Psalm 8
"0 Lord, our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth, who have set Your glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have ordained strength, because of Your enemies, that You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels, and You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands: You have put all things under his feet.
All sheep and oxen—even the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea that pass through the paths of the sea.
0 Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth!"

It is time to praise our God, and the Psalm before us will assist us in doing just that!
It is a psalm of praise and thanksgiving and its primary idea is the condescending love and goodness of God toward man. That God, who has made the heavens, and set His glory on them, should have a regard for man, and "visit him," and not only so, but give him so lofty a position, so exalted a destiny...is a thought that is well-nigh overwhelming!
The psalmist, filled with the thought, can do no less than pour out his feelings of love and gratitude in song. The psalmist seeks to give to God the glory due to His name.
David, the author of our psalm, had slain the giant Goliath in the valley of Elah.
Soon afterward he was appointed court musician and given the task of trying to charm the king out of his dark moods with the music of his harp.
It was probably about this time that David

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wrote this psalm. The tradition that refers it to Goliath is as old as the Targum. There it is paraphrased: "Concerning the death of the man who went forth between the camps."
Scholars tell us that this is a direct reference to the story of David and Goliath for in 1 Samuel 17:4 the Hebrew word for champion is "the man of the space between the camps"--that dread no-man's land between Israel and the Philistines dominated by Goliath of Gath.
Some scholars suggest that this Psalm 8 is prophetic. John Phillips is his commentary writes: "This psalm is prophetic and anticipates the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ at the end of the age. The world will have found itself another champion, the beast, and Israel will be powerless before him. He will be the one who "stands between the camps" to defy God and fight His people. But great David's greater Son will come, "the stone cut without hands," and He will fight against that blasphemous and defiant champion. Down he will go! It will all be over in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, and Satan's strong man will be no more."
This psalm, written by David, the champion of champions, was perhaps sung before King Saul to subdue the demon that flared from his jealous heart.
C. S. Lewis called Psalm 8 a "short, exquisite lyric." Derek Kidner, in his excellent commentary says: "This psalm is an unsurpassed example of what a hymn should be, celebrating as it does the glory and grace of God, rehearsing who He is and what He has done, and relating us and our world to Him, all with a masterly economy of words, and in a spirit of mingled joy and awe. The range of thought takes us not only 'above the heavens' and back to the beginning, but as the New Testament points out, on to the very end."
The psalm's theme is the greatness of God and the place of man within God's universe. The most striking feature of Psalm 8--and its dominant theme, if we count verses--is its description of man and his place in the created order. But the psalm does not begin by talking about man. It begins with a celebration of the surpassing majesty of God, and

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this places men and women within a cosmic framework. It is a way of saying from the outset that we will never understand human beings unless we see them as God's creatures and recognize that they have special responsibilities to their Creator.
One responsibility is to praise God, of course, which is what David does. Indeed, he does it grandly, beginning the psalm with two great names for God: JEHOVAH (Yahweh) and ADONAI (Lord), literally "0 Jehovah, our ADONAI. As David is here the mouthpiece of humanity, praising God for mercies common to all men, he uses the plural pronoun instead of the singular one. In later, Judaism, the divine name was held to be so sacred that the title was always used in place of the name, but here, the name is enunciated, and then immediately the psalmist goes on to praise the majesty of the "name."
The word "name" here represents not only God, but also God's revelation of Himself, and it is critical to an understanding of the theme of revelation in the psalm as a whole. Thus God's "name" and God's "majesty" are poetically synonymous, for the majesty of both God's person and creation are revealed to mankind in the divine name and all that it implies. The majestic name of God both permeates the earth and transcends the heavens, thus evoking the words of mortal praise. "0 Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!"
ADONAI means properly master, Lord, ruler, owner, and is such a title as is given to an owner of land or of slaves, to kings, or to rulers, and is applied to God as being the ruler or governor of the universe. The meaning here in our psalm is that the psalmist acknowledged JEHOVAH to be the rightful ruler, king, or master of himself, and of all others. He comes before Him with the feeling that Jehovah is universal ruler--the king and proprietor of all things!
HOW EXCELLENT! This word suggests the thought of the...BEYONDNESS OF GOD. "The high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity" (Isa. 57:15). "Thou art a God that hidest thyself" (Isaiah 45:15). "Thou thoughtest I was altogether such a one as thyself"(Psalm 50:21)

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"The Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (James 1:17). HOW SURPASSING ALL ELSE THAT IS, THOU ART!
David maintains that JEHOVAH is his God and He is so majestic and His glory so great that the latter is "above the heavens." This means, as David's son Solomon would say later in his great prayer at the dedication of the temple: "The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built" (1 Kings 8:27). The reason the creation, wonderful as it is, cannot exhaust the glory of God is that God is its maker. So altogether creation expresses His glory, revealing His existence, wisdom, and great power, as well as other attributes, it is only a partial revelation of the surpassingly greater God who stands behind it. If God has set His glory above the heavens, it is certain that nothing under the heavens can praise Him adequately.
HOW EXCELLENT IS THY NAME IN ALL THE EARTH!
The works of creation and providence proclaim that there is an infinite Being, the Fountain of all being, power, and perfection, the sovereign Ruler, powerful Protector, and bountiful Benefactor of all the creatures. How great is His name in all the earth! "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--His eternal power, and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse" (Romans 1:20).
0 LORD, OUR LORD! Let us not forget the possessive pronoun OUR...so obligatory for religion--and in this connection so awesome in the comfort it provides. The God who is the BEYOND is also OUR GOD--a thought that comes to its power and experience through faith in Jesus Christ our Saviour! My Lord! My God! My Saviour, My King!
Verse 2 of our psalm reads: "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies; that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger."
Psalm 8 is quoted a number of times in the New Testament, on one occasion by Jesus. He had entered Jerusalem in triumph on what we call Palm Sunday. While He was in the temple

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area, healing the blind and lame who came to Him, the children who had observed the triumphal entry continued to praise Him, crying, "Hosanna to the Son of David," This made the chief priests and teachers of the law indignant. But Jesus replied, referring to Psalm 8, "Have you never read, 'From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise?’" (Matt. 21:16). If these leaders of the people had been indignant before, they must have become very angry by now! For by identifying the praise of the children of Jerusalem with Psalm 8, Jesus not only validated their words, showing them to be proper. (He was indeed, the "son of David," the Messiah.) He also interpreted their praise as praise not of a mere man, which a mere "son of David" would be, but of God, since the psalm says that God has ordained praise for Himself from children's lips!
Jesus also placed the scribes and teachers, who resisted His claims to be the unique Son of God, in the category of "the foe and the avenger," thereby identifying them as God's enemies!
A cynic once said, "God is on the side of the big battalions." That is not so! God does not need armies at all. All God needs is a babe! To humble mighty Pharaoh’s empire, God did not summon Assyria or mobilize Macedonia. He sent a baby to a Hebrew home. The babe was hidden among the bulrushes and was found by Pharaoh’s daughter...and in the fullness of time, Moses humbled Egypt to the dust!
Our psalm continues: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained."
When the psalmist thinks of the glory of God exceeding the greatness of creation, he is struck with how small man is by comparison.
The psalmist has before his eyes the heavens as they appear by night. He is struck with the awful magnificence of the wide extended firmament adorned by the moon walking in the brightness, and a multitude of shining orbs, differing from each other in magnitude and splendor. And when, from surveying the beauty of heaven with its glories, he turns to take a view of the creature man, he is still

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more affected by the mercy than he had been by the majesty of the Lord! Far less wonderful is it that God should make such a world, should be mindful of man in his fallen state, and should visit human nature with His salvation. How wonderful! God is more interested in PEOPLE than He is in PLANETS, more interested is US than He is in the UNIVERSE! Two words for man are used here in our Psalm. "What is MAN...the word used means "mortal man"...man in his weakness. God is mindful of us in our weakness. The other word for man is in this same verse: "And the son of man, that Thou visited him. "In the Hebrew, there is no article...THE...it is simply "son of man." The word used is ADAMAH which means DUST, identifying man as the son of Adam. In the New Testament the expression changes. It is no longer "son of man," now it is THE SON OF MAN. Without the article the expression refers to a mere human being...but with the article it refers to Christ as the second Man, the last Adam.
The God who visited man occasionally in the Old Testament is now revealed as the Son of Man, the rightful Heir to Adam's forfeited estates, and successor to the dominion of the earth. His name is Jesus, and thus we have a direct prophecy of the coming of Jesus Christ to Bethlehem two thousand years ago as the Savior of the world! "God, who at various times and in various ways, spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds: who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high" (Hebrews 1:1-3).
His name is IMMANUEL...GOD WITH US! Ah! what a visit!
Verse 5 in our Psalm reads: "For You made him a little lower than the angels, and You have crowned him with glory and honor." Not only does God think of us and care for us, which is what verse 4 asserts, He has also crowned us with "glory and honor." This means that He has given human beings, mere specks in this vast universe, a significance and honor above everything else He created!

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David makes this point in two striking ways.
First, he uses the word GLORY, which he first used of God, of mere man. Verse 1 says, "You have set YOUR GLORY above the heavens". This is a glory that surpasses even the great and overwhelming glory of the heavens. But then in verse 5 he says, speaking of men and women, "You...crowned him with glory and honor. This is an effective way of identifying man with God and of saying that he has been made in God's image, reflecting God's glory in a way other parts of the creation do not. The psalmist in considering how man has been favored by God, goes back in thought to his creation, and remembers the words of Genesis 1:26-27: "Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness...So God created man in His own image in the image of God created He him."
"A little lower than the angels" is God's estimate of the human race. We are not "a little higher than the beasts"; we are a "little lower than the angels." Charles Darwin described man as "the most efficient animal ever to emerge on earth." What a degrading view of man!
Man is not just an efficient animal; he was made by an act of God, and made in the image and likeness of God. When the Son of God stepped off the throne of the universe to enter into human life He did not become "an efficient animal," He became a man! "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men" (Philippians 2:5-7).
"But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone." (Hebrews 2:9).
Nothing so exalted our race as the Son of God inserting Himself into it by His incarnation, and so becoming the Son of man.
THOU HAS CROWNED HIM WITH GLORY AND HONOR.
Man can think God's thoughts after Him, and rejoice in that in which God rejoices. The Creator placed the royal crown on man's head when He made him potentially Christlike.

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Verses 6,7, and 8: "You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands: You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen--even the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea that pass through the paths of the seas."
This dominion was originally given to man at his creation, and it still remains (though not so absolute and entire as this), for nothing is in itself more remarkable than the dominion which man, by nature so feeble, exercises over the inferior creation. It is impossible to account for this in any other way than as it is accounted for in the Bible, by the supposition that it was originally conceded to man by his Creator. Man's power over the lower creation is not only a fact, but it gives him high moral responsibility. If the psalm had been written in this century, the writer would not have stopped there. Indeed, it is doubtful if he would even have mentioned sheep and oxen and fish. The dominion which would have occupied his mind would have been that which man has achieved over the forces of nature, as he goes on to discover God's secrets and to find that he is not fit to rule over them. Today man's dominion is demonstrated in his ability to subjugate the forces of nature...the atom smashers have unleashed and harnessed the energy of the universe. The code breakers have unraveled the mysteries of DNA and RNA. Psychologists have explored the workings of the brain. The marks of man's genius are everywhere despite the fall.
God has crowned man with glory and honor and dominion.
But it is the majesty and glory of God that thrills the heart of the psalmist.
0 LORD OUR LORD, HOW EXCELLENT IS THY NAME IN ALL THE EARTH. "Oh clap your hands, all you people! Shout to God with the voice of triumph! For the Lord Most High is AWESOME, He is a great King over all the earth. God reigns over the nations; God sits on His Holy throne...He is greatly exalted." (Psalm 47)
"I will extol You, my God, 0 King; and I will bless Your name for ever and ever, every day I will bless You, and I will praise Your name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised." (Psalm 145)