Psalm 8 - Over All the Earth
Introduction
What is the glory of God? We talk about glory constantly in the Bible. You know, "the glory of God" is one of those automatic answers to most of the questions that come up in a Bible study. Just take any question that begins with "Why did God...", and the answer is very probably "for the glory of God." And it really is such a central subject in the Bible. So what is the glory of God?
Why am I asking this question? Because this psalm revolves around the glory of God. Psalm 8 begins and ends with the same sentence: "LORD, our Lord, how magnificent your name is over all the earth!" The Hebrew word translated "magnificent" (addir) goes further than beauty alone; it also means "majestic," "powerful," "grand." A whole field of vocabulary that is ultimately tied to the glory of God in all its complexity. In fact, glory is the very word the BDS [one Bible translation in French] uses here: "how admirable your glory is over the whole earth." So let me ask my question again: what is the glory of God? Let us take a moment to meditate on that.
Human glory
On 20 December 1998, a certain footballer was born, and not a minor one: I am of course talking about our dear Kylian Mbappé. He went from unknown player to young prodigy very early on, and he made his debut for the French national team at only 17. He was already becoming known before the national team, but the national team in particular propelled him onto the international stage, especially with the 2018 World Cup that France won (a proud moment for France!).
Here is an example of human glory that we know well. His glory started to shine everywhere. Glory here, for Mbappé, is the fact that people all over the world watch him play, that they started taking a closer interest in him, betting on his performances, buying his jerseys with his name on the back of course, playing with him in all sorts of video games, seeing him appear in countless adverts, and even writing songs about him (good ones and bad ones)... In short! Whether you like him or not, Mbappé shone, and he still shines today in the eyes of the whole world.
He is at the center of attention. The spotlights are pointed at him. That is what glory is. Something grand that stands out from the crowd, something you cannot fail to see.
The glory of God in this psalm
As I said a moment ago, this psalm also speaks about glory. But a glory that is not based on the ability to kick a ball around; it is based on other things. It is based on what God has done, and on the characteristics of his person. This sentence, "LORD, our Lord, how magnificent your name is over all the earth!", wraps around the psalm like a sandwich, and as is often the case when we find sandwiches in the Bible, we must never read the bread and the steak separately. The two are closely connected. Here is what the sandwich contains:
The bread: a truth announced: "LORD, our Lord, how magnificent your name is over all the earth!"
And the steak: a kind of demonstration, a justification of the truth that has just been announced. The steak describes why the spotlights and the eyes of the world should be fixed on God.
I suggest we divide the contents of this sandwich into three major demonstrations of the glory of God.
1. The praise of infants
(v. 1-3) "To the choirmaster, on the gittith. A psalm of David. LORD, our Lord, how magnificent your name is over all the earth! Your majesty rises above the heavens. Through the mouths of children and infants, you have founded your glory to confound your adversaries, to silence the enemy, the man greedy for revenge."
This verse is not easy to understand. Why does it speak about children and infants? Why do they have enemies? And why does God found his glory through their mouths? "Founded your glory," which the Greek in fact rendered as "established praise." How does that justify our guiding verse (the bread)? How does it justify the claim that the name of the LORD is magnificent over all the earth?
So I started reasoning backwards, a proof by contradiction for the mathematicians among us. I asked myself what it would look like if we replaced children with strong men. Strong men victorious over their enemies, well... that makes sense. They are strong! They know how to defend themselves, they know how to attack, it is even normal. It is so normal, in fact, that there would not be any praise in their mouths at all. Or if there were, it would be praise directed at themselves. The glory here would go to the strong man, because it is his strength that leads to victory. Yet the psalm clearly says that you, LORD, have founded YOUR glory to confound your adversaries, or "you cause praise to spring up" as the BDS translates it. Hence the proof by contradiction: replacing children with strong men would prove nothing about the glory of God, and nothing about his name being magnificent over all the earth. His name would be hidden here behind the name of the strong man.
QED, in a way. The best way for God to make his glory shine, beyond any possible doubt, is for him to choose to give victory to people who are clearly weak. And honestly, what is weaker than an infant? I have a 4-month-old daughter, and after 4 months (and 4 months is not nothing), I find myself delighted that she can at least hold her head up! Suffice it to say that this particular skill is not what will help her triumph over her enemies... What is weaker than a human infant! A baby is enormously dependent on adults for several years, otherwise it dies! A human child cannot be fully autonomous before the age of 12, 13, 14, 15! That does not exist among animals, that many years of dependence before becoming autonomous. And in the few rare species where late dependence can be observed, it never reaches the level of a human child. And yet it is through their mouths that the LORD causes praise to spring up against his enemies. They are the ones he supports and makes victorious.
And when David wrote this psalm, he was very well placed to write these words. He is, after all, the one who, while still very young, walked toward the giant Goliath and said to him: "You come against me with sword, spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD." Infant that I am, I am literally coming at you with stones, but above all I come in the name of the LORD. And in giving David the victory over Goliath, the glory that bursts out is not David's glory but God's.
1 Corinthians 1:28-29 "God chose the low and despised things of the world, the things that are nothing, to reduce to nothing the things that are, so that no one may boast before God."
This is what moves us once again to repeat the refrain: "LORD, our Lord, how magnificent your name is over all the earth!"
Let us continue reading the psalm.
v. 4 "When I contemplate the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars that you have set in place,"
The sentence is incomplete, but I am stopping here on purpose. Because looking at the sky is in itself enough to prove that the name of the LORD is magnificent over all the earth. Before moving on to verse 5, which puts the greatness of God in perspective with the lowliness of man, let us first take the time to observe the greatness of God.
2. Contemplating the sky
What I love about this verse, "when I contemplate the heavens," is first of all how accessible it is. Contemplating the sky requires no effort at all; you simply step outside and look up. It is easy, and anyone with eyes is meant to be able to see the sky. And when we look at the sky, what do we see? Let us talk a little astronomy (nothing advanced, I promise, just simple observation):
During the day
The thing that jumps out at you, that you cannot fail to see, is obviously the sun. Quite simply the brightest thing our eye is capable of seeing, and in fact so bright that you must not even look at it directly, at the risk of burning your retinas. I am one of those people who did not have glasses during the eclipse, and please do not try this at home, but I still tried squinting at the sun in short bursts, and nothing worked. Even though the sun is so far away, its power is felt instantly. But in observing the sun we do not only see a ball of power, we also observe the benefits that flow from it: a source of light so that we do not bump into every obstacle, and a source of heat so that we can live.
Looking at the sky during the day also lets us see something surprising, or rather lets us fail to see something: the end. We see an expanse of sky whose end escapes us. Our poor little brain cannot even conceive that there might be no end, and to this day, with all our advanced astronomical tools, we have not found the end. A small aside: today we are able to see galaxies so distant that the light coming from them had to travel more than 13 billion years (at the speed of light!) before reaching us. And still there is no end in sight. It is dizzying!
At night
We observe another heavenly body, the moon, which takes over so that we do not sink into total darkness even without the sun.
We also observe a countless number of shining stars, beyond counting with the naked eye. A painting that is spoiled today by human light pollution in our big cities (ironically), but that reveals itself perfectly once you are far from any other light. An XXL painting of breathtaking beauty!
What this teaches us about God
Just by lifting our eyes to the sky, we see a work of art that speaks about its author. Whether you are a Christian or not, whatever your nationality, here is what contemplating the sky teaches you about God:
God is powerful, powerful enough to be able to create such things.
God is not restricted by any limit.
Whatever his reason may be, he provides for our needs, in light and in heat, by day and by night.
And finally, we observe that God is quite the artist. He could have made things purely functional, but we do not only have a God who provides; we have a magnificent God, worthy of contemplation.
"LORD, our Lord, how magnificent your name is over all the earth!"
Now that we have admired the glory of God in his greatness, here is yet another aspect of that glory:
(v. 4-9) "When I contemplate the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars that you have set in place, I say: 'What is man, that you should remember him, and the son of man, that you should care for him?' You have made him a little lower than God and you have crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands, you have put everything under his feet, sheep and oxen alike, and even the wild animals, the birds of the sky and the fish of the sea, everything that travels the paths of the seas."
3. The reign of man
Here David mentions the creation mandate that God gives to Adam: to multiply and to reign over his creation, in Genesis 1. And so David contemplates the sky, as we have just done, and sees how great God is, and how beautiful and complex his creation is. And naturally David ends up comparing man to all of that, and he says to himself, "Really? You are entrusting your creation to us? WOW!" Glory to you, our God, for entrusting us with such a beautiful and great responsibility, and with a dominion over your creation that we are not worthy of. "LORD, our Lord, how magnificent your name is over all the earth!"
The reign of man is not very glorious
But if I want to be honest, there is still a "but" in this story. We could rightly say to ourselves that watching men reign has rarely been a beautiful sight, and has rarely been an occasion for magnifying the name of God. We can see clearly through history what very poor kings men have been, and even today what very poor leaders they are (naming no names). And quite simply, we see how men on a large scale mistreat this creation and push it a little further toward its ruin. How does letting man reign over creation magnify the name of God?
In reality, what would magnify the name of God is if we reigned the way he reigns, in his image! And that was in fact the whole purpose of the creation mandate in Genesis 1: "Then God said: 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness! Let him rule over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky [...]'." That was the goal, that we would reign in his image.
But as you know, the fall of Adam and Eve entered history, and from then on this image of God that we carried within us has never stopped deteriorating, never stopped turning into a caricature. We who are supposed to represent God dishonor him. Watching man reign, you could even say that the name of the LORD is not magnified but, on the contrary, insulted, because we are supposed to be his image.
Of course, God is not indifferent to this. His anger toward us accumulates again and again and again, like a cup of wrath that fills up and that will one day be poured out on everyone.
A model of reigning is given to us
But God, even faced with the bad reign of men, still manages to make his glory burst out over all the earth. This is what the Bible calls the "good news," the gospel. God raised up, from the line of man, a man who carried within himself far more than the image of God. In Jesus, we were able to see what God looks like in all his perfection! No one else has ever radiated the image of God as powerfully as Jesus, for the simple and good reason that Jesus is not merely an image of God, he is God. Consequently, through his ministry on earth, we have been given a faithful example of what the reign of God looks like.
To see Jesus reign is to see the creator Father reign. A king who serves his neighbor and not himself, a king who lifts up rather than puts down, who washes the feet of his disciples rather than the other way around. Jesus says it himself to his disciples in Matthew 20:25-28:
"Jesus called them and said: 'You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and that the great ones hold them under their power. It will not be so among you. Instead, whoever wants to be great among you shall be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you shall be your slave. This is how the Son of Man came, not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.'"
And indeed, Jesus ended his ministry by drinking that cup of God's wrath entirely and unjustly, in the place of his people. Hanged on the wood as the ultimate act of service toward his own.
Jesus takes the throne
Through this cross we are given the solution to the problem: through this cross it is Jesus who takes the supreme throne, and it is to him that all things are subjected. It is his perfect reign that will be applied, and that, for its part, glorifies God. From his first coming we have been able to watch his kingdom grow and grow, and at his return Jesus will display his reign perfectly, for eternity. Great, problem solved! But it does not stop there, it goes even further. In his grace, Jesus chooses to share his reign with those who overcome, with his people, as Daniel 7, Luke 22 and of course Revelation 2, 3 and 22 tell us, among many others. How can that be? We do not know how to reign in the image of God; the image of God in us is completely twisted. And yet even there, through the reconciliation that Jesus offers us, he also sends us his Spirit, who transforms us and who brings to birth in us a new man, now capable of striving toward his image.
And one day, when we join our creator, we will then be perfectly capable of reigning in the image of God, fully filling the role for which God created man. In this way we will glorify him for eternity through the reign of Jesus Christ, which he, the King of kings, will share with us.
And knowing all of this should produce something in us. Not the pride of such a privilege, of having been chosen for such a destiny, but rather praise in the mouths of the children that we are: "LORD, our Lord, how magnificent your name is over all the earth!"
Conclusion
To finish: as you have understood, this psalm highlights several aspects of the beauty, the power and the glory of God.
His name is magnificent because it is his strength that makes the weak victorious.
He is magnificent to the point that the infant praises him for it.
He is magnificent in his power, in his greatness, and in his beauty visible in the sky.
He is magnificent because he does not keep the enjoyment of his creation for himself, but creates man in order to share it with him.
He is magnificent because even when man fails, and insults such a generous creator, he also plans a way to restore him and to enable him to fulfill his role.
So when we meditate on this psalm, I hope that what naturally rises up in us is wonder toward God! Let us do our very best to remember these things, so that we can always say "WOW!" So that we can always rejoice in being his children, and grasp what is at stake in our role. Our role, after all, is to contribute in our own turn to magnifying his name wherever he places us!
But also, when we meditate on this psalm, I hope that what rises up in us is humility as well, a heightened awareness of our dependence on God. Let us lower ourselves like children; that is what God wants! Jesus tells us in Matthew 18:3: "Truly I assure you: if you do not change and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven."
We must be like children, aware that we are completely powerless and dependent on God for absolutely every aspect of our life. And may that dependence drive us to plead for his help. Let us pray without ceasing that he would help us to fulfill such a great role, and that he would transform us deeply, in small things as in great ones, so that we resemble him more each day.