by Duane Maust
October 8, 2006
Psalm 8
I am excited to come together with you all today and look at this Psalm together. We come as a group and look at the greatness of our Lord. Yes, we can do this alone. But I am glad we can come and praise you as a congregation.
It is important to come as a group and remind each other of the greatness of God.
Today I want to take you on a look at the God we serve. I want to start looking at the greatness of God and then work it around to a personal level. Maybe it will be like spinning in a vortex. We’ll start on the outside and spin toward the center.
The center will be the personal spot.
So here we go.
This Psalm has a neat beginning. “O Lord, our Lord!”, not “O how beautiful Nature is!” It leaves David almost speechless. What else could he say.
Verse 2 reminds us that children can say the neatest things. When Elaine teaches the youngest Sunday School class, she comes home with some very profound things. I know some of you parents may not feel the profoundness, but listen for it.
One commentary that I read suggested that David wrote this either in Solomon’s temple or out in a pasture. I picture David laying flat on his back looking up to the sky.
Read verse 1b and 3: “You have set your glory above the heavens. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers the moon and the stars…”
We saw some fine needle work at the camp sale yesterday. It would take days and days to do, but think about what God can come up with.
If those were David’s thoughts, how should we feel today? He had no real idea of the vastness of space or of the immense number of stars that there are out there. Even today we have trouble comprehending what is out there. Our sun is about 860 thousand miles across, which is 100 times the diameter of the earth.
We are about 93 million miles from the sun. It takes light about 8 minutes to cross this distance at 186,000 miles per second. Our solar system is about 7,000 million miles across, it takes light 10 hours to cross this distance. It takes 4 years for light to travel here from the nearest star. That is just the nearest star. The number of stars in the visible universe is thought to be 2000 billion billion, or 2 with 21 zeros after it.
I have trouble getting all this. It is too big to picture.
Realizing how small our planet is helps us to get things in perspective. We need to appreciate how small and weak we are but more importantly, how great and powerful our God is. David didn’t stop at feeling small, he also cried out: “O Lord, our Lord, How majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.” He starts and stops the Chapter with the same verse.
What is surprising, when you think how insignificant we are, is that God is interested in mankind at all.
Read verse 4-5.
Why does God take interest in mankind? Why did He give His Son to die for us? The only answer can be that he loves us so much.
From the very beginning, God’s purpose was to have fellowship with man. And he wants fellowship with you and I.
God created man lower then the angels, but we are here to look after this world.
Let me take you to Heb. 2: 5-9.
That is taken from Psalm 8. But Hebrews takes it a step closer to us. We are starting to wind down to the center. This is getting where we live. It is getting more personal.
It is not just ourselves that are lower than the angels. It is also Jesus that came down here with us. Jesus came here to be with us. He came to live where we live. He came so he could “taste death.” He came to be our Savior. He loves us that much. He knows what pain is. He knows what being on this earth is like.
Read 9-12.
Jesus has come to be here with us. We come together today and have his Holy Spirit. It gives us strength in the difficult time.
There are times that we need the community of the church. The Amish school shooting this past week showed us how they gave each other support through that difficult time.
I read in the paper this morning that 75 mourners went to Charles Carl Roberts IV funeral. He was the gunman that did the shooting at the Amish school. About half the people there were Amish. That is community. They showed the world what love and forgiveness is this week.
Yes, I know they will have a lot of pain ahead. They were meeting last night to see what to do about school. But they are there for each other.
That is what we are about here at Jubilee. We want to be a support to each other. Not just the hard times. But the times we think about the greatness of God. This God that is so great cares about what is going on here on 28th Ave.
This God knows and cares for each one of us.