As the youngest of his father’s sons, David had to have pulled more than his share of night-shift duty, watching over the family’s flocks and protecting them from nocturnal predators. So he had to have spent a lot of time gazing up at the night sky – and in the semi-arid Middle East in the days before electric lights, the full moon would have seemed close enough to touch, just as the stars would have seemed impossible to count. It’s no wonder that on those occasions David’s thoughts turned to worship, praising God for the majesty revealed in His creation. How awesome God must be to have created such an awe-inspiring universe with a single word (verse 3)!

But as a shepherd, David would also have been intimately acquainted with the marvels of biology, as he witnessed, and doubtless had to assist with the birth of countless lambs. Later in life, with the birth of his many children, he would have had even more reason to marvel at how God’s creative power could be expressed so eloquently even in the tiniest baby’s cries (verse 2)

But David found something else even more marvelous: that the God of such power and might, the God of such boundless life and energy would choose to set His love on finite, relatively tiny human beings (verse 4). And why God would give men and women responsibility for all the things He has made continues to be a mystery (verses 6-8), especially considering how our sin has corrupted or even destroyed so much of the beauty and bounty God originally intended for this world.

But the answer to David’s riddle is found in the Son of David, the One whose praises the children sang on Palm Sunday (verse 2, see also Matthew 21:15-16). Indeed, in calling Himself the “Son of Man,” Jesus was claiming for Himself all the authority David describes in verse 4. For Jesus is the One Who rules and reigns over all of God’s creation for all time (verse 6). He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords – the One Who in His Person and Work most fully displays God’s power and glory (John 1:14).

And it is only as we are joined to Christ by faith that any of us can fulfil God’s purposes for us in our families and in our stewardship of God’s magnificent creation. So, let us bow the knee before the One Who in His incarnation was made a little lower than God, and by whose death and resurrection has been crowned with glory and majesty (verse 5). And let our prayers be filled with praise for the One Whose name is majestic in all the earth.

Psalm 8 (NASB)

For the choir director; on the Gittith. A Psalm of David.
O Lord, our Lord, How majestic is Thy name in all the earth, Who hast displayed Thy splendor above the heavens!
2 From the mouth of infants and nursing babes Thou hast established strength, Because of Thine adversaries, To make the enemy and the revengeful cease.
3 When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, The moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained;
4 What is man, that Thou dost take thought of him? And the son of man, that Thou dost care for him?
5 Yet Thou hast made him a little lower than God, And dost crown him with glory and majesty!
6 Thou dost make him to rule over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet,
7 All sheep and oxen, And also the beasts of the field,
8 The birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, Whatever passes through the paths of the seas.
9 O LORD, our Lord, How majestic is Thy name in all the earth!