Brought Back From the Brink (Psalm 8)

Rev. Joe Dentici

Transcript

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So exactly one year ago, I know exactly what I was doing a year ago. I was out west in Utah in an RV with my family, and we drove hundreds and hundreds of miles. We blared music as loud as we could. We sang and we danced. You can ask my kids, what did you guys listen to a lot? Like there were songs of the week. And we were out there because we were doing a tour of national parks, and so we saw the Grand Canyon, and we saw Zion National Park and Arches and Bryce Canyon, and it was glorious. And it's funny, I'm trying to describe what it's like, and I feel like everything I'm going to say is so cliched. Except I was not prepared for the beauty that I was going to be placed in front of. I was, I had seen pictures of all of these. I've seen, I've seen, you know, the Grand Canyon in 4K. And then still not prepared for what happens when you get there. And I hate to use the word breathtaking, but that's why do we say breathtaking? I saw it happen. I heard it happen in my family.

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Wow.

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When you look at majesty, it takes your breath away. And I was immediately struck by two things. There's a number of things that race through your mind, and at least two of them are these. I am so incredibly small. You ever have those moments you stand before something like the Grand Canyon, or you see all the stars in the world and somewhere remote, and you're struck. I am so incredibly small. And a related idea. How do I fit into everything? How do I fit into this hole? Because I am so small. What if I'm utterly insignificant? What if I'm just a vapor in the wind? You feel those moments? There's two kinds of it. I mean, but deep down, so many of us, we feel that. And I think it's universal. I feel small, and it brings you to the brink of asking existential questions. Sometimes standing on the precipice of the Grand Canyon can send you into the depths of your own soul. What if I don't matter? And the psalmist this morning, we're going to look at Psalm chapter 8. The psalmist wants us to see, not just in his psalm, but what the Bible teaches, that Christianity can account for both. Christianity can account for both this feeling of being tiny, teeny, feeling insignificant in the face of something grand. And Christianity provides an answer for how can these two things be true? How can both be true? The answer is in Jesus. And so let me read this passage and pray. It's a famous Psalm. 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, distill 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 word of the Lord. Almighty God. We ask you, as we ask you every week, that you would help us to see the risen Christ. We ask you, as we always ask you, that you would change us by your Spirit. And we ask, as we always ask, that you would dig out for us ears to hear, that you would give us eyes to see what is true here. And I pray that whatever I say that is not true would be forgotten. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. So my outline this morning is really simple. I want to look at God. It's easy. I want to look at man, and then I want to look at the God man. God, man, the God man. That easy comment was a joke. There are a lot of psalms that call for the worship of God. Come, let us worship. Come, let us bow down. And yet this psalm just starts worshiping and it just starts bowing down. And I was really struck by how hard it was to work on this sermon, how hard it was to think about what to say, because so much of this is talking about the majesty of God, and everything I tried to say just seemed to pale in comparison. And then I realized I think that's what the psalmist feels. I think he's trying to get at something powerful, and I think even here you feel his words just aren't enough. But when we think about God, let's think about his majesty for a minute. And I don't know if you've thought about what the word majesty means. It means greatness. Think about the greatness, the majesty of God that dwarfs, absorbs all other greatness, all other majesty. That if we want, and we do as humans, we want to recognize greatness. It's why we watch sports in the Olympics, it's why we listen to music, we want to appreciate greatness, and instinctively we do because we were wired to admire and to recognize greatness. And true greatness, God's greatness, is meant to elicit from us, draw out from us worship, that we acknowledge it, that we fall down before it, that we yield and adore the majesty of God. And so the psalmist this morning, he's inviting us to think great thoughts of the Maker of heaven and earth. Something that Christians would all readily acknowledge, this is what we are here for. But if you were like me, sometimes we forget. Sometimes it's been a while. To pause and to consider greatness. To pause and to consider our teeniness. The maker of heaven and earth, he is eternal. He is infinite. He is almighty. And he is all-loving. We think of great humans. I mean, I bet if you were to put together a list, we'd come up with a lot of the same names. Alexander the Great, George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., like we think of men and women who have done great things throughout history. We're going to make a lot of the same lists. These great men, great women, they pale in comparison to the greatness of God. The grandeur of God is not limited to a finite time and a finite amount of time. A finite space and time. That's human greatness. It comes up and there are statues and there are amphitheaters named after you, and then they go away. Forgotten. And the greatness of God endures forever. He alone is eternal. And the psalmist says, how majestic is your name in all the earth. In the mountains, Everest in the Himalayans. You think about the Matterhorn in Switzerland, the Rockies in our own United States, you see grandeur, greatness. How majestic is your name in all the earth. In the Grand Canyon, and on deserts around the globe, in rainforests. If you've been on a cruise ship or a boat and you've been surrounded by water or just on the beaches and looked out on the horizon, that is 71% of this globe that we live on. And we haven't even begun to talk about the creatures in these places. I Googled a few days ago what is the creature that you can find at the highest point. I bet you all know, just like I knew. The Himalayan jumping spider, which lives, finds a home at 22,000 feet above sea level. What's at the depths of the sea? The snail fish at 27,000 feet below sea level. That's over nine miles difference. And that's just where like things live. The highest to the lowest point is over twelve miles. Thinking on these things is meant to conjure how vast this universe is, how vast this earth is. And not just the vastness of this globe, but the vastness of the one who made it. He made the vastness. He made the grandeur. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon, and the stars which you have set in place. One of my best friends growing up is a rich kid and he had a lake house in Wisconsin. His neighbor on one side was Sam Johnson from S. C. Johnson Wax. His neighbor on the other side was a Stratton, if you've heard of Briggs and Stratton. I went up to his lake house in Wisconsin and I was like, man, this place is pretty nice. I like your tennis court. But when it went dark, we were about 120 miles from the Canadian border. We were in the middle of nowhere. And stars like I have never seen. I mean, never seen. It was 35 years ago, and I'll still talk to them. Hey, when are we going back up to Wisconsin? One day, Joe, one day. Do you know how many galaxies are out there? I mean, nobody knows. But the latest estimates from scientists like NASA magazine, we're now estimating that a conservative guess is two trillion galaxies. We don't know what to do with that number. We have no idea what two trillion means. Let's start this way. Do you know how long a million seconds takes to pass? A million seconds? Eleven days. Eleven and a half days. How long does one billion seconds take to pass? Thirty-two years. That's a big jump. So if you can do the math, a trillion seconds, thirty-two thousand years. I mean, it's just to begin to help us to wrap our minds, and we're not wrapping our minds, but we get some sort of gauge. Whoa, two trillion galaxies. And a galaxy is not a solar system. In our own galaxy, scientists estimate conservatively there's a hundred billion solar systems. In our solar system, we're done, right? Like, ah, what do we do with that? What do we do with that? The psalmist didn't know that. He didn't know that, but when he looked at the stars, and he and there were no city lights to disturb him, but when he looked, even that blew his mind. He says, I marvel at the universe. I marvel at that, and you made it. You are more marvelous than the marvel I'm looking at. In Psalm 147, he says, You determine the number of stars, and you give them all their names. You put them where they are. You know them by name. Where each moving star is, you know it. We can't wrap our heads around the number. He knows them by name. God made everything. And what that means, I mean, this is the obvious conclusion, but do we think about this? Reality as we know it. Reality as we know it is God's creation. It's God's creation. You know, Greenville is also pretty beautiful. One of the things I like to do, most mornings I do this. I get up first in my family usually, and I'll go out on my back porch when I've got my first cup of coffee, and I'll just look. Two minutes, three minutes, and just try to like pay attention. And the dozens of shades of green in my backyard and in your backyard would make somebody from Idaho say, Wow, I haven't seen shades of green like this. And then if you just stop looking, oh there's a hummingbird. You know, 30, 40 feet up, zooming, oh, another one. And if you listen, how many different kinds of birds do I hear? And there's something happening in that. God made that. Sustains that even now. That when we encounter God's creation, we encounter majesty. And the purpose of all of that majesty is not to stop there, but to say, someone made it. I can't make it, you can't make it. That ought to humble us to the dust. Which leads us to our second point. Man. What is man? Human. What is humanity, male and female, that you are mindful of them? We're back where we started, aren't we? Feeling small at the Grand Canyon. Feeling small under a canopy of stars. It's appropriate. I was watching uh clips of some of the last Stephen Colbert. I've been a fan of Stephen Colbert for the last 25 years at least. And Jim Gaffigan asked him, and Jim Gaffigan's interviewing him on his show. And they're both they're both believers. And he said, What do you think happens when you die? I was like, Stephen Colbert has been so poignant and so many times. I was expecting like something really great as I do from him. And I was so disappointed because he said, you know, I think there's some continuance. Let me get this right. He says, I think there's a dispersion of the self into a greater being. And I don't think it was a bit Jim Gaffigan just looked at him and he says, So you're saying we become Fabris? He's like, Yeah, I guess so. Or Jim Gaffigan was like, we say the same creed, bud. Like, what are you talking about? Jesus tells us that the one who numbers the stars numbers the hairs on your head. That the one who sets the stars in place keeps track of the hair on your head, and we could start pulling, and he's like, okay, what are you doing? I know. I know. Psalmist says, You says, You're the Son of Man. What is he that you care for him? He doesn't just create the vastness of the universe, he makes us and he cares for us. To be human is to be cared for by God. To be human, to be made in his image, is to be cared for by him. The psalmist says it this way: you've made him a little lower than the heavenly beings. You've crowned him with glory and honor. You've given him dominion over the works of your hands. And you've put all things under his feet. How has God cared for us? I mean, never mind the fact that we get to live in his reality, that he gave us breath today, that we get to be a part of this world. Never mind that he gives us rain and sunshine and wine to gladden the heart and bread to strengthen the heart, and he gives us community. He says he has crowned us with glory and honor and given us dominion over his creation. There's profound existential payoff here. Because we don't have to run from our teeniness, our finitude. We don't have to run from it. We don't have to be scared about it. And it doesn't have to send us spiraling. In fact, we're smaller than we think. I mean, if the Grand Canyon makes you think that you're small, think about the earth. And if that makes you think that you're small, think about the trillions and trillions of stars we just talked about. And if that makes you feel small, remember, oh yeah, God made all that. He's infinitely more majestic than this seemingly infinite universe, but it's not. It's finite. We're smaller than we think. But we are also made in the image of the one who made it. We've also been endowed with a certain dignity that the Maker has given us that no one can take away. And this means that in the sea of what seems to be so vast, we get to hold on to our individuality as well. Two things can be true. We're a part of this vastness, but being a part of this vastness doesn't mean you have to lose your individuality. And I feel like we're always swinging between these poles. What's more important? My individuality or the vastness? My individuality or the vastness? It's dizzying. And the Bible says stop vacillating between the two. You are a part of the vastness. You were made of dust, and you were made in the image of God. That is how we reconcile these. In Christ, we get to move from existential dread to what the Bible calls fear and trembling. Do you read those in the New Testament? Fear and trembling. Dread? No. No. It's not cowering from this reality. That I tremble at the thought of my finitude. I fear the one who made everything. But not because I I'm not dreading him. Not in Christ. I'm not dreading him. He's made me in his image, and in Christ, he's made me a part of his family. But that doesn't keep my knees from shaking when I consider all of this. And he's mindful of me. In Christ, that's the move from fear and dread to a holy fear and trembling. Don't jettison the knocking of your Knees, that's to remember who you are and who God is. What is this dominion He's given us? It's not ownership, it's stewardship. So we can't say it's mine, I can do with it what I want. To take care of it. To take care of God's creation. Whether that be, you know, the land or the creatures, or we have to take care of it. And understand this doesn't belong to me. It belongs to a holy God who's made me and everybody else in his image. We take care of it, we steward it. He originally tasked our first parents to seek his kingdom by spreading and cultivating a culture, a civilization that honors him. Not in that heavy-handed, you will do this sort of way. But spreading the goodness of God. And the psalmist tells us in 106 that we've exchanged the glory of God and given all that glory to creation. We seek our meaning and our purpose, not in the one who made us, but in the stuff He made. And so we've elevated ourselves over this thing and we lured it, and sometimes we misuse the earth that God has given us and the people that we're called to share it with. When we were created to seek our meaning and our purpose in the one who made us. And this, of course, was true even when Psalm 8 was written. The good news is God hasn't given up on us. And that even though we have exchanged his glory, we haven't lost his image in us. And the good news is that the psalmist, I don't know if he knew it. Surely on some level, because of some of his other psalms, but God knew that Psalm 8 is going to ripple out throughout the rest of Scripture. That Psalm 8 isn't, it's not finished. Which leads to the last point: the God man. The God man. And so first I want to draw your attention back to verse 1 and verse 9. It's the same sentence. Okay? And the first Lord in both of those is supposed to be all caps. Not the second Lord, the first Lord. And whenever you see all caps in your Old Testament, this was sort of lost in formatting, whenever you see all caps in your Old Testament, that's the Old Testament word for the covenant name of God, Yahweh. So when you see Lord in all caps, you're thinking the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who doesn't punt on his people. He keeps covenant, he's faithful. The very one who came in the flesh is Yahweh. Jesus is, I mean, the triune God is Yahweh, but Jesus is Yahweh coming to us. And I was working on this sermon yesterday. I was typing at my dining room table, and my doorbell rang, and so I went, and there were two Jehovah's Witnesses at the door. And they were like, Can we talk to you about God? And I said, Of course. And I said, But since you've come up to my door, can this be a two-way conversation? And they said, Of course. And we started talking, and then the lady said, I don't want to really get into an argument. And I said, I'm sorry, I'm really not trying to be argumentative. And I want you to know that what you're doing is extraordinarily brave. And her she's lit up. She was like, Really? I was like, you're just going to doorbells and talk. Like, that's so brave. I'm just so brave. And I want you to know I would fight for your right to keep doing this. She was like, you would? I was like, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I was like, I'm not trying to be argumentative. And she was like, okay, we can talk a little bit more. And I was like, all right. Okay. And so I said, you know that Palm Sunday passage where Jesus goes in? She said, yeah. Because she was saying is, Jesus is created. And Jesus isn't Yahweh. I was like, okay. And I said, well, that old that Palm Sunday passage, the children, they're praising Jesus. And the Pharisees, they rebuke him. And she says, Yeah, that's right. She says, I love that passage. I said, I do too. And she says, I said, what does Jesus say to the Pharisees? And I paraphrased, I've got it written out here now. The Pharisees say, Do you hear what these are saying? And Jesus said to them, Yes. Have you never read, out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies, you have prepared praise? He's quoting Psalm 8. And what he's saying, right? Yahweh, O Lord, our Lord. He's quoting, what he's saying is, the God who made everything. That's me. That's me. And they recognize me. The weak things of this world, as Paul says, shame the strong. And foolishness of this world shames the wise things of this world. That you don't have to be strong and powerful to get it. You actually have to be weak. You have to understand your finitude. How strong can anybody really be in the face of the one who made trillions and trillions of stars? Jesus is clearly the God of Psalm 8, but Hebrews 2 says he's also the human of Psalm 8. And here's the thing. Had Adam fulfilled his calling? Had he spread the way he was supposed to, had he cultivated a civilization that honored God? Had he obeyed God, then he would have spread the Garden of Eden. He would have, we would have seen, oh, by his faithfulness, by his work, the glorified earth would have been a reality. That was always God's plan A, this new heavens and new earth. But he failed. He failed. Nancy Guthrie puts it this way Eden was unspoiled. That is, it was innocent. But it was unfinished. It was unspoiled, but it was unfinished. Eden was always supposed to develop. Okay, stick with me. Hebrews 2 quotes Psalm 8, and I'll read a little bit before and after. He says, for it was not angels that God subjected the world to come. He didn't give angels the world. And here he says to come. It was always this world to come that wasn't quite here. It was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It's been testified somewhere, Psalm 8, what is man that you are mindful of him? Or the Son of Man that you care for him. You made him a little lower than the angels. You have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection to his feet. Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he's commenting now, he left nothing outside of Jesus' control. At present, we don't 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. It was fitting that he, for whom all things exist, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. This is amazing. And if it's a lot there, but here's what he's saying. The psalmist knows that God made humans a little less than the angels. But he also made us to grow in God, to obey him, to develop in a way that we surpass the angels in glory, but we never did. We never did. And so God himself, in this person of the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, becomes humanity for us, becoming less than the angels for a while, so that he could not just himself be resurrected to glory, but bring humanity back to himself. Bring humanity to glory. That means in Christ, humanity has risen to a glory above the angels. And he did it. He accomplished what God originally purposed. Plan A has been fulfilled. Which means dust is in heaven. Humanity, flesh and bone is in heaven, which means the material world is in heaven. You get this? Material things. So that when you look at the vastness of everything, it's now a foretaste. Am I a vapor? Oh, you're tiny. You're such a vapor, unless, unless God comes and makes himself one of us so that we now maintain our individuality forever. Jesus does it. The majestic one does it. 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. Oh, but you do care. You do care. What a thought. What a thought. And that means we lean into how small can I be, how weak can I be in the face of all of this? It doesn't matter what anybody, he's so weak. Look, she's so weak. They're pitiful. Who cares? Who cares? We are. We're weaker than they think they are. So much weaker. And have been given a dignity that has been restored and renewed, that is imperishable, it is undefiled, and it is kept in heaven for us until He makes this earth a part of the new heavens and the new earth. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. Let's pray. God in heaven, you were holy and righteous and majestic and eternal and infinite and loving and gracious and merciful. And oh, so mindful of us, we would not be like that. But we pray that you would make us like that. That you would make us a merciful and kind people. And we pray that you would help us to see your greatness that we might see who we really are in you. Amen.