Several years ago, I wrote an article for Gemini, which is the web magazine for the Minnesota Astronomical Society, entitled, Our Science and Religion in Conflict. My opening paragraph reads as follows, the beasts of the fields care little about sunsets and night skies. In reality, only humans, so far as I know, can hold the natural world with such rapt attention. My guess is that most of us are drawn to observing, I am speaking to fellow astronomical observers as myself, that most of us are drawn to observing the heavens from a sense of wonder and amazement for the sheer beauty we observe and transcendence we experience. Whether chasing an eclipse, photographing the stars, or letting photons from distant galaxies tickle the eye, We tend to be hopeless romantics when it comes to the night sky. In my mind, it is not our opposing thumb or upright gate that sets us apart from the beasts, but rather our ability to contemplate our world, to observe, to imagine, to enjoy, to understand." And the article went on from there. It's this psalm that has inspired my love for the natural world. This psalm and the love that my father infused in my life as an outdoorsman. And so I have always had a love of nature and the night sky and the like. The psalm begins, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. And because nature, the created world, leads me to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus, I am drawn to it. Psalms are prayers and meditations which range between two poles, joy and sorrow. and everything in between, thus our forefathers called them the anatomy of all parts of the soul. Thus there are two basic types of Psalms that scholars have recognized, hymns of praise and laments of sorrow and tears. Psalms 3-7, which I've already had the opportunity to visit in my post-retirement days, are laments. Prayers of David in the midst of distress and grief. Psalm 8 is perhaps the Psalter's classic hymn of praise. It's a song of jubilant celebration and I've been waiting to get to it. It's a refreshing change from the doldrums of the previous five Psalms where David is seeking forgiveness for his sins, deliverance from his enemies, and reorientation to his broken and perplexing world. It's a psalmic meditation on creation, the creation account in Genesis chapter 1. That's why I felt compelled to read that along with this. Often overlooked when we look at the Psalms is this superscription, these phrases that often do not get read with a psalm, but by right should be because it's part of the inspired text of God's word. The superscription, these little notes at the top that are included in many, maybe most, but not all psalms, this one tells us of the recipient. we read that it is to the choir master. Now that, I think, is important. This is an individual psalm. It is written in the first person pronoun, I, when I look at the heavens. But then the psalm is handed off to the choir master. So what's the choir master to do it? I imagine he is to put it in form and music for the congregation to sing. So they're intended to be sung by God's people. Yes, even today. And if you are in the tradition of singing psalms, more power to you. It's a wonderful thing. I've often said to my psalm-speaking or exclusive psalm-seeking brothers, I recognize if I just sang the psalms for the rest of my life and none of the hymns I've come to love, I wouldn't be at any loss. And although I love the hymns in the faith as well. So the recipient, the choir master, there are often liturgical notes, and this one, like most of them, tend to be confusing, according to the Gitteth. What's that? Well, we don't know. But there are guesses. It kind of comes from a word that means vintage and it is often thought to be associated with the Feast of Tabernacles. So maybe it was a song that was kind of a holiday song. Perhaps. It's also recognized that the Ark of the Covenant journeyed to Jerusalem after it was captured by the Philistines from the city of Gath. And the Gittites, of course, held on to it for a period of time before it was returned. You can read about that in 2 Samuel 6. And maybe it's speaking of the reference to the Gittites' house, where it was in custody for a period of time before it returned to Jerusalem. Or maybe it's just a musical tune. Many think that as well. According to the tune, Gitteth, which has been lost to us today, perhaps a tune that originated in Gath from David's wanderings among those who would become his enemies. But he had nowhere else to go, being chased by Saul. So a lot of times these superscriptions, they add interest, but they also raise questions that are probably for the most part unanswerable. But they tell us the author, a song of David. David has written at least half the Psalms in the Psalter and so we often just credit the Psalms to David. There were other authors and there are many Psalms that are written that give no authorship to it and perhaps they were written by David, most likely they were. But we know him to be the sweet singer of Israel. And so we have here a Psalm of David. And it serves as a kind of crescendo at the end of the previous five Psalms of lament that David is singing and praying. Psalm 3 is when he was defeated by his son Absalom and driven from his city. And we have the context of that and perhaps that context continues for a time. The last Psalm, Psalm 7, I think really comes from David's Judean wandering days when he's hiding from Saul. But we don't know the context of all of them. But there are plenty of times in David's life where it makes very clear sense that David is in bad straits and is singing psalms of lament. Well, the majesty of the Creator is revealed in his creation. And that's what this psalm is about. That's what the Bible is about in a very real sense. and particularly in creation's crown. The majesty of the creator is revealed in his creation and particularly in creation's crown. That's you and me. To be sure, Psalm 8 is this meditation on the creation account, but it doesn't merely look back in reflection. to Genesis 1. But it looks forward in the New Testament to the perfect man, the incarnate Son of God, the one in whom we live and move and have our being, the one in whom we are united and therefore share in His death, His burial, and His resurrection. So it looks not only back in reflection but it also looks forward in anticipation to the perfect man who would reveal the fullness of the Lord's supreme glory in the face of Jesus Christ. And that is reason enough to fall in love with this psalm. If you are going to memorize some of the psalms This should be on one of your top 10 list. So it speaks of divine majesty. It speaks of human dignity. And then it revisits the divine majesty once again. Verse 1. And two, oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. You've set your glory above the heavens out of the mouths of babes and infants. You have established strength because of your foes to still the enemy and the avenger. This evocative expression has several parts that are worthy of notice and thinking about. First, the name LORD in all capital letters, and lying behind that is the respect the Jewish people showed for misuse of the name of the Lord. But when we see LORD in all capital letters, we know the proper name of God is standing there, Yahweh or Jehovah in the more earlier way of pronouncing it. And so we see a name that is mentioned and who is being spoken of, who is being praised and recognized is Yahweh himself. Second, there is a title. The title of Yahweh, he is called Lord. Lord is akin to king and sovereign and the one who rules over all. He is the king of kings and Lord of lords that he is called repeatedly throughout scripture. So in a simple vocative expression of joy and worship, our Lord, our Lord. How majestic is your name in all the earth. Third, there is a superlative. You have set your glory above the heavens. The heavens are, this is my love for the night sky, the heavens are a kind of doorway into seeing the glory of God. It's like the divine signature. Now over the, particularly beginning of the last century, the understanding of the universe has exploded exponentially and gone beyond measure. And what I found quite interesting is as we learn more about the vastness of the universe, God doesn't get replaced by it. He grows in our imagination and our understanding with it. He is big enough to encompass it all. It's not like we worship the little God and when the universe got bigger, He was obsolete. When we see how vast the universe is, we realize how vast God is and He spoke of those things from the very beginning. And our view of God enlarges. His glory is set above the heavens. We have a superlative. It was this superlative God before whom Isaiah met in the temple and could only fall at his feet and cry, woe is me. For I'm undone, I'm a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips because I've gotten a glimpse of the Lord of glory and His holiness. Fourth, there is a testimony, a testimony that comes from the babes and the infants. The little ones testify by their very existence The mystery of childbirth, the development of little ones, the joy that they bring to a family is a microcosm of the joy of new life in Christ that's brought to the assembly of God's people. Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes. Jesus, of course, perhaps had this psalm in mind when he spoke of the preciousness of the little ones that would be drawn to him as disciples would have them. They're a nuisance. Send them away, Jesus. Don't let the little ones come to me and forbid them not. For as such is the kingdom of heaven. And fifth, there's a purpose. There's a purpose in this expression of majesty to still the enemy and the avenger, that their mouths would be shut, that they would see the testimony of the living God. The enemies of David are a persistent theme in the Psalms. I've become aware of this just as I've gotten this far and have kind of made notes of all the different places where the enemies of the people of God, not just David, but the people of God. Jesus would later say, the son of David, would say that if the world hates you, keep in mind it hated me first. There's nothing new here. David says, how many of my foes in Psalm 3? Many are rising against me, and they are saying of my soul, there is no salvation for him and God. Very modern lie that we see in many universities today. There is no God, there's no salvation there, you have to save yourself, that's a lie. That comes from the mouth of an enemy. That's just one example. Psalm 7, which I considered last week, called the enemies, my pursuers. Save me from all my pursuers. There are people that seem bent on troubling the people of God for their hatred of Christ and the hope that is in Him. And yet, in this simple expression, we have an explosion of worship And that explosion of worship results from seeing the creation. God is greater than all who oppose him. And then there's human dignity. And we read this in verse three, when I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, there's my inspiration. What is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? Now human nature has rightly been described in terms of its dignity and its depravity. We know that humankind originally was created in dignity as the crown of God's creation. We know that we were created, we don't say perfect, Reformed people never say perfect, but innocent, without sin, with the ability to choose right or wrong, but without the promptings of sin nature or the outside inducements to sin till the serpent came into the garden. So we were created in innocence. We are created with human dignity. Of all of creation, the glorious heavens, the galaxies, the black holes, the moon and the stars which he set in place, there's nothing like this, nothing in the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom, nothing that compares to those whom he made in his image. in true righteousness and holiness and called to have dominion over the creatures. And yet we know about the fall, how disobedience soon reigned and Adam in his innocence embraced the lies of the serpent and he and his wife would be as gods knowing good and evil. and they soon discover that evil enveloped them. And we are, unfortunately, the benefactors or the recipients of that. And so it's right to think in terms of human nature as described in its dignity and depravity, but we reform people who so much emphasize, and rightly so, total depravity. Let us not forget that every human being in this world is nevertheless created with a dignity by virtue of their being in the image of God. It's a ruined image, but it's an image. It's like you were to take the most expensive car in the world. I mean, when I was young, it was the Cadillac. So what is it today? A Jaguar or something. An expensive car in the world. Run it right into a tree at 100 miles an hour. It will cease to function almost immediately for the way it was intended. But it still remains a Cadillac. It still remains, you still have to pay off the bill too, so the worth is still there, you see. But its function is destroyed, its image, its beauty is obliterated to one degree or another depending on how it glanced off the tree. Human nature is much like that. And so there is dignity. Let's never forget that as we engage with our friends over pressing issues of the day. Let us treat them with the dignity of being made in the image of God, even if they do not confess the God in whom they were created. Let us be bigger than the political discussions of our day and show the way forward for a world that is lost in how to handle disagreements. Of all creation, people alone were created in the image of God. Not the snails, not the fish, not the birds, not the sequoias, not the elephants. People were created in God's image. And this is an idea, incidentally, that is found only in the Bible, only in the Judeo-Christian faith, only. You're not finding it in any other world religion. You will not find it in animism. You will not find this idea of human beings created in the image of God in any philosophy that is out there. It is unique to the Christian faith. And where the gospel advances, human dignity rises, and where the gospel recedes, human dignity collapses. And though this image has been destroyed by the fall and thus ruined, it's not, as I said, obliterated. And the following two points are what he draws out, those same two points that are drawn out in the creation account, which is a testimony of God's continuing regard for the crown of his creation. When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings, read angels or spirits, and you crowned him with glory and honor. Imagine that. Angels are not the crown of God's creation. They are, you might say, a higher level of beings, and they fell as well before the angels of time, but Jesus didn't die for them. There is no hope for redemption for fallen angels, but there is hope of redemption for people. There is hope of redemption in a general sense for the world that the Lord will remake in due course. But he didn't come to die for the animals and the trees. Jesus came for his people to save his people from their sins. That's remarkable. That speaks more than anything of the dignity of human life and human beings. This is really the motive behind my love for the night sky. Observing the heavens, the moon, the stars. You may feel small, and we do feel small. I feel small whenever I'm under my telescope on the night sky's canopy. And all of my problems feel small too. Not because I'm worshiping nature, but because I'm worshiping nature's God. And anytime I can get a glimpse of him through the book of creation as well as the book of revelation, my life comes into order. We feel small and our problems seem small. Humans are special. They are the crown of God's creation. If not, they are not the apex of God's creation. We were made a little lower than the heavenly beings. But we alone were crowned with glory and honor. These are marvels. The heavens are marvels. But the greatest marvel of all is the fact that I can marvel at all. that the animals don't. The deer that come out and forage in my backyard, they don't marvel. The cranes that are digging grubs in my backyard, they don't marvel. Their heads are always downward. But we marvel. We pause. We stop. We look up. We waste time on worship leader called it a royal waste of time when we worship the Lord and I say amen to that. Also human dignity is testified by the dominion over creation. Verses 6-8, you've given him Humankind dominion over the works of your hands and you have put all things under his feet all sheep and oxen also the beasts of the field and birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea and whatever passes along the paths of the sea. We need to do more thinking in the area of conservation and care for the earth. Now I'm not an environmentalist in the sense, in fact I don't like that term because it always comes with earth worship in mind. We don't worship the earth. The earth is like us, it's part of God's created realm. There's God the creator and then there's the creation. And the earth, us, we're all part of that. But we've been given care over it, we've given a stewardship over it. It's not ours to race, to waste, it's not ours to misuse. A biblical conservation needs to be thought hard about. I don't know if we've ever, some are thinking about it, but maybe not as much as we should. We should be on the forefront of the movement of care for what God has given us. resources are limited. They're finite. And we've seen time and again where we have come up to the very edge of extinguishing wonderful aspects of nature because we've been driven by other motives. We have to find that balance. We have to find that ability. And I would say it's grounded in this. We have something the world doesn't have. The world is concerned with the environment but we have a reason for being concerned with it and that's the glory of God. Dominion over the creation and you've given that dominion to us. Consider this is what we are. We are stewards and we alone can give rapt attention to natural beauty. I marvel that I can marvel at these things. That's because I'm created in the image of God. And yet this psalm is really not about us, is it? It hints at yet an entirely different focus. And it takes us back to what the psalm is really about. Divine majesty revisited. that this verse serves, verse 8 or verse 9, serves as a kind of bookend. If we see everything in between, there's bookends on the end. And whenever something is mentioned twice in the Bible, that means it's important, take notice. Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. Verse one, verse nine. Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. This is the bookends on which everything else is included. The excellence and the glory of God's name. That is what we are about. Now, old Palmer Robinson, whose name you may recognize, wonderful expositor of the Word of God, treated this psalm, calling it the measure of a man. And he asks, is man devil-like or God-like? Is he mortal or immortal? Is he victor or vanquished? And now, the way he treated these subjects, I certainly would agree entirely. But I was hoping, when he gave these comments, that he would give more attention to the glory of God. Now, he certainly has, don't get me wrong, old Palmer Robinson is a good guy. But I would say that these bookends direct us not to the measure of a man, but it's a measure of a man as he stands before the glory of God, in which sense we are pretty minuscule. In the end, the psalm's theme is not about us, but the psalm, it's about God and our relation to him and his creation. God is all majestic and excellent. We are a little lower than the angels, and they aren't very big in his eyes. God is worthy of our worship, and though we are crowned with glory and honor, we are nevertheless still creatures, and we are part of that cacophony of praise, praising his holy name. Derek Kidner says the question what is man is picked up in three other places in the Old Testament and the answer of the psalm is expounded upon in the New as carrying out implications which only the incarnation that is the death and the reign of Christ are big enough to satisfy. When we read this Psalm, we not only are called to look back in reflection upon the creation account, But we are invited to look forward in anticipation to think about the perfect man who was incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary and came and lived and died and was buried and rose again and is coming again with life and liberty for those who believe in him. I will end by taking you to Hebrews chapter 2 where this remarkable New Testament commentary gives us the anticipated focus. Hebrews chapter 2 verse 5 through 9. For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere, now it's not that he didn't know where, but they had no reference system back then. What is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you care for him? Psalm 8. You made him a little lower than the angels. You have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet. Now we do all of that poorly, do we not? But there is a perfect man, the second Adam, the representative head of all of us, the Lord Jesus, who is incarnate and walked among us that we might see his glory this one in whom we are united by faith. Hebrews author says, now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside of his control. At present, we do not see everything in subjection to him, but we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus. The word of God sees Jesus. and Psalm 8, and so must we. Crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. That, my friends, is the gospel. What a remarkable commentary on this psalm. Reardon says Christ is the archetype of man bearing all of humanity in himself. To be sure it is only our relationship to this Jesus that will ultimately determine the dignity to which we aspire. Human dignity is being restored. in Jesus for those who rest in Him. Amen? Amen. Our Heavenly Father, we pray that you would bless us with these words we think of what it is to be human. Scriptures give us much to think about, but when we realize humanity is most emblematized in the incarnation of Christ and its purpose is seen in the death and resurrection of our Savior and that we are part of that, we pray the Lord that you would bless and keep us in your