The Glory of God

The Glory of God

Psalm 8

    Father's Day is a recent invention in human history.  As such, ancient Israel knew no such holiday.  However perhaps their equivalent would have been in the fall when dads across the nation took their entire families camping.  Picture yourself in the land of Israel.  It is late Autumn.  The last of the crops have just been hand cut and threshed, most of the fields are brown stubble.  In thankfulness of God, you have just been celebrating the feast of Tabernacles - the feast in which you thank God for the wonder of the Harvest, the wonder of his fruitful creation.

You've built yourself a booth, a lean too, out of sticks and branches.  Its some protection, not much, but it helps.  The ground is rough, so you gleaned some left over hay from the fields so that you have something to lay upon.

The feast of the Ingathering or Tabernacles is to last for Seven days, you've now been celebrating God's good Creation for six days, it late in the evening, the sun has just set... and gathered with family and with your friends who have their tents built nearby, you look up in the black dark of night, above you, to the east, looms a large ivory moon.

It's not full, you can see its dark edge shadowing the glimmer of the stars behind it --- and it makes you feel small, as if you could shrink between the straws and stubble on which you are lying.

Above the whispers of the night you hear a whimper, then a wail of a child who is crying out in sleep for its mother.  Then its still again and you know that there was something beautiful in that cry - it was dependence, it was intimacy and contentment and you know that in that child's eyes, when it wakes tomorrow there will be the amazement of a new day.  And you know, somewhere in that babe's cry, in those eyes, is an inexpressible, but wonderfully harmonious praise.

The breeze that hushes through the night pulls at a tuft of hair that has somehow become tangled with straw.  The twitch on your head pulls you back to the reality of the night and you notice how the sun's total departure has made the stars pierce through the darkness which seems to become brighter with each passing moment - more stars appearing than before,  until the heavens seem to be stars - stars - so many - everyplace you look there seems to be another star.   And if you turn you eyes to the side slightly - there are still more that you did not see.  Billions of starts!

No - more likely billions of billions of stars, incredible in size, infinitely far away, yet all surrounding - protecting this earth as a stellar, defensive wall.

Inside, you feel the surge of a quenched shout: "Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"

All of these stars, so immense, so intense, God made them with his own hands.

Of all these stars, of all these possible worlds, here you lie, gazing at the infinite, the innumerable, the immeasurable, the eternal, and you feel insignificant, small, a speck of dust on a pebble planet cruising around some petty star.

You, Six feet tall, your life, maybe 80 years...

But in this infinite dark expanse, on this pebble planet, God has focused His attention on you so that He might express His love.  Out of a thousand billion billion stars, He choose this puny sun, and this tiny ball flying around that sun, and this little six foot creature...

"What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?"

Incredible!  This speck of dust - bewildering!  This being that passes away as a flower - and he actually cars for it!  Amazing!  Man - so microscopic - yet... Its unbelievable!

    This is the context of our passage this morning from Psalm 8.  The Psalmist, David, looks at all of creation and gives glory to God.  Next, he begins to consider how this great God came to be interested in man.  In today's text we see   ...

God's Glory  (vv. 1-2, 9)

God's Finger-work  (vv.  3-4) , and

God's plan for Man  (vv. 5-8)

1. Body
1. God's Glory  (vv. 1-2, 9) 
1. He is worthy to be praised.
1. His Glory is Above the heavens
2. Yet made known through the weakest of things
3. That this is exactly what the Psalmist means is confirmed by an incident from the New Testament. In the twenty-first chapter of Matthew the Lord Jesus quotes the words of this psalm on a certain occasion. Matthew tells us,
1. And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David!" they were indignant; and they said to him, "Do you hear what these are saying?" And Jesus said to them, "Yes; have you never read, 'Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants.  You have perfected praise’?” {Matt 21:14-16 RSV}
4. These chief priests and scribes thought that Jesus should be offended by the fact that these street urchins, ragged and dirty, were crying out, "Hosanna to the Son of David!" This was not a children's choir, trained by the temple leaders, it was merely a band of ordinary children who happened to be there at the time Jesus healed the blind and the lame. But when they saw these wonderful things the children began to cry out, "Praise be to the Son of David! Hosanna to the Son of David!" The scribes and chief priests were indignant and thought Jesus ought to silence these ragamuffins. Instead he said, "They are the ones who have caught the truth, they are the ones who see. They understand that here is being manifested the healing power of God. It is all right in line with the prediction of David in the eighth psalm that God's marvelous simplicity can be conveyed to a child much more easily than it can to an adult."
5. Remember that the Apostle Paul says much the same thing in his opening words in First Corinthians. He declares that God has deliberately designed life in this way. God has ordained, has chosen, the weak things and the things that are not to set at naught the things that are -- to show them up, to expose them -- and to convey messages through weak, foolish and obscure things.
6. Ray Stedman tells a story of a rather liberal Sunday School teacher who had a class of boys. He was teaching the story of the feeding of the five thousand, and said something like this. "You know, this isn't really a miracle. Jesus did no miracles. What really took place here was that when this crowd was hungry a little boy present there decided to share his lunch with Jesus. He brought his lunch to Jesus and Jesus commended him for this. When the crowd saw that, it suggested to them that if they would share the lunches they had brought, everybody would have enough. So they all began to share and there was plenty for everyone. If there was a miracle at all it was a miracle of sharing." He leaned back rather satisfied with himself that he had explained away the miracle when one little boy in his class said to him, "Sir, may I ask a question?" The teacher said, "Yes." And he said, "What did they fill the twelve baskets with afterwards?"God's Finger-Work  (vv. 3-4)
1. On display for all to see. 
7. The glories of all creation
8. compared against mere humanity
1. What is man... ?
9. Now there are basically only two answers that are being given. A mechanistic scientist looks out into the universe around using instruments of exploration, such as the telescope, and tells us that man is nothing but another creature like the animals; that he is the highest of the animals, having grown from animal stock, and that he is alone in the universe as an intelligent rational being, although even that is up for debate, as we continually probe to find signs of other intelligent life in the universe. Furthermore, there is nothing beyond the whirling stars; man is part of a great cosmic machine which grinds on relentlessly and man is but an insignificant cog, hardly able, with the exercise of his utmost powers, to do anything at all about the universe in which he lives. I do not think this has been more eloquently expressed than by Bertrand Russell, whom many have regarded as the high priest of humanism. This is the way he puts it.
1. The life of man is a long march through the night surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, toward a goal that few can hope to reach and where none may tarry long.  One by one as they march our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death.
2. Brief and powerless is man's life.  On him and all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark.  Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.  For man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.
10. That philosophy is producing widespread despair in the world around us. Everywhere young men and women, boys and girls, are succumbing to this philosophy of despair that says there is nothing permanent, life is futile, and we all live out our days in a hopeless tangle of meaninglessness.  As Shakespeare put it, "Life is but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  The result of that is the violent attempt to grasp what life there is for the moment that we see about us on every side; the awful sense of frustration and meaninglessness, the skyrocketing of suicide rates, and the dark despair that spreads like a blanket of gloom across the peoples of earth as they face the growing, inexorable problems of our day.
11. But contrast that with the biblical view of man, for the Psalmist goes on to answer his own question by the revelation of the program and purpose of God for man.God's plan for Man   (vv. 5-8)
1. A mystery made known through Jesus Christ.
12. He made Man lower than heavenly beings
1. Gen. 1:26 --- Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.  And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
2. Mat. 28:18 --- Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.Yet exalted (through Jesus Christ)
3. In Jesus Christ we see what we may be. He is God's answer to the question: "WHAT IS MAN?"
4. In His emptying out of Himself (Phil. 2:7), His humiliation in leaving  heaven's throne and taking on our human flesh, Jesus showed us what we are to be!   He not only taught the Beatitudes: He embodied them!  Poor in spirit, a man of sorrows, meek and lowly, pure in heart-- and yet above all else, blessed, and conscious of pleasing the Father.  
5. WHAT IS MAN?
6. Jesus identifies with us and shows us how to live in fellowship with the Father by the Spirit!
7. But that is not the only answer we have to the question: WHAT IS MAN?!!  For in His exaltation, His glorification, Jesus shows us God's purpose for you and for me!
8. Paul sees this as finished and done: (Ephesians 2:5,6 "(God) made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus.")
9. John puts it in the future: (I John 3:2) Beloved NOW are we the sons of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be, But we know that when He shall appear we shall be like HIM, for we shall see Him as He is!"

II. Conclusion 

1. The ultimate question we are facing here is: What is the purpose of life? Why are you here?  Why do you go on making money to buy food and other things year after year?  What is the reason for it all?  The answer is, if you have discovered Jesus Christ, you are a part of God's new humanity.  God is fulfilling his original intention for man right now.  He is beginning a new humanity right now, and he is teaching us lessons we could never learn in any other way, through the struggles and difficulties of life.  He does this in order to fit us for the day when he will pull aside the curtain and the whole world will suddenly see what he has been working on all the time -- a new humanity.  
2. Paul says in Chapter 8 of Romans that the whole creation is eagerly looking forward to the day of the manifestation of the sons of God. God is not going to be defeated by the wickedness and foolishness of man.  Even though man is working hard at destroying the world in which he lives, making it a mess in which he can no longer exist, God will not be defeated.  Amidst the increasing ravaging of nature, God is doing something.  The exciting news of today is not what is recorded in our news headlines. The events that are reported in the headlines will all be entombed in some internet archive or buried in a trash can in another ten years, and it will be of very little significance to any living being at that time. But the exciting thing today is what is happening in the new humanity that God is creating through the trials and difficulties we are going through. 
3. That will be the truly exciting thing. These troubles are transforming you and me who know Jesus Christ into sons of God, who are awaiting the day when the curtain is drawn back, and all the world shall see what God has been doing behind the scenes. In Romans 8 the apostle says, "I know that the sufferings of this present time are not worth being compared with the glory that is to be revealed," [Rom 8:18 RSV]. In Second Corinthians he says, "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory," [ 2 Cor 4:17]. There is purpose to life -- if you know Jesus Christ! There is no purpose outside of Christ.  But if you know him you are part of a new creation that God is fashioning behind the scenes within the framework of history and one of these days it will be revealed.  When the curtain is drawn back all the world -- and all the universe -- will sing together the words of the last verse of this psalm.
4. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!