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A Meditation on Psalm 8
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
The eighth psalm is the first purely joyful psalm. The previous seven psalms have focused on lamentation (Psalms 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) or teaching wisdom (Psalms 1 and 2), but the eighth psalm is full of praise. Our God is King over all creation. His glory is above all other glories.
The psalmist showcases God’s glory through His created world. The psalmist brings out the whole host of God’s creation: the heavens, the moon and stars, the angels, sheep and oxen, the beasts of the field, the birds, the fish and all sea creatures. All testify to the greatness of their Creator.
But praising God as Creator is not the psalmist’s reason for trotting out the whole created order in Psalm 8. He uses Creation to make an argument about the nature of God’s glory, which he begins, “Out of the mouths of babies and infants you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.” The nature of God’s glory is such that He uses the weak and the humble, people of no account, to humble the strong and the arrogant. Babies are powerless, more powerless even than the poor, the widow, the orphan, or the foreigner. Babies are powerless, yet God can use even them to put a stop to violent men, and God is glorified in doing this.
The psalmist then extends this argument to the whole of mankind within the created order: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” Just as babies seem pitifully overmatched by a grown man, all of mankind is overmatched by Creation—even more so! Compared to the violence of the sea or the yawning vastness of space, man is nothing. He is less than an infant. And Creation will always humiliate man in this way. I am reminded of something that Herman Melville wrote in Moby Dick: “…however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make….”
“Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.” Who are we to be elevated to such a lofty position, a little lower than the angels? Who are we to have dominion over the created order? Yet we are, not because of our own glory, but because of the glory of God.
Just as God is glorified in establishing infants against violent men, so is He glorified in establishing man as lesser lords over His Creation. It is a natural argument for the nature of God, which ought to be self-evident, that “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Anyone looking at man’s place in the created order should be able to see that, for there is nothing more humble, more frail and powerless against his foe, than man when compared to Creation. Yet, despite the violence of the sea, man still travels on it. Despite the barren hostility of space, man has still traveled in it.
The psalmist cannot withhold his praise when he considers God’s glory in this way. The psalm begins and ends with the psalmist’s exclamation, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” The psalmist must declare the Lord’s fame. We should remember than the first exclamations of praise for God in the psalms are to praise Him because, as the Virgin Mary sings, “He has looked on the humble estate of His servant.”
