We are meeting in the parks again.
Our church has been gathering outdoors during the warmer months for our midweek service, preaching the Word of God in the open air with the sky overhead and the trees around us and the children running through the grass. I enjoy preaching. I have always loved it. But I absolutely love preaching in the open air. There is something about standing under that sky with an open Bible that feels right, that feels the way preaching must have felt for the apostles in Solomon's portico, for George Whitefield on the commons in Boston and the fields of Moorfields, for the field preachers and the circuit riders, for every man who ever lifted his voice where God put the ceiling. Whitefield said he chose the open air because the pulpits were closed to him, but he stayed there because that was where the people were. Souls do not always walk through church doors. Sometimes we have to walk through theirs. If we want sinners to hear the gospel, we have to take it to where they are.
What a blessing it is to live in a country where we are free to do it. Free to stand in a public park and proclaim the name of Jesus Christ without looking over our shoulders. Millions of believers around the world cannot say that. I do not take it for granted. I am also doubly blessed to pastor a church that is willing to go with me. They sit in the heat, swat the gnats (some days are worse than others), and open their Bibles. A pastor without a supportive church is a man shouting into the wind. I do not have that problem.
This sermon was originally preached at the park, and I cannot think of a more perfect setting for it. Psalm 8 was written by a man who was looking up. David stood under the open sky, saw the work of God's fingers stretched across the heavens, and asked a question so simple it staggers: What is man, that You remember him? If you are going to preach that psalm, you ought to preach it where you can see what David saw.
So look up. If you are reading this indoors, picture the last sky you stood under. If you are outside, go ahead and look up right now.
That sky, the sun, the clouds, the blue going on and on: David saw a sky like that three thousand years ago, picked up a pen, and wrote, "When I see Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have established..." He looked up. He asked a question. A small question. A staggering question. "What is man that You remember him? And the son of man that You care for him?"
What are we? We are specks. Standing on a rock spinning through space we did not make, under a sky we cannot reach, breathing air we did not put in our lungs. The grass outside will outlive you. The trees were here before you and will be here after. The sky David saw is still there, untouched by every kingdom that has risen and fallen since he wrote.
What are we that the God who flung those clouds across the sky would know our name?
Now think of the children you know. The grandchild at your feet. The toddler in the back pew. Listen for that noise, that laughter, those little voices that will not stay still: David says God uses that. Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies, God has established strength. He silences His enemies with the sound of a child.
Stop and feel the strangeness of it. A sky so vast it makes kings feel small. A child so small the world walks past without seeing her. One God who is majestic in both. The hand that hung the stars is the hand that holds the toddler.
That is what this psalm is about. A God too great to comprehend. A people too small to deserve a thought. A love that bends the one toward the other.
So reads the infallible, the inerrant, the all-sufficient Word of the Living God.
The God of Majesty (vv. 1, 9)
Look at verse 1. "O Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth, who displays Your splendor above the heavens!"
Then look at verse 9. The very last line. "O Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!" The same line. Word for word. David opens with it and closes with it. The psalm is wrapped in worship like a book between two covers. Everything in the middle, the babies, the heavens, the question, the crown, all of it sits inside that one sentence about the majesty of God.
That is on purpose.
David does not start with man. He does not start with himself. He does not start with his problem. He starts with God. Yahweh, our Lord. God's covenant name. His personal name. The God who told Moses "I AM WHO I AM." David says this God's name is majestic in all the earth. Not majestic in Israel. Not majestic in the temple. Not majestic when people remember to praise Him. Majestic in all the earth. Whether the nations know it or not. Whether you feel it right now or not. The majesty of God is a fact of the universe, not a mood we work ourselves into.
Look at what he says next. "Who displays Your splendor above the heavens." The heavens are not enough to contain God's glory. The sky we look up at is the lower hem of His garment. There is more above it. The galaxies you cannot see, the angels you cannot see, the throne room you cannot see, all of it is splendor displayed above the heavens.
The sky is big. The God who made it is bigger.
I knew a man once who had been faithful in church for years. Then he started watching the wrong programs at night. Just news at first. Then commentary. Then conspiracies. Then the kind of shows that explain everything wrong with the world in twenty-three minutes. Little by little, the God he prayed to on Sunday morning got smaller. Not because his theology changed. Because his focus changed. His God shrank to the size of his outrage. After a while he could not sing anymore. He could not pray a long prayer. The worship wells in him had dried up because the God he was worshiping had been whittled down to a household god, useful for handling his enemies and explaining his troubles, but not big enough to fill a sky.
That is what happens when a small God replaces the real one. The life goes out of the worship. The fight goes out of the prayer. The wonder goes out of the walk.
David did not have that problem. David looked up.
Application
When you close this article and go back to your week, the world is going to do its best to make God seem small. The news will. Your phone will. The arguments at work will. The bills on your counter will. The whole modern world is engineered to shrink God in your imagination until He fits in a category somewhere between "personal opinion" and "ancient mythology."
Fight that. Fight it with what is over your head right now. Fight it with what David fought with. Look up. Notice the sky. Make a habit of it. Walk outside at night and look at the stars. Watch a sunrise or a sunset sometime this week. Let the size of the sky preach to you the size of the God who made it. Look up while being grounded in God's Word.
A small God produces a small life. A big God produces big worship. David's whole psalm starts with the bigness of God. So should ours.
The Strength of Small Voices (v. 2)
Verse 2. "From the mouth of infants and nursing babies You have established strength because of Your adversaries, to make the enemy and the revengeful cease."
You would not expect this verse here. You would expect David to go straight from the majesty of God in verse 1 to the heavens in verse 3. Sky to sky. Glory to glory. That would be the natural flow. But David puts something between them. He puts babies.
The God who is majestic above the heavens has established strength out of the mouths of babies.
Look at the word "established." This is not a passing comment. God has set this up. He has built it into the way the world works. The cry of an infant, the babble of a toddler, the unfiltered confession of a small child: God has loaded that with strength. He has loaded it with strength for a reason. "Because of Your adversaries, to make the enemy and the revengeful cease."
The praise of a child silences the rage of a man. That is the world God made.
Look at how Jesus uses this verse. Matthew chapter 21. Jesus has cleansed the temple. He has overturned the tables. The children in the temple are crying out "Hosanna to the Son of David!" The chief priests and scribes get angry. They walk up to Jesus and say, "Do You hear what these children are saying?" Make them stop. Shut them up. They are embarrassing You.
Jesus quotes Psalm 8. He says, "Yes; have you never read, 'Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies You have prepared praise for Yourself'?" The Son of David quoting David. About Himself. The Lord Jesus reading Psalm 8 as a psalm about Him being praised by children. This is not a small thing.
Application
If you have children, hear this. Their voices matter to God. The hymns they cannot pronounce yet. The prayers they stumble through at bedtime. The "Jesus loves me" they sing in the back seat of your car. None of that is wasted. God has established strength out of those mouths. He uses small voices to do big things.
So train them. Bring them to church. Sing in front of them. Pray in front of them. Read the Bible to them when they squirm. The world will tell you children are too young to know God. The Bible says God uses children to silence the world.
If you do not have children, hear this too. God uses small things. Small voices. Small offerings. Small acts of faithfulness from old men and quiet women who think they have nothing left to give. The strength of God's kingdom has never come from impressive sources. It comes from babies. From shepherds. From fishermen. From you.
The Wonder of Being Remembered (vv. 3–4)
Verses 3 and 4. "When I see Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have established; what is man that You remember him, and the son of man that You care for him?"
I want you to feel this verse, not just read it.
Picture David. He is probably outside. It is probably night. He looks up and sees the moon. He sees the stars. He sees what every shepherd in Israel for a thousand years has seen. He calls it "the work of Your fingers."
Stop on that phrase. The work of Your fingers. God did not break a sweat making the universe. He did not labor over it. He did not strain. He stretched out the heavens with His fingers. The way a woman threads a needle. The way a man flicks a piece of lint off his sleeve. The work of His fingers. If the fingers of God made the stars, what did the arm of God make? What did the strong right hand of God make? David is overwhelmed by what God did with His fingertips.
Then the question lands. "What is man that You remember him?"
It is one of the great questions of the Bible. One of the great questions of human existence. Job asks it. The writer of Hebrews quotes it. David asks it standing under the sky. Compared to that sky, we are nothing. Compared to those stars, our names will be forgotten in three generations. The God who made all that, with His fingertips, would not owe us a thought. He would not owe us a glance.
The word David uses is "remember." Yahweh remembers man. The Hebrew word means to call to mind, to act on behalf of, to keep in active care. It is the same word used when God "remembered" Noah on the ark (Genesis 8:1). The same word used when God "remembered" His covenant with Abraham (Exodus 2:24). It is not passive remembering. It is the kind of remembering that does something.
The next line is even stronger. "The son of man that You care for him." The word for "care for" carries the sense of looking after, attending to, visiting. God does not just remember us at a distance. He visits us. He attends to us. He looks after us.
That is the wonder.
Some years ago I heard about a woman in a nursing home. She had no family left. Her husband was gone. Her children had passed before her. She sat by the window most days, and the staff said she would talk to herself, but they could never quite make out what she was saying. One day a young nurse leaned in close. The woman was not talking to herself. She was praying. She was telling the Lord about her morning. About her breakfast. About the bird outside the window. About how her knees hurt. The nurse asked her later, "Why do you pray about such small things?" The old woman said, "Because He listens to small things."
She had it right. The God who measured the heavens with His fingers leans down to hear an old woman talk about her breakfast. He is not too busy. He is not too far. He is not waiting for you to have something important to say. He remembers the small. He cares for the small. That is the wonder David is reaching for. The big God who pays attention to small lives.
Application
If you have been feeling small lately, this verse is for you.
If life has been making you feel forgotten. If the world has made you feel like a number on a screen, like one more face in one more crowd. If you have been wondering whether your life matters in the grand scheme of things. If you have looked at the news and wondered whether anybody, anywhere, is paying attention to the kind of small, daily, unimpressive faithfulness that makes up your whole life. Hear this.
The God who set the stars in their courses remembers you. He knows your name. He has counted the hairs on your head. He has bottled your tears. He sees the prayer you whispered yesterday that nobody else heard. He sees the kindness you showed to your spouse early this morning when nobody was watching. He sees the temptation you fought down on Monday. He sees you.
You are not forgotten. You are remembered by the God who made the moon and the stars with His fingers.
The Crown on the Son of Man (vv. 5–8)
Verses 5 through 8. "Yet You have made him a little lower than the angels, and You crown him with glory and majesty! You make him to rule over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the animals of the field, the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, whatever passes through the paths of the seas."
The answer to "what is man" is dignity. Crowned dignity.
Before we get to the crown, I want to stop on one word in verse 5. The word translated "angels" in our LSB. The Hebrew word here is elohim. It is the regular Hebrew word for God. It is the word used hundreds of times in the Old Testament for the one true God. So you might ask, why does the LSB render it "angels" right here in Psalm 8?
Some translations render it "God." A little lower than God. Others, like the LSB, render it "angels." Both readings are defensible from the Hebrew. The word elohim sometimes refers to God, sometimes to heavenly beings, sometimes even to human judges acting in God's place. Context decides. The LSB translators chose "angels" because the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that the apostles used, rendered it "angels." The writer of Hebrews quotes it that way in Hebrews chapter 2. He quotes it that way to make a point about Christ.
Do you see what just happened? The writer of Hebrews takes Psalm 8 and reads it through the lens of the incarnation. "Made a little lower than the angels" is not just a comment on the dignity of man in creation. It becomes a description of the Son of God taking on flesh. The Lord Jesus, who is higher than the angels in His divinity, became "for a little while lower than the angels" in His humanity. He took on the body of a man. He bled like a man. He died like a man. Then He was crowned with glory and honor.
The psalm has two voices.
The first voice is David. David is talking about humanity. Man, made by God, crowned with dignity, given dominion over the creatures. This is Genesis 1 set to music. "Let Us make man in Our image... and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky..." That is what verses 6 through 8 describe. Adam in the garden. Man as God made him.
The second voice is the voice the Holy Spirit speaks through David, the voice Hebrews picks up and identifies. It is the voice of Christ. The true Son of Man. The second Adam. The one who took the dignity Adam threw away and carried it all the way back up to the throne of God. The one under whose feet all things will finally be put.
Charles Spurgeon saw both. He said Psalm 8 is a creation hymn and a Messianic psalm, and he refused to choose between them. He was right. The same verses that tell us what man was made to be tell us what Christ became and what Christ will accomplish.
Look at it this way. David asks, "What is man?" In David's lifetime, the answer was Adam. Man as God made him. Crowned with dignity. Given dominion. Fallen and broken, but still bearing the marks of the crown. After Bethlehem, the answer is Christ. Man as God redeemed him. The Son of Man crowned with thorns, then crowned with glory. The one who took back what Adam lost.
Application
If you are a believer, this means your dignity is not measured by the world's scale. The world will tell you that you are a meat suit, an accident, nothing more than a dressed up monkey or an ape, a collection of cells with no purpose beyond what you make for yourself. The Bible tells you that you are made in the image of God, crowned with glory and majesty, given a place in the order of creation that no animal and no angel was given. You were made for dominion. You were made for dignity. In Christ, what Adam lost is being restored to you.
Your dignity does not depend on your performance. Adam fell. Every one of his sons and daughters has fallen. The crown was knocked off. But the Son of Man picked it up. He wore it on the cross. He wears it on the throne. He shares it with all who are in Him.
If you are in Christ, you are not less than the world says you are. You are more.
Conclusion
We come back to where we started. David started Psalm 8 with a shout: "O Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!" He ended with the same shout. The same line. Word for word. Because that is what wonder does. It comes back to where it began, and it says it louder.
Look up one more time, even if only in your mind. That sky is still there. The same sky David saw. The same sky a Galilean carpenter looked up at, knowing He had made it. The same sky a Roman soldier saw turn black at noon while the Son of God was dying underneath it. The same sky that will split one day when that same Jesus comes back.
The children you love will grow up. The grass outside will go brown and green again. We will all of us, every one, be gone from this earth one day. But the name of the Lord will still be majestic in all the earth. Long after our voices are quiet, the heavens will still tell His glory. Long after we are dust, the Son of Man crowned with glory and honor will still be reigning.
The God who is majestic above the heavens is mindful of the man beneath them. He was mindful of David under the stars. He is mindful of you wherever you are reading this. He was mindful of you all the way to a cross. He will be mindful of you on the day He calls you home.
The Gospel in the Psalm
David asked the question under a sky full of stars. What is man, that You remember him? Christians have asked the same question for three thousand years, under every kind of sky. What are we, that the God who made all this should know our names?
David did not know the half of it.
The answer to his question is not a doctrine. The answer is a Person. Look at the question again, the way Hebrews quotes it. "What is man, that You remember him? Or the son of man, that You are concerned about him?" Then Hebrews says this: "But we do see Him who was made for a little while lower than the angels, Jesus."
We do see Him.
David could only ask. We can answer. God did not stay above the heavens looking down on the man beneath them. God became the man beneath them. The hand that hung the moon and the stars was nailed to a Roman cross. The voice that called the galaxies into being cried as a newborn in a manger in Bethlehem. The Son of Man whom Psalm 8 says is crowned with glory and majesty was first crowned with thorns.
That is how mindful God is of man.
If you are not in Christ, this psalm is not a comfort to you. It is a warning. The God who made the heavens is the God you will answer to. The same hands that set the stars in place will hold the books on the day of judgment. The bigness of God that fills you with wonder right now will fill you with terror on that day if you do not have a Mediator. The Mediator is the Son of Man this psalm points to. Jesus Christ, who took on flesh, who lived the life you could not live, who died the death you deserved, who rose again on the third day. The Bible says repent. Turn from your sin. Believe on Him. Cry out to Him while it is still called today. The God who is majestic above the heavens has made a way for you to come to Him through His Son.
If you are in Christ, hear this. The next time the world makes you feel small, the next time life makes you feel forgotten, the next time you look up at a sky too big and feel like a speck not worth a thought, remember this. The God of that sky has not forgotten you. He has done more than remember you. He became one of you. He bled for you. The same hands that flung the stars now hold you. You are not too small for Him to think of. He thought of you all the way to Calvary.
David asked, "What is man that You take thought of him?" The cross is the answer.