Reflections on Psalms 8

 Psalms 08(Contemporary English Version)

1. (A psalm by David for the music leader.) Our LORD and Ruler, your name is wonderful everywhere on earth! You let your glory be seen in the heavens above.
   
2. With praises from children and from tiny infants, you have built a fortress. It makes your enemies silent, and all who turn against you are left speechless.
   
3. I often think of the heavens your hands have made, and of the moon and stars you put in place.
   
4. Then I ask, "Why do you care about us humans? Why are you concerned for us weaklings?"
   
5. You made us a little lower than you yourself, and you have crowned us with glory and honor.
   
6. You let us rule everything your hands have made. And you put all of it under our power--
   
7. the sheep and the cattle, and every wild animal,
   
8. the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea, and all ocean creatures.
   
9. Our LORD and Ruler, your name is wonderful everywhere on earth!

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This is another Davidic Psalm in which David is awed by God's majesty and overwhelmed by the standing in which God has placed man. The best display of God's majesty is seen as we look into the heavens and see His creation of the sun, moon, and stars and the constellations beyond. And yet, as great and majestic as God is, He has established that through the praise of children His enemies will be silenced. As the Message translation of the Bible states it, the songs of toddlers "silence atheist babble."

It blew David's mind, though, as it should ours, that in observing "Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You set in place," that God would even consider man, let alone make him, "little less than God" and crown him "with glory and honor." (8:4, 5) And yet, not only did God do this, He made man "lord over the works of Your hands; You put everything under his feet." (8:6)

It is unfathomable, and yet it is true. The thought of all this returned David to thoughts of God's magnificence in the last verse. These things are so unfathomable to our minds they should cause us to get over our grandiose ideas of second-guessing God as if our ideas are better.