Redemption through the Son | Psalm 8
Brian Hedges | December 22, 2024
For the message today, we’re going to be in Psalm 8, if you want to turn there in your Bible. This is the concluding message in our Advent series “Songs of the Son: Advent in the Psalms.” For the last four weeks we’ve been looking at various psalms, and especially psalms that use the language of sonship that somehow connects us to Jesus Christ.
We began in Psalm 2, looking at the coronation of the Son and the reign and kingship of the Son and how that is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Then in the second week we were in Psalm 72, looking at the justice of the Son and how Christ has brought justice and righteousness to the world. Then, last week, Pastor Brad was preaching all about anticipation for the Son, and we were in Psalm 80, talking about waiting. That’s really what Advent is about, as we wait for the arrival of the Son and the arrival of salvation and the arrival of redemption.
Today is really all about redemption through the Son in Psalm 8. This is an important psalm; in many ways this is a wisdom psalm and a psalm of praise. It’s a psalm that reflects on the majesty of God revealed in creation. But the way this psalm is used in the New Testament also connects us to the themes of redemption. That will be clear when we look in Hebrews 2 here in a few moments.
Derek Kidner 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 in relating us and our world to him.”
We’re going to see that this morning as we work through this psalm together, Psalm 8. It’s just nine verses long. Let me begin by reading it. It says,
“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!”
This is God’s word.
I want you to notice three simple truths from this passage this morning. We could call these:
1. The Majesty of God
2. The Dignity of Humanity
3. The Mystery of Redemption
1. The Majesty of God
You can see this in both the beginning and the ending of the psalm. The psalm is framed in verse 1 and verse 9 with parallel statements: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” That frame is telling us the essential content of this psalm. It’s a psalm that extols the majesty of God, and it does so in both small ways and in great ways. I want you to see both of these things.
(1) First of all, in small ways. You see this in Psalm 8:2 in this kind of enigmatic statement about the mouths of babies and infants. Look at verse 2.
“Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.”
What in the world does that mean? I think we get a clue to the meaning in the New Testament, which quotes this verse in Matthew 21:16. It’s the scene when the Lord Jesus on Palm Sunday enters into Jerusalem, and he comes to the temple. As he’s entering into Jerusalem, the children are crying out, “Hosanna to the son of David!” The people, the priests especially, are indignant. The priests and scribes say to Jesus, “Do you hear what these are saying?”
Jesus, in response, quotes Psalm 8:2. He says, “Yes. Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?”
Jesus here is quoting from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which interprets this verse about God establishing strength through the mouths of babies and infants as strength through praise. So Jesus quotes it as, “You have prepared praise out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies.”
The meaning seems to be something like this, that the praise of God even in the mouths of the weakest and the smallest people—that is, the children and babes—God’s praise in their mouths is stronger than all the tumult of the enemies of God. God overcomes his enemies, and it’s seen in the praise out of the mouths of infants and the nursing babies. So the majesty of God, the praise of God is seen in the praise of the children.
(2) But then, in verse 3 we see also the majesty of God in the great things that he has made. In fact, this is the second half of verse 1: “You have set your glory above the heavens,” and then the thought is picked up in verse 3: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place…”
Of course, the heavens are the realm of the sun, the moon, and the stars. The sun’s not mentioned here because he’s probably reflecting on the nighttime sky. All you have to do is just look up at the sky on a cloudless night where you can see the magnitude and number of the stars. Here’s a picture that was taken in Bolivia that shows you the majesty of the starry heavens.
The psalmist says that “when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you have set in place, I’m asking, ‘What is man, that you are mindful of him?’” He is just in awe of the majesty of God when he thinks about the magnitude of all that God has made, and he calls this the work of God’s fingers.
You know, in our home we have many things that have been made in our family by my mom or by Holly’s mom or by one of our children, things that represent their artistry, their handiwork, the work of their fingers—maybe a drawing or a painting or a quilt. You study the detail of this and you see the creativity. But the psalmist here is telling us that you see the handiwork of God, you see the craftwork of God, when you look up at the stars, the moon and stars in the heavens.
Have you ever thought about the magnitude of the heavens? Think about the size of the earth in comparison to the sun. The earth has a radius of just under four thousand miles, and the sun, 93 and some odd million miles away is hundreds of thousands of times bigger than the earth, so that our earth would fit inside the sun hundreds and hundreds of times.
But our sun is a relatively small star. There’s a much larger star by the name of Betelgeuse that’s 642.5 light years from earth. It’s seven hundred times larger than our sun! And the largest known star in the universe that’s so far been discovered is called Stevenson 18; 19,570 light years away from the earth, it is 2,150 times larger than the sun.
The magnitude of all of this should astound. Let’s just do a little experiment. Everybody make a fist. Go ahead, make a fist. Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you to hit anybody. Think of your fist as representing the solar system, our solar system. Our solar system in our galaxy, which is much, much larger, is about the size of your fist in all of North America. That’s how much bigger the galaxy is than our solar system—just our sun and our planets—the size of your fist in the whole continent of North America! And the galaxy is that many times bigger than the solar system, and our galaxy is one among millions.
Let that hit you. Think about that for a minute. How big, how great, how majestic must be the God who made all of this!
Surely the first appropriate response of our hearts is just to rebuke the smallness of our thoughts of God. There was a book written by J.B. Phillips years and years ago called Your God Is Too Small, and that’s probably a rebuke that would apply to all of us. Our thoughts of God are too small, because this God, who made all of this with just a word, this God is incomparable in his character, he is matchless in his majesty, unrivaled in his reign, unequaled in the quality of his being, the grandeur of his power, and the weight of his glory. “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” The majesty of God; let it hit you how great this God is.
2. The Dignity of Humanity
This great God, with all of his majesty and power, has conferred on human beings dignity and worth as those who are created in his image. That leads us to point number two, the dignity of humanity.
You see it in this question. As the psalmist reflects on the magnitude of the heavens and the majesty of God, he asks a question in Psalm 8:4-8: “...what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” Of course, he’s thinking here of humanity at large. What is man? “What is a human being, that you, the God who created all things, is mindful of human beings and that you care for them?”
He says in verse 5, “Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings,” and that phrase “heavenly beings” translates the Hebrew word elohim, which is oftentimes the name for God, but sometimes it also carries a more general reference to supernatural beings such as angels. So again, the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, interprets it in that way: “You have made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor.”
Then verse 6, very clearly an echo here of Genesis 1, says,
“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.”
The idea here is that as the psalmist reflects on the nature of man as created by God, he affirms here the created dignity of human beings as made in the image of God, made to rule under God over creation. You’ve given dominion to these human beings who are created a little lower than the angels.
I think it’s helpful for us to contrast the dignity of human beings in biblical revelation with other worldviews. Dale Ralph Davis, in his exposition of this psalm, does this very helpfully. I want to borrow from him for a few minutes. He contrasts the biblical view of human beings with other worldviews.
He looks at ancient paganism, and he quotes from that old Babylonian document the Enuma Elish. Essentially what he shows is that in ancient pagan theology, human beings were slaves of the gods. They were little pawns on this celestial chessboard, as there were warring, dueling spirits who were trying to control all things, and human beings didn’t really matter to them. They’re just pawns, just slaves in this celestial game. They didn’t have the dignity that Scripture speaks of.
Then Davis looks at nihilism, this current philosophy that essentially says life is meaningless. There’s nothing that really matters. In that view, human beings are just junk. He references a play, a play written by Samuel Becket called “Breath.” It’s 35 seconds long, this play. It begins with a recorded cry, then an inhaled breath, and a dim light begins to light the stage, and on the stage is a pile of rubbish, a pile of garbage. In 35 seconds the light begins to dim again, there is an exhaled breath, there’s a cry, and the play ends.
What’s the meaning of that? The meaning is that there is no meaning. A cry, a breath, a life that’s basically meaningless, just garbage, just trash, and then it’s all over. That’s the view of nihilism. Life doesn’t matter. We’re just garbage. We don’t mean anything. We’re just here. This is a cosmic accident. That view of human beings is a very, very low view of humanity.
Or take humanism. The view of humanism, Davis says, is that man is alone, and he quotes the Humanist Manifesto II of 1973, which says, “We can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species.” We’re alone, we’re by ourselves, we’re alone in the universe. “There’s no god, and there’s nothing above us, there’s nothing beyond us; this is it.” Again, it’s a pretty hopeless view.
But in biblical revelation, human beings are royal. We’re royal. We’re not slaves, we’re not junk, we’re not alone; we are royal, made in the image of God, made to exercise dominion over the earth, to rule as the vice-regents of God in creation. Jesus himself says that “you are more valuable than the birds of the air that God faithfully feeds” in Luke 12. There’s value and worth to human beings—the dignity of human beings. When the psalmist asks this question, “What is man that you are mindful of him and care for him?” part of the answer is the very fact that God is mindful and he cares, because God has made us in his image and given dominion to human beings.
This should really shape the way we think about both ourselves and the way we think about others.
(1) The twofold application is first, apply this to your self-concepts. It’s right, what the old bumper sticker says, “God don’t make no junk.” He doesn’t, and you’re not junk. You are not trash. Your life is not meaningless. God has created you with meaning and with dignity and with worth and with value and with purpose. Your life matters, because God gave it to you; God created you in his image. Apply that to the way you think about yourself. Don’t think wrongly of yourself. We need a higher view of human beings. Don’t think that Christianity in any way destroys genuine reflection on ourselves and an appropriate self-image. Apply this to your self-concepts.
(2) But then, even more importantly, apply this to your thoughts and your treatment of others. When we think about others, we think about other races and other cultures, we should remember that all human beings are created in God’s image and there is no room for racial superiority of any kind. We are to treat all others with dignity and with respect.
When we think about other faiths, other ideologies, other political views, no matter how wrong we may think they are, and no matter what kind of debate or dialogue we may enter into with them (and we should), we still must treat them with dignity and respect. We never demonize the other view. These are people made in the image of God. We treat them with kindness.
We think about other sinners, and no matter how awful the sin or even the crime, even if we believe that justice and the law demands some kind of punishment for the sin, the punishment should never be inhumane. They should still be treated with dignity and with respect. We are not to be brutal in the way we treat other people.
Then we think about the other people in our lives. Sometimes it’s easy for us in the abstract to think, “Of course we should treat all people with dignity and respect,” but then, when we think about how we treat our spouses, our children, our grandchildren, our in-laws, it seems that human kindness kind of tends to disappear, and instead it’s the harsh word, it’s the snap response, it’s the angry outburst. The very people we should love the most sometimes we treat with the least humanity.
This psalm rebukes that. This psalm and the biblical teaching on what human beings are reminds us that we are to treat one another with love and with respect, remembering each person that we ever speak to is made in the image of God.
James 3:9 says that when we curse a human being, we are cursing those who are made in the image of God, and this should not be. It should not be that we praise God with our tongues and then curse people who are made in his image.
The dignity of human beings. I believe, brothers and sisters, that Christians need a better biblical anthropology, a doctrine of humanity. We need to understand human nature as the Bible teaches it, and that should shape everything about our relationships with others.
3. The Mystery of Redemption
The majesty of God, the dignity of human beings, and then, point number three, the mystery of redemption.
This one we have to back into a bit. You don’t see it so much in the psalm as you see it in the use of the psalm in the New Testament. Psalm 8 speaks of human beings as royalty made a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor. There’s the royalty language. They are crowned with glory and honor and given dominion over the earth.
Occasionally we see evidence of this. We see the great feats of human brilliance. You think of a bridge, you think of a skyscraper, you think of space travel. It’s amazing what human beings can do. You watch those videos that show how amazing human beings are in their athletic feats. It’s amazing to see what people can do.
I had an example of this just a few days ago. We had a staff Christmas party; we went to Brad and Katie O’Dell’s house. I don’t know if you know this, but Brad has a dog, and Brad’s dog is named Isla. This dog is amazingly well-trained! I mean, everybody is throwing balls around, and this dog will catch every ball—jump three or four feet in the air and catch the ball—except when Brad, the master, said, “Hold.” He would throw that ball, the ball’s bouncing around the floor. When Brad says “Hold,” that dog is frozen in its tracks. I was seeing that and thinking, “This is an amazing example of a human being exercising dominion over creation.” It’s a little realized eschatology—this is what’s going to happen in the future. (That’s an inside joke for the theologians.)
It’s very, very different than the dog in my household. I mean, we have a beagle, and beagles just aren’t that smart, and there’s no way this beagle’s going to catch a ball in the air or even understand what we mean when we say, “Hold.” I mean, the fall is very evident in the Hedges household with our pet! We do not exercise dominion in the same way.
Occasionally we see this. Occasionally we see human beings exercising dominion on the earth, but most of the time we don’t. Most of the time, what we see is disease and decay. We see environmental degradation and problems. We see hurricanse and tsunamis and tornadoes and earthquakes and wildfires. We see animals, we see nature, as the poet says, “red in tooth and claw.” The world is trying to kill us. Why? Because we live under the curse. Because the world is fallen. So we don’t see the fulfillment of Psalm 8. The way the psalmist describes it, reflecting on creation, is not what we currently see.
This is the scene that you get in Hebrews 2. Hebrews 2:6:
“It has been testified somewhere,
‘What is man, that you are mindful of him,
or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned him with glory and honor,
putting everything in subjection under his feet.’
Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. [Now notice this.] At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.”
Is he contradicting Scripture? We do not see it! We don’t see it, because the world is not as it’s supposed to be, because the world is fallen, because the world is under a curse. So we don’t see everything in subjection.
This creates, then, a need for redemption. But here’s the mystery of redemption. This is what we do see. Look at Hebrews 2:9-10. We do not yet see everything in subjection to him.
“But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
“For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.”
You know what the writer to the Hebrews is doing? He is using Psalm 8 to teach us the doctrine of the incarnation of Jesus Christ and the supremacy of Jesus Christ, who in our human nature as one of us has won our redemption through suffering, through death, through the cross. He had to take on a nature like ours, taste death for everyone, and through that suffering, through that death he’s crowned with glory and with honor, and it’s through that work that he brings many sons to glory.
That’s really the story of Christmas. That’s the story of the incarnation, that God, the creator God, the God of majesty, the God of power, the God who created human beings in his image, that this God, in the person of the Son, took on human nature in order to redeem us and to save us.
Let me illustrate this with a story. I heard this years ago in a sermon from someone else, a story that was originally told by Paul Harvey. It’s a story of a man who lived in the midwest, and it was Christmas Eve. He had a family, his wife and his children were Christians and they’d gone to the church service in the chapel on Christmas Eve, but he was not a believer. He was not a Christian. He didn’t really see the point of all of this celebration of Jesus.
So he sat at home that Christmas Eve in front of his fire. It was cold outside, and he began to hear a thump. He wondered what it was; he thought somebody was at the door. He opened the door and no one was there. He continued to hear this thump, and he realized it was coming from the window. As he opened the drapes, what he realized was that there were birds that were trying to fly into the window, thumping against the window and then falling to the ground.
A snowstorm had blown in, and these birds had been caught away from their shelter. They couldn’t find their way back, they couldn’t fight the wind. They had seen the lighted window, they were attracted to the light and warmth of the house, and they were trying to fly in. They were flying right into the window and hurting themselves. They needed shelter or they were going to freeze to death.
This man who had refused to go with his family to the Christmas Eve service and had no interest in Christ, no interest in Christianity, is suddenly filled with compassion for these birds. He wants to help these birds find shelter. So he went outside and tried to shoo them on their way. That didn’t seem to work. He opened the barn and tried to get them into the barn. He took corn and grain and tried to create a trail that would lead them into the barn, to this place of shelter.
Nothing would avail, and he began to be very frustrated. He began to think, “I just wish I could communicate with the birds so they would know I’m not trying to harm them, I’m trying to save them. But I can’t communicate with the birds because I can’t speak their language. If only I were a bird, then I could communicate with them.” And suddenly, Paul Harvey says, the meaning of Christmas dawned on him. The meaning of Christmas is that God, in order to communicate his love and his grace to us, became one of us, so that he could lead us into the warmth and shelter of his love.
Friends, the greatness of God is seen not only in his majesty displayed in the heavens, but it’s seen in the mystery of redemption, in the humility of the incarnation, the manger, and the cross. In this we see the astounding plan of God to redeem us by becoming one of us.
A few weeks ago, someone sent me this poem by Leslie Leyland Fields.
“Let the stable still astonish:
Straw-dirt floor, dull eyes,
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
“No bed to carry that pain,
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough.
“Who would have chosen this?
Who would have said: ‘Yes,
Let the God of all the heavens and earth
Be born here, in this place’?
“Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms of our hearts
And says, ‘Yes, let the God
Of Heaven and Earth
Be born here—in this place.’”
See, the mystery of redemption is seen in the humility of our God, who becomes flesh as the word becomes flesh and dwells among us, and then who invades the dark, foul places of our lives, our very hearts, to shine the light of his love and his grace and of the gospel to bring us redemption.
I wonder this morning if you have experienced that. Have you experienced the light of God’s grace invading the darkness of your heart and your life? We’ve seen this morning these three things: the majesty of God—our response to that should be one of wonder and worship and awe, to stand in awe of the God who made all these things. We’ve seen the dignity of human beings and it calls us to a certain way of living in the world, where we treat one another and human beings and all people with the dignity and respect that is fitting those who are made in the image of God. And we’ve seen the mystery of redemption, that God’s great plan of redemption, his great plan for restoring us and the created world, reconciling us to himself, eventually making all things new, is through the incarnation of Christ, his death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, his ascension into heaven, and our human nature—and someday, in the second advent of Christ, his return, when he will come back to this world and he will make all things new. Our response to that truth, of course, should be one of heartfelt trust and faith, believing in this gospel, trusting in this God and the work that he has promised to do, and submitting ourselves to his grace and his work, transforming us in the here and now.
Has that been your experience? Will you look to this God this Christmas season, trusting him, trusting in his grace, believing in his promise? Let’s pray.
Gracious, merciful God, we thank you this morning for the gospel, the good news of your love for a lost world demonstrated through the birth of your Son and through his obedient life, his death as our substitute, our representative on the cross, to take our sin, our shame, our punishment, and our judgment onto himself, and to set us free from sin and death to bring us into new life. Lord, that’s our hope this morning, and once again in our hearts right now we express our hope in that truth. Lord, we cannot save ourselves, we cannot make this world a better place on our own. We’re wholly dependent on you, so we trust your grace and we thank you for it.
As we come to the Lord’s table today, may we come with faith in our hearts, seeing in these elements of bread and juice the truth of the gospel of this God who was broken in his human body, who shed his human blood for our sins so that we can be redeemed. Lord, we ask you to strengthen us, to encourage us, to assure us as we come to the table today, and to be glorified in our worship. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.