Psalm 8 Commentary

Some years back I was slated to preach a sermon from Hebrews 2 as part of the major annual Worship Symposium we have held for many years at Calvin University and Seminary.  The portion of Hebrews 2 I preached on quotes Psalm 8 and applies some of the psalm’s language to Jesus.  In particular it quotes the verse that says “God has put everything under his feet.”  But then in an honest admission, the writer of Hebrews says “Yet at present we do not see all things subject to him.  But we see Jesus.”  In any event, I worked hard on the sermon and it was ready to go when only a couple days before the Symposium was to begin I saw that in the liturgy for that service the worship planners had used the NRSV translation.  So the verse that was the key to my sermon about all things being subject to Jesus/to him was made gender inclusive.  Now it was to “mortals” that God had subjected all things—all things were under their feet, at present we do not see all things subject to them.

So I promptly panicked thinking I had it all wrong for my sermon.  Thankfully a double check of two good commentaries on Hebrews confirmed that the writer did interpret the “Son of Man” of Psalm 8 as being Jesus and we thus do need the singular and masculine pronouns there in Hebrews 2 to make the theological connections the author intended.  The sermon was saved, even though I had to give an explanation ahead of the sermon on this translation issue.  In most Bibles now both Psalm 8 and the places where it gets quoted like Hebrews 2 have moved from the “Son of Man” to “mortals” and that may be problematic for this psalm.  Because it does seem to be pointing toward some ultimate figure to whom all things will be subject.  True, Psalm 8 envisions that all  of humanity can also be in view here.  What is man(kind), what are mortals, that God should treat us so well and take care of us so tenderly?  On that level “mortals” can still work at least within the psalm (but not in Hebrews 2).

But that does seem to be the real crux of Psalm 8.  The majestic God of Israel is awesome.  The works of this God in the created cosmos are mind-blowing.  In those days long before anyone had heard of such a thing as light pollution, the starry sky above on a clear night revealed dazzling numbers of stars.  The ancients did not really know what those stars were—that each one is a sun in its own right.  They also could not know what a small sliver of the stars in just the Milky Way galaxy they were seeing, not to mention that fact we now know that even the whole Milky Way and its 1 billion stars is just one of untold billions more whole galaxies.  We do feel properly dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of it all and of the God who made it all.

But as we have noted before here on the CEP website, if Israel was stunned by the majestic power of their God Yahweh, what stunned them even more was that we human beings appear to matter to this God.  God sees us in our littleness.  What’s more, God has crowned us with glory and honor, put us in charge of taking care of this world.  That is amazing and for Israel counted as something even more amazing than the sheer vastness of the universe in the first place.

Of course as we have also noted in the past, for lots of people in the modern era the vastness of outer space and the mind-numbing number of whole galaxies out there proves the opposite point: we don’t matter.  How could we?  What’s more, as we discover more exoplanets orbiting distant stars, how can we conclude we are the only conscious beings in the cosmos?  Maybe there are other alien races out there and maybe they are superior to humanity for all we know.  Maybe some of them fancy themselves as the most important part of the cosmos too.

Sheerly from the vantage point of science it could be hard to argue with that.  The more we know about the universe the less likely we are to infer that humanity is the center of all things or that even if there is some massive God out there somewhere that this deity would much notice us.  No, if we are going to make the conclusions found in Psalm 8, this will have to be a piece of knowledge that comes from outside of ourselves, outside of what science can see or prove.  If we have the kind of intimate relationship with God that Psalm 8 talks about, this is going to have to be revealed to us, which is precisely what believers think the Bible does by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Of course this gets rejected in the modern world too.  Philosophers have claimed in recent decades that revelation of this kind does not count as a valid source of information or valid knowledge.  For an idea or a claim to be valid from a rational standpoint, it needs to be provable, testable.  It needs to be scientifically verifiable and all claims that cannot clear that bar are rejected as irrational to embrace as truth.

This sermon commentary is not the place to rehearse the brilliant counter-arguments of Alvin Plantinga but suffice it to note here that Plantinga very persuasively argued that as a matter of fact we all embrace things that cannot be scientifically verified.  Past memories, the belief that a spouse loves you, even the belief that other people are actually real and you are not the only being in existence in whose mind other people exist: none of these everyday truths can be proven in a lab.  But we would not say it is therefore irrational to believe that the memory that you ate a protein bar for breakfast this morning is accurate or that you believe in the existence of people even when they are not within your line of sight.

To know as true Psalm 8’s claim that we live in the embrace of a very loving God is a piece of revealed knowledge if ever there were one.  On this Trinity Sunday we also affirm that the one true God consists of three divine Persons who have from eternity worked together to love us as created in this God’s image and to save us from the sin that threatens God’s entire project of creation.  This is the God whose Name is indeed majestic over all the earth and even more majestic still is this God’s love of us.  Against all odds, God sees us in our infinitesimal smallness and not only that, this God cares for us.  A majestic thought indeed.

Illustration Idea

It was an apparently empty part of the sky.  It was apparently a section of outer space that when looked at from here on Earth was some kind of in-between part of the universe.  There was nothing to see in this patch of the night sky.  Until the Hubble Space Telescope trained its powerful lens and camera on that patch and then took a photo with a very long exposure time of leaving the camera aperture open so that even the faintest of light might eventually have time to register on a photo.  What scientists saw on the resulting photo stunned them.

What you see on this photo are not stars but whole galaxies, each containing 1 billion or more stars.  Perhaps there really are no blank patches of the universe.  It teems with life and if the writer of Psalm 8 was gob smacked over what he saw in the night sky overhead, to put it mildly what he could not see was a whole lot!