The Greatness of God
Summer in the Psalms • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 7 viewsPsalm 8 teaches us to have the proper perspective of ourselves and the world.
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The Greatness of God
Psalm 8
For the choir director; on the Gittith. A Psalm of David.
1 O Lord, our Lord,
How majestic is Your name in all the earth,
Who have displayed Your splendor above the heavens!
2 From the mouth of infants and nursing babes You have established strength
Because of Your adversaries,
To make the enemy and the revengeful cease.
3 When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained;
4 What is man that You take thought of him,
And the son of man that You care for him?
5 Yet You have made him a little lower than God,
And You crown him with glory and majesty!
6 You make him to rule over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
7 All sheep and oxen,
And also the beasts of the field,
8 The birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea,
Whatever passes through the paths of the seas.
9 O Lord, our Lord,
How majestic is Your name in all the earth! (pray)
Do you remember being a child and laying on your back in the middle of a field, starring up into the sky in amazement of how big and incredible the world is?
And in that same moment realizing how incredibly small and insignificant you were compared to it all. At that moment the world seemed like this huge magical place where anything was possible.
Then something happens; we begin to grow up, the innocence is gone. We don’t see the world as a big place anymore, but we begin to see ourselves as big and the world as small. Some people will begin to think that it all revolves around them.
Psalm 8 teaches us to have a proper perspective of ourselves and the world we live in. It is a Psalm of praise to God our Creator who is the architect of it all.
It’s a Psalm that teaches us about the greatness of God. The Creator of the world and to recognize His purpose for our lives.
When I read Psalm 8 It reminds me of the song; “How Great Thou Art,” because the words are so similar. It says, “O Lord my God. When I an awesome wonder. Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made. I see the stars; I hear the rolling thunder. Thy power throughout the universe displayed.”
But you can’t stop there, because the chorus goes on to teach us a great truth we find in this Psalm. It says, “Then sings my soul. My Savior God to Thee. How Great Thou Art. How Great Thou Art.”
As Christians are soul should sing because we have been redeemed. And we can once again look at this incredible world that God has Created with wonder and amazement. Knowing that even though it is not perfect, Christ is on the throne, and He is in control of it all, and one day it will all be put under His feet.
What we learn from this Psalm is that we are to worship God as the Creator of the world and recognize His purpose for our lives.
The first thing I want you to see in this passage is The Majestic Name of God, Vs. 1-2.
David begins by magnifying God, Vs. 1 says, “O Lord our Lord how majestic is your name in all the earth.”
Psalm 8 literally begins with a name and a tittle for God, because in Hebrew this would read O Yahweh our Adonai. Which means O God our ruler. O God our King.
He is emphasizing God’s ownership, His sovereign authority over us. Yahweh is the King. He is the ruler of Israel and David is praising Him for being the God who created everything he sees and for choosing them to be His people.
What David is saying here is; He is not only worthy to be praised by me, but He is worthy to be praised by all. He is our Lord; He is our God.
Later in Vs. 3 David will become personal and say, “When I look at the heavens, When I see the stars.” But here in Vs. 1 David says He is worthy to be recognized and seen and praised by all of us.
Why? Because “His name is majestic in all the earth.” In other words, His name is excellent, His name is glorious, His name is mighty and noble.
Throughout the scriptures a person’s name represented their character. It identified who they were and what they were about. Today, we name our children based on culture and popularity.
We choose names from books or television shows. But in the Bible, they were careful to choose a person’s name. Many times, a person’s name would be changed even as an adult so that it would more accurately reflect who they are.
So, when David talks about the majestic name of God, He is talking about the way that God reveals Himself to us, through that name. He is talking about the attributes of God, His character, His person His nature.
In fact, His name is synonymous with His glory. That’s what we find in the next line of Vs. 1 where it says, “Your splendor is above the heavens.” The word “splendor” here means Glory. So, the name of God is reflected by the glory of God.
That’s what Moses teaches us in Exodus 33, When Moses asked to see the glory of God, God proclaims His name to Moses.
Exodus 33:18-19 says, “Then Moses said, I pray you show me your glory, and God said, I myself will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim my name to you.”
So, here in Psalm 8 When David is talking about the name of God, He is talking about God revealing His glory, revealing his sovereignty. His majesty in all the earth.
That means He has put Himself on full display for all to see by everything He has made in the world.
What is interesting to me is David doesn’t call God “Elohim” here. Which means God all mighty, His name in Genesis that describes Him as the Creator of the world. But David calls Him Yahweh, which is His personal name.
It’s the covenant name of God. It’s the name God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai when He was sending him to the people He said, “You tell them I Am is sending you.”
This is important because what David is telling us here is this magnificent Creator of the universe is a personal God who wants to know us. He wants to have a covenant with us.
He wants to be our God and for us to be His people. God is not somewhere far away from us out in outer space somewhere like some distant landlord, but He is omnipresent. He is always with us.
He fills the earth with His presence and fills our hearts with His Spirit. David calls Him Yahweh, His covenant name, because He wants a relationship with us, He wants to redeem us.
We live in the age of grace. We live in a time after the cross when God has revealed Himself to us in His Son.
Jesus is Emanuel, God with us, and He made our approach to God even more personal. He taught us we can know God as “Our Father.”
In Matthew 6 The disciples come to Jesus and ask Him to teach them to pray, and Jesus says, “You are to pray like this, Our Father who art in heaven.”
Paul picks up on this same idea in Galatians 4:6 “Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!””
We are blessed to live on this side of the cross. God’s people living under the old covenant knew Him as Yahweh but today we know Him as our Father.
David says, His majesty and excellence can be seen in every corner of the earth. People of the world may not know the name of God, they may even reject it, but the beauty of His creation reveals Him to us.
There is a general revelation of God that speaks to the heart of man that there is a Creator.
Psalm 19 says, “the heavens declare the glory of God the skies proclaim the works of His hands.”
Romans 1:20 tells us we are without excuse if we don’t know Him because of everything we see, tells us He exists.
To look at the world around you and come away with the idea that it is all just some random chance would be liking walking along the beach and finding a castle in the sand and believing it was created by the waves.
God is not hidden from us. God is only hidden to those who refuse to see Him.
Not only is His name majestic in the earth but His splendor is set above the heavens. In other words, the greatness of God cannot be contained within the world. The heavens and the earth can only partially express how incredible God is.
His throne is set above all of it. He dwells with in the world and yet His glory transcends the world.
Let me ask you this do you notice the glory of God? It’s easy for us to get caught up in our world and only see the concrete, the cars, the computers, and phones, but have you noticed the glory of God lately?
Have you looked up and looked around at our world and seen the beauty of His testimony? The story of God is all around you if you are willing to see it.
Also, I want you to notice He reveals His strength in our weakness. Look at Vs. 2, “From the mouth of infants and nursing babes you have established strength because of your adversaries. To make the enemy and revengeful cease.”
David is teaching us that this all-powerful glorious God chooses to use the simplest, weakest, most insignificant people to prove how strong He is.
God chooses to overcome strength with weakness. He defeats His enemies with praise.
I am reminded of the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12. He had a thorn in his flesh something that tormented him, something he thought prevented him from serving God to his full capabilities, and he prayed three times for God to take it away and in the end God’s answer was no, “my grace is sufficient for you for in your weakness my strength is perfected.
That’s what we learn from this Psalm; it brings glory to God to use people who are imperfect, people who are uneducated, people who are rejected by the world. God will use them to do great things because it silences His enemies.
How majestic is His glory? How majestic is His name? The next thing I want you to see in this Psalm is God’s Concern for Man, Vs. 3-4.
“When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon, and the stars which You have ordained; what is man that you take thought of him, and the son of man that You care for him?”
At this moment I picture David sitting on a rock in his father’s field, shepherding his father’s flock at night, starring up into the sky and realizing just how small he is. Yet he realized he was important to God.
And the same thing is true in your life. Just like David cared for every one of the sheep in his father’s field and he wasn’t willing to lose any of them, God cares about us and doesn’t want us to be lost. There are no unimportant people to God.
David recognizes how amazing God’s creation is, the heavens, the moon, the stars, and he understands it is all the work of God.
This phrase, “the work of your fingers” is a metaphor. David is fully aware God is a Spirit, and God doesn’t create with fingers and hands, but with His Word.
He orders the earth into existence, and it answers in obedience. He places the stars in the sky by design to serve His purpose. All things are determined by Him and when David realizes this incredible fact the only logical expression can be humility, insignificance, and utter powerlessness.
What am I that you would think of me, who am I that you would care about me? That is a great question. That’s a question we all need to ask, because we can become so full of pride, we think the world revolves around us.
We think everyone cares about my opinion, everyone wants to see my pictures and read my posts. Vanity, vanity it’s all so shallow and meaningless.
We can become so full of pride we begin to think that God needs us. We are doing Him a favor by going to church and giving Him an hour of our time on a Sunday morning.
When the reality is; He is throwing us a life preserver as we tread water in the middle of the ocean. How arrogant would it be to pass on the life preserver and think we don’t need it? But that is what so many people do. They just don’t have time for God. They have more important things to do.
David recognized his insignificance, and he was humble, but he also recognized God’s compassion. God does consider us. He is mindful of us, and He does love us.
Think of this, we are less than a tiny dot on the face of the universe. Compared to God’s creation we are smaller than a grain of sand on a seashore.
Yet God loves us. With the technology we have today we can see galaxies that are beyond our reach. There are trillions and trillions of stars, and we would be just a speck on one of those stars, yet we have been chosen by God to know Him and to be known by Him.
David’s question is meant to put us in our place. It is meant to give us the proper perspective of ourselves. We were created for a purpose.
God has a plan for your life. Those physical things about you that you would love to change, have been uniquely designed by God specifically for you.
In fact, He loves us so much He sent His Son into the world to die for us so that we could be saved. God Himself stepped down from heaven into His creation so that He could rescue us from our sin and take us back to heaven with Him for all eternity.
Nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. God is concerned about man.
The next thing I want you to see in this Psalm is Mans Position Over God’s Creation. Vs. 5-8
David moves from thinking about God’s care for us personally to thinking about God’s confidence in us universally. What a great responsibility we have. We are the overseers of creation.
Vs. 5 says, “You have made him a little lower than God.” He is talking about mankind but there is a lot of controversy and differences of opinion about this verse. who man is lower than? Some translations read, “You made him lower than the angels,” And I actually like that better because the Hebrew word for God here means, “heavenly bodies.”
But the point that David is making is God has created man in His image and given him a position of authority and responsibility in the world. And because we are created in the image of God we are qualified to rule over the rest of creation.
As Christians we must accept responsibility as stewards of the earth. But we need to do it with a Biblical balance, with a biblical world view. There is extremist on both sides of the isles.
There are environmentalist who do not realize God has given us the earth to meet our needs, and then there are extremists who carelessly abuse the earth and it’s resources. We are to be good stewards with what God has given us.
Someone once said, “the earth that was created to be ruled by us has been raped by us instead.” I don’t know how true that is, but I know man is sinful by nature, and we do tend to abuse ourselves and the world we live in.
But we can praise God because Jesus came to redeem us from our sinful nature and one day, He will redeem all of creation as well, and will restore all that has been lost.
You see David’s description of our authority is also prophecy that is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. That’s what the author of the book of Hebrews teaches us.
Hebrews 2:6-9 says, “But one has testified somewhere, saying, “what is man that You remember Him? Or the Son of Man that You are concerned about him? You made him for a little while lower than the angels; You have crowned him with glory and honor, and have appointed him over the works of your hands; You have put all things in subjection under his feet.” “For in subjecting all things to him, He left nothing that was not subjected to Him. But now we do not yet see all things subjected to Him. But we do see Him who was made for a little while lower than the angels, namely Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone.”
The author of the book of Hebrews turns Psalm 8 into a Messianic Psalm pointing to Jesus and teaches us that when Jesus gave His life on the cross, He redeemed everything mankind and the earth as well, and He will one day restore our dominion over it, and by His side we will rule over it for eternity.
The final thing I want you to see in this Psalm is God’s Purpose for our Lives, Vs. 9.
God wants us to acknowledge Him as Lord and praise His name. David ends this Psalm the way it began in, “O Lord Our Lord how majestic is Your name in all the earth.”
God’s great purpose for creation and for us is laid out for us in this Psalm. The perfection that we once knew when we walked in the presence of God in the Garden of Eden, the glory and authority we are supposed to have, as rulers over the world, will be restored in Christ.
The New Testament completes the picture, and one day Christ will make all things new and will reign as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.
But is He your king? Is He your Lord? Because the only way Jesus can ever be our King and Lord is He must first become our Savior!!
We must first surrender our lives to Him. We cannot rule over the creation of the King that we do not allow to rule over us.
Ask Jesus to save you. Ask Him to forgive you. Ask Him to restore you and do it today. Don’t wait, we are watching as the chapter of this life ends. A new chapter of life only begins with Jesus.
