“How
Excellent is Your Name”
(Psalm
8:1-9)
June
7, 2021 YouTube
Today is Trinity Sunday, and we will be looking at Psalm
8.
In this Psalm, we find David enraptured with God’s Glory
and Goodness and God’s infinite goodness towards us.
David begins by saying God is to be glorified.
“O
LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”
David
says that God’s Name – His Character and Perfections – are majestic – they are
beautiful and dignified. Above
everything and everyone else in all of Creation, Who God is and what He does is
held is high esteem – He is Glorified.
“You
have set your glory above the heavens.”
Beyond
the earth – beyond the sky and the stars and the sun – is where God resides and
His Glory is set. God is not a creation,
but the One Who exists before time and space and outside of time and
space. All things that are exist because
He is.
“Out
of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of
your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.”
What
does it mean to say that God’s strength is established out of the mouths of
babies and infants?
It
means at least one thing, and it might mean a second.
People
use this verse in the context of a young child saying something true about God.
People
might be talking about a crime and a five-year-old says, “God hates sin.” And someone will gasp and say, “Out of the
mouth of babes…”
Does
this verse literally mean that God’s strength is established in very young
humans? God is free to use whomever and
whatever He chooses. However, Jesus adds
another way to interpret this verse:
“And
the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. But when
the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the
children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ they were
indignant, and they said to him, ‘Do you hear what these are saying?’ And Jesus
said to them, ‘Yes; have you never read, “Out of the mouth of infants and
nursing babies you have prepared praise”?’” (Matthew 21:14-16, ESV).
The
text mentions the blind and the lame coming to Jesus in the Temple and children
praising Him as the Promised Savior. And
we need to ask, could the blind and the lame – of whatever age – be the
children who praised Jesus?
Well,
how would we draw that conclusion?
Paul
writes to the Corinthian Christians:
“But
I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the
flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were
not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready,” (I Corinthians 3:1-2, ESV).
And
the author of Hebrews writes, “For though by this time you ought to be
teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the
oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk
is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food
is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by
constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:12-14, ESV).
These
texts tell us that the biblical writers consider those who are immature in the
faith to be milk-drinking babies.
The
blind and the lame – among others – were not allowed into the Temple due to
their afflictions, so it is likely they would be immature in the faith, and,
would be considered milk-drinking babies.
In
either or both cases, the point of God’s power being established through the
mouths of babies and infants is that the power cannot come from the babies and
infants themselves because they are babies and infants. The power and the wisdom of whatever they say
has to come from God Himself. It is not
something they could come up with – so all praise and glory for such utterances
are God’s.
It
is through these that God sends His Power “to still the avenger and the foe.”
We
will remember how God comes to Gideon and tells him that he will lead Israel
against the Midianites, so Gideon gathers 32,000 men to fight. And God shakes His Head:
“The
LORD said to Gideon, ‘The people with you are too many for me to give the
Midianites into their hand, lest Israel boast over me, saying, “My own hand has
saved me”’” (Judges 7:2, ESV).
So,
Gideon reduces his army to 300 men – in the world’s eyes – a suicide
mission. And God conquers the
Midianites.
The
result of God using those who are weak and immature and unable to care for themselves
is that God is glorified.
Paul
writes, “For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise
according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble
birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose
what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and
despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things
that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And
because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God,
righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let
the one who boasts, boast in the Lord’” (I Corinthians 1:26-31, ESV).
If
you don’t think you are able to do what God is calling you to do, you are the
perfect person for the job. God is to be
glorified.
Second,
God’s condescension is unfathomable.
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the
moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are
mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?”
If you remember going outside – back before Covid – you
may remember looking up in the night sky and seeing the moon and the stars. And, as we saw last week, the idea that all
of this variety and precision popped out of the slime by accident is less
likely than the national debt ever being paid off.
David
tells us that the heavens – the sky above us and all that proceeds out through
space – the moon, the stars, the galaxies, and so forth – all of these were
created by God as a human might make something with his fingers. God created each star and put it in the exact
place that God wanted it to be to accomplish the purpose He created it
for. Every planet was individually
created by God and placed where God wanted it to be to accomplish the purpose
He created it for. God created each
person and placed each one of us exactly where He wants us to be to accomplish
the purpose He created us for. Every weed
in your lawn was created by God and placed there to accomplish the purpose He
created it for. Amazing precision,
arrangement, and order!
If
we consider all that God did to put all of Creation together and to have all of
it function for however long God will have it function as it is functioning,
and then we consider that God came to earth in the Person of the human Jesus,
we are dumbfounded.
God
did not come in the person of an angel.
He did not come in the person of a cat or a dog or a goat – He came as a
human for humans to save a human people for Himself.
When
we talk about condescension, we normally think of someone treating us poorly,
but that is not what we mean when we say that God condescended. What we mean is that God put aside His Honor
and Privilege and became something of a lower and less dignified state.
This
is what Paul means when he says of Jesus, “Let each of you look not only to his
own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among
yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of
God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied
himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the
point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:4-8, ESV).
When
we talk about God’s condescension for us, we are talking about the fact that
God made everything that is for us, and He incarnated – He became one of us –
Jesus is the Almighty God in the flesh – He put aside aspects of His Deity – He
did not cease to be God – by He was born as a human, raised as a human, tempted
as a human, learned as a human, lived under God’s Law as a human, and gave
Himself up to be mocked and denied and crucified and killed – for us – His
sinful, miserable, disobedient creatures!
How unfathomable is His condescension!
We
read, “Behold, even the moon is not bright, and the stars are not pure in his
eyes; how much less man, who is a maggot, and the son of man, who is a worm!” (Job
25:5-6, ESV).
God
is not drawn to us because of our goodness.
Rather, God shows His Glory through His working in us and through us and
by condescending to us.
And
so we have what ought to be one of the most shocking sentences in the
Bible: “For God so loved the world, that
he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have
eternal life” (John 3:16, ESV).
God’s
condescension is unfathomable.
Third,
God gave humans dominion.
“Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly
beings and crowned him with glory and honor.”
The heavenly beings are spirits and serve God in His throne
room immediately – they are present before Him now.
God created humans to be the physical beings with the
highest honor. We – created in the Image
of God – nearly have a celestial condition as we live our lives on the
earth. We were created to be the highest,
most blessed, of all God’s physical creation.
Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA, wrongly states, “Animal
liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational
basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog
is a boy. They are all mammals” (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ingrid_Newkirk).
Why is she wrong?
Because humans are the only creatures that were created
in the Image of God, and we are given dominion over all of the rest of
Creation.
“You
have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things
under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds
of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the
seas.”
Perhaps
the second most shocking thing that God has done – after the Incarnation – is
that God gave humans dominion. God
created humans to be His undershepherds over Creation.
Moses records, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image,
after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and
over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and
over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in his
own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”
(Genesis 1:26-27, ESV).
God has dominion over all His Creation. And God has given us dominion – under Him –
of all the creatures on this planet. So,
we are to care for the Creation – on God’s behalf – in the same way that God
cares for us – and all of Creation. God
is our Shepherd, and we are His undershepherds.
We have greater blessings and responsibility that all other creatures.
The author of Hebrews brings all the strands together:
“It
has been testified somewhere, ‘What is man, that you are mindful of him, or the
son of man, that you care for him? You made him for a little while lower than
the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in
subjection under his feet.’
“Now
in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his
control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we
see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus,
crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the
grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Hebrews 2:6-9, ESV).
Now, we are given dominion over the
creatures of the earth and we are to care for them and show them the love of
God as we care for them. That does not
mean it is a sin to eat animals, but it does mean animal abuse is a sin. So, let us do all we can to care for the
creatures God has put in our charge.
“O
LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”
When
we consider the Creation and who we are, it is unbelievable that God cares for
us. He is to be glorified for all He has
done – the One, Triune, Sovereign God and Creator of all. The love of God is unfathomable as we
consider that God became one of us to save a people for Himself. It is also a great surprise that God has
given us the responsibility to tend to the needs of the creatures of the earth.
Let
us raise the Name of God, our God, on high – praising and glorifying Him –
telling others that God is intimately involved with His Creation and He became
one of us that we would be forever with Him.
And let us seriously, and in love, obey all the commands that God has
given us, include to care for the Creation.
Let
us pray:
Almighty
God, when we consider Who You are and all You have done, we are amazed and humbled. We lift our voices to praise the excellence
of Your Name, and we are struck dumb as we consider that You loved Your people
so much that You came to earth as one of us.
We are left wondering why You would love Your creatures – especially
creatures who continually sin against You.
Keep us looking to You in amazement and may God the Holy Spirt empower
us and cause us to do all You have created us to do. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
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