40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Psalm 8 (Episode 391)

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

Chad and Daniel discuss Psalm 8. Have a listen! Show Notes: Support 1517 1517 Podcasts The 1517 Podcast Network on Apple Podcasts 1517 on Youtube What's New from 1517: Freedom Lessons Album Free 2023 Advent Resources Your God is too Glorious, 2nd Edition 2024 NWA Tickets (May 3-4) Join the 1517 Academy  More from the hosts: Daniel Emery Price Chad Bird

Welcome to the Psalm Companion of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast to check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. This episode, we've got Psalm number 8. This is, of course, a psalm of David. Yeah, it's a short psalm, but it's important for a number of reasons. It's one of these psalms, I like to describe these psalms as forward and backward looking. So they look back to creation, as we'll see in just a second, but they also look forward to the new creation we have in Christ.

And this psalm in particular is significant because it gets quoted at length in Hebrews chapter 2, in which he, in a rather unexpected sort of way, applies what initially seemed like it was a psalm about Adam and humanity in general. The author of Hebrews applies it specifically then to Christ as the last Adam, as the man in whom we have a new creation. so it's uh only nine verses let's read through the entire psalm and then we'll quickly work our way through it oh lord our lord how majestic is your name in all the earth you have set your glory above the heavens out of the mouths of babies and infants you have established strength because of your foes to still the enemy and the avenger when i look to the heavens the work of your fingers the moon and the stars which you have made what is man that you are mindful of him the son of man that you care for him yet you have made him a little

lower than the heavenly beings and crown 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 beast of the field the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea whatever passes along the paths of the seas oh lord our lord how majestic is your name in all the earth kind of a nice uh usually called an envelope structure where you begin you begin and you end the exact same way so that verse one and verse nine are duplicates of of each other i mean back in the start back in the 90s they wrote uh an entire song based upon just the oh the oh lord our lord how majestic is your name in all the earth and i was very repetitive i can hear it i can hear it playing

in the back of my head yeah i was i was reading the psalm and i was hearing it you almost started He's singing, oh, Lord, our Lord. It's a real banger back in the day, man. Like, we used to sing that one. And, you know, sometimes we'll, I mean, we will, but people in our tradition, of course, will criticize worship music that's more contemporary for being very repetitive. And, of course, it is. But sometimes the psalms are that way on purpose. and so uh you could probably sing oh lord our lord how majestic is your name in all the earth

over and over again and god is probably just fine with it yeah yeah i mean especially when you consider all of the riches that are that are packed into it um so uh yeah it begins with of course just this exclamation of praise that god it doesn't say how majestic is your name in israel by the way you know it doesn't say how majestic is your name in jerusalem at the temple all of which are true, of course, but this is everywhere. And that's important because this is contrary, of course, to the typical ancient Near Eastern theology, which held that gods and goddesses were geographically circumscribed.

You know, you had your god of here, you had your god of there, and you even hear language like this, like Baal of Zephon, or Asherah of such and such a place, or Kamosh of such and such a place. So they were like rooted to a specific land, not God. So Yahweh our Lord, He is majestic. His name is majestic everywhere in all the earth because He's the only God. And so therefore, everything is filled with His praise. You know, majestic is a word that—not a word that we use a lot, but if we do use

I was trying to think of a scenario in which I might use the word majestic, right? And usually it would be something like I think of maybe if you were like on top of, you know, a mountain and you could see all these. I remember when I lived out in the Northwest, I went to the Cascades and you could just see forever and you just see the Cascade Mountains and you could see water over here and stuff. And it's situations like that where you'd be like, and maybe you were describing it to someone else, and you're like, dude, it was absolutely majestic, right? It's like awesome is not like a good enough word. There's something else there. Yeah, it's awesome on steroids. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon.

When I hear majestic, that's what comes to my mind. Mountains, yes, but I mean, even that kind of the downward looking, you can look up at mountains, you can look down in the canyon. That's majestic, too. I mean, it just seems surreal. It's so incredibly awesome that majestic is the best term for it. Now, that's interesting because we both use examples from creation, and yet here it's the creator who is majestic. So our Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

Yeah, I think with something being majestic, as opposed to just being great or awesome, and of course the Psalms will say that God is great and awesome, and it will use those words as well. But when I think of majestic, majestic is something that is so big and so awe-inspiring that it makes you smaller, right? So if something's majestic, you end up feeling, you're in awe of it, and you feel little and small, which I think is really cool because he's going to say, oh Lord, your Lord, our

Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth, and then talk about all the things he's done for this small little thing that he's created which is man right which is cool yeah yeah it's it's kind of the uh the erneas quote uh the glory of god is a is a man fully alive yeah god yeah how does god show his glory yeah in saving us yeah that's that's his his majesty is expressed in doing things for what we deem to be small but in god's eyes are are worth everything that he's doing or to quote my uh my friend nicholas hopman uh you have to remember that god does whatever he feels like doing and what he feels like doing is saving you yeah yeah that's right that's good verse two is quoted by jesus um in uh the context of palm sunday right out of the

mouths of babies and infants you have established strength because your foes to steal the enemy and the avenger i've always i've always thought that uh this is of course you know the crowds are singing hosannas and welcoming jesus as he rides in and the religious leaders are complaining to jesus you know don't you hear what they're saying and jesus doesn't know the one of these uh do you dudes not even ever read the bible situations i always love it it's like have you never read uh in the scriptures where it says out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise you guys don't even do the bible but i i love the because the way the verse ends to uh to silence or to steal the enemy and the avenger so that the babies and the infants are

praising god and they're doing this so they can shout down you guys the enemy and the avenger you guys who are plotting my own death in fact even as we even as we speak yeah there there is something great about jesus saying do you guys even bible uh because when he says it to those people it's he's saying to the people who really think they bible yeah it was their job that's what they did it'd be like it'd be like saying to somebody today with a you know a phd in bible new testament old testament whatever he's like do you know the bible do you do you actually read study the bible So it's a top-notch insult every time Jesus says that. Have you ever read the Bible?

It'd be like if, honestly, if God came to you and I and we're like, do you guys even Old Testament? We'd be like, what? Yeah, it's pretty much a parallel. What's what we do? What are you talking about? Yeah, that's what we're all about. Now, verse 3 is where we have this transition to

uh building on the majestic name of god but we we we kind of place ourselves this is the eye speaking so this is david speaking but it's more than just david i mean it's us and it's uh also going to take us to christ when i look at your heavens the work of your fingers you know this majestic uh creation that's reflection of your majesty when i look at your heavens the work of fingers the moon and the stars which you have made what is man that you are mindful of him the son of man that you that you care for him that my that word mindful by the way is our uh our verb uh remember zakar so what is man that you remember him yeah that you act that you act on his behalf yeah that you act on his behalf the son of man that you that you care for him you

know i actually think about this uh so he's looking up but when i'm on an air airplane and i like down especially when we're going over city and i just think everything is small and you can't even see the people yeah i'm just you know hovering a thousand feet in the air but god looking down and does he does he see us does he care i mean what what are we compared to everything that he's made yeah what's great about this is that that david is saying i mean i'm outside. You can imagine looking at the night sky or whatever. And he doesn't come to the conclusion that, wow, everything is so big and vast. God must not be mindful or care about me. No. Instead, and this would be bad if you did come to that conclusion, don't look at whatever

incredible majestic thing you're looking at and think, man, with all this, I bet you God is not mindful of me. He probably doesn't really care about me. Look at all this creation. he's got to be so much more he's got to be way more proud of this than he is of anything else and that's not the conclusion david comes to he is struck with awe but he's struck with all that he's like he knows it's it's a i know that you're mindful of me and i and i know that you care for me and that is wild yeah yeah in fact you so you've made me uh well this can be translated two ways a little lower or for a little while lower both the hebrew and the greek can be translated that way so you have made me you have made him rather for a little while lower or a

little lower than the elohim which uh some translations will render as god esv has heavenly beings the septuagint the greek translation has angels which is what is quoted in hebrews so i think that's probably the best way to to read into this you made him for a little while or a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor you've given him dominion over the works of your hands but all things under his feet this of course is all genesis one language where god is made god has made adam and eve to be those who bear his image and likeness which in the ancient near east to bear the image and likeness of god was usually confined only to royalty so the king was the image of god right so if you thought of the image of god ancient near east you thought

of the king well the a similar thing is happening in genesis except humanity all the humanity they are regal so crown him with glory and and honor so for a little while lower and then lift it up uh to show our true place even above these heavenly beings now here's where things get really cool because when you go to hebrews chapter two uh this is where you see the author applied this directly to christ so the the person he's talking about here the author hebrews will say is jesus himself you made him for a little while lower but then you have exalted him to his rightful place crown him with glory and honor and the beauty of that is that you see genesis alongside the ministry of jesus and the gospels you see everything kind of come together yes i

mean in genesis god didn't make humanity a little bit a little bit lower than the angels crown him with glory and honor but then you see humanity now taking a different form coming to its its uh god-ordained purpose in the incarnation where god actually becomes man and then the father lifts him up, crowns him with glory and honor, and places him as king of kings at his right hand so that he rules over all things. Yeah, this is the way that creation works. So God, imagine God creates everything, and of course he creates man last. And it's almost as if God creates everything that is, and then says, now who am I going to give this to? Because that's how God is. God is, that's what he likes to do right he likes to give gifts and so he's he's created everything and says

who am i going to hand this over to who who have i created this great gift for i know i will create someone to give it to and this is exactly what he does i mean like when he creates adam and eve and says i got something for you it's everything okay i got all this all this is yours and of course They're like, well, we'll screw it up badly. And then, of course, Jesus comes, and God becomes his creation. And now all of this is handed over to Christ. But then again, also returned to us who are in Christ. Yeah, everything comes to, I don't know if you want to call it full circle or not,

but it comes to its telos it's god-ordained end yeah you see uh eden restored you see humanity it's it's sometimes called the uh oh happy fall philips philips culpa um because we receive more in christ than we lost in adam yeah so we're at a higher place in christ than we were in in adam and so the whole psalm in this nine verses you've got creation you've got incarnation you got redemption you got the ascension you really have uh the the end times in view where all of this becomes visible in the new heavens and the new earth, and David is able to pack this whole biblical theology into a mere nine verses. Yeah, and of course ends with the way he began, right, which is how creation works, is that ends with, oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in

all the earth, right? This is the thing that you do. All right, well, all right, that is Psalm number eight uh we will be back next week uh to tackle another one chad i will see you there see you then