in the line of that Easter hymn: “You ask me how I know he lives—he lives within my heart.”

Sure, the claim that we matter to any God as we spin around our modest star on our modest little blue marble of a planet tucked into one corner of a galaxy with 100 billion other stars in it looks ridiculous on the face of it.   It blows our minds every bit as much as it did the mind of David or whoever it was that penned the 8^th psalm.  With the psalmist all we can do is place our hands on our heads and cry out, “Lord our Lord, how majestic is your Name over all the earth!  Over all the galaxies!  Over all the cosmos!  How majestic!”

Illustration Idea

A few years back a student wrote a sermon on Psalm 8.  Near the end of the sermon the student wrote something along the lines of, “Psalm 8 tells us we are crowned with glory and honor.  And so you might wonder ‘What does that mean?’  It’s a good question.  But we can be assured that we are so crowned.  We have glory.  We have honor.  Sometimes we all wonder what our purpose is and Psalm 8 tells us.  It’s glory and honor.”  Well, this was one of many occasions I have when evaluating sermons to roll out my mantra of “Show, Don’t Tell.”  Don’t keep telling us over and over the same thing about glory and honor.  Show us what this looks like.  The student wanted an example so here is what I said.

“When I think about what it means to be crowned with glory and honor I remember a dear member of my former congregation named Marge.  Marge was the least self-centered and the most generous person I have ever met.  She had a real knack for noticing people on the fringes.  If there was a stranger in church who was off in some corner of the church narthex by himself, Marge would break away from her circle of friends to befriend this person and bring him more into the fellowship.  If Marge saw an older person struggling to reach some groceries at the store, she would abandon her own cart to help this person, sometimes even staying with them through the checkout process and then helping get the groceries into their car.  And every time I saw Marge doing things like that, out of the corner of my eye I swear I could see a crown of glory and honor on her head.  Like the majestic God of Psalm 8 who manages to see us in our littleness, so Marge always saw the little ones in her vicinity and took care of them.  And how well Marge wore that divine crown indeed.”

Note: the CEP website also has commentaries on Psalm 26:

from Leonard Vander Zee in 2018: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2018-10-01/psalm-26/

from Scott Hoezee in 2015: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2015-09-28/psalm-26-2/