Psalm 8: Looking Up

http://kickinkaren.blogspot.com/2011/04/psalm-8.html

I love this depiction of Psalm 8 that Karen did.  Simple yet so creative.  Psalm 8 is a happy psalm.  Derek Kidner said, "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 in a spirit mingled of joy and awe."  

This is a description of man and his place in created order.  You can't fully understand the human race unless you see them as God's creatures and recognize that they have special responsibilities to their Creator...we are NOT animals!!  We are to praise God grandly.  He is absolutely amazing.  Just take a look around.  Step outside, fill your lungs with air, feel the warm of the sun shining on your skin.  All of these are gifts to be praised.

But what is man?  He is an insignificant piece in the vast framework of creation.  Man is teeny tiny small in the cosmic setting compared to God's exceeding greatness.

We went to a Chris Tomlin tour a few years back and Louis Giglio shared about the greatness of our God in the cosmos.  I will never forget these slides of space.
Verse 5 says He has crowned us with glory and honor.  God has given us mere specks in this enormous universe a significance and honor above everything else He created.  We are made in the very image of the Creator himself, we are to reflect His glory in a way other parts of the creation can not.  He has made us to rule over creation.
Theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote, "Psalm 8 places man midway between the angels, which are above him, and the beasts which are below.  Man is a spirit/body being.  Angels have spirits but no bodies, animals have bodies but no spirits.  Man, however, has both spirit and body and so comes between the two.  We are to look up to God since we are a little lower than the angels.  Notice scripture doesn't say to look down to the beasts.  Look up, not look down.  The sad thing is some people have turned their back on God and not looking upwards, which is their privilege and duty, they actually look downward to the beasts and so become increasingly like them.
In the Old Testament there is a story in Daniel about a King that turned his back on God.  ³⁰ The king spoke, saying, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for a royal dwelling by my mighty power and for the honor of my majesty?”  This is secular humanism, describing creation as of man, by man, and for man's glory.  The words fresh from the King's lips the next verse states, "³¹ While the word was still in the king’s mouth, a voice fell from heaven: “King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: the kingdom has departed from you! ³² And they shall drive you from men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. They shall make you eat grass like oxen; and seven times shall pass over you, until you know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomever He chooses.”  The king became insane.  It is insanity to take the glory due God for oneself.  King Neb was driven out to live with and behave like the wild animals. 

This is what evolution is all about.  Eliminate God and the we are only slightly advanced beasts, according to this theory that yells so loudly.  We behave like them, and even worse sometimes.  

Hebrews 2:7-8 says, 
"You have made him a little lower than the angels;
You have crowned him with glory and honor,^[a]
And set him over the works of Your hands.
⁸ You have put all things in subjection under his feet.”^[b]

God sends his own son to save us from our willful ignorance and rebellion and to fulfill Psalm 8 as we have not and can not.  The apostle Paul applies it to Jesus saying that he was made a little lower than the angels (in order to die for us) and that as a result, the Father has, "Crowned him with glory and honor and put everything under his feet."  In putting everything under Him, God left nothing that is not subject to him.

Hebrews 2:9, 3:1 says "We see Jesus...now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death...fix your thoughts on Jesus."  What happens when we do?  At this juncture we are looking up again-by the grace of God- and the grace of God, which has saved us and redirected our affections, now begins the conforming of us to His likeness.

We are the apple of His eye!
Coram Deo,
E.W.