Psalm 8:1-9 O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth! who have set your glory above the heavens.… The great spiritual truth contained in the first passage of Scripture, that God made man in his own image, flashes forth in this psalm in true lyric grandeur, a ray of light across the dark mystery of creation God is the most wonderful thought of the human mind, and this thought retains its hold upon us in spite of all atheistic influences. Here the thought is that God's glory is celebrated - I. BY CHILDHOOD. Putting to silence the clamour of the atheist. Christ uses the passage against the scribes and Pharisees, and in another place says that God reveals to babes what he hides from the wise and prudent. We must be converted to little children; "for of such is the kingdom of heaven." God reveals to babes unbounded trust, unbounded obedience to parents, the simple truthfulness, the guileless mind; and they proclaim all this aloud, and it tells of their Divine origin and inspiration, and they thus praise God, and ought to abash the irreligious. "Heaven lies about us [and within us] in our infancy." II. BY THE STARRY WORLDS. The things which tell us most of God are: 1. Night. The solemnity and impressiveness of the heavens are greater by night than by day. 2. Their constancy and order. 3. Their immensity. We cannot compute their number and distances by any effort of thought. 4. Their silence. God's greatest works are all done in awful, impressive silence. Then we feel our physical insignificance. III. BY MAN'S SPIRITUAL GREATNESS. (Genesis 1:26-28.) Compared with the material heavens, he is but an atom; but God has "visited him," and made him great, by stamping him with his own image, and giving him the sovereignty of things. He is made a little lower than God, or little less than of Divine standing (Elohim). But he is to ascend up to sovereignty. In Hebrews 2:6-8 the words are applied to Christ in a much wider sense, and by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15., because he is more perfected in his highest power, and is to have all rule and all authority. We have only begum to exercise lordship over the animal, the material, and the moral worlds, and over ourselves. It is only as we rule ourselves that we learn the secret of rule over others. Obedience is the road to sovereignty. - S. Parallel Verses KJV: {To the chief Musician upon Gittith, A Psalm of David.} O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens. |
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