What is Man?

¹ O LORD, our Lord,
How majestic is Your name in all the earth,
Who have displayed Your splendor above the heavens!
² From the mouth of infants and nursing babes
You have established strength
Because of Your adversaries,
To make the enemy and the revengeful cease.
³ When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained;
⁴ What is man that You take thought of him,
And the son of man that You care for him?
⁵ Yet You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings,
And You crown him with glory and majesty!
⁶ You make him to rule over the works of Your hands;
You have 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 Your name in all the earth! (Psa 8:1-9).

We really like that stuff. We eat it up. "You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings, 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." Oh, yeah, we're something, aren't we? "How majestic is Your name in all the earth!" Absolutely!

I suspect, however, that we really love that kind of thing not because we're starting from the same place that David was. Why is the Lord's name majestic? Why is it so marvelous that we have been made a little lower than the heavenly beings? Well, typically we think it's because we should be. I guess God figured out our true worth, eh? David begs to differ. It is truly remarkable not because we deserve it, but precisely because we don't. David started with the premise of the majesty of God contrasted with the worthlessness of Man. "What is man that You take thought of him?" David wasn't glorifying God because He recognized Man's worth. He was praising God because He assigned worth where there was none.

The closer we get to realizing that God has no obligation to Man, that we don't deserve God's favor or even God's attention, that we're really not so valuable on our own, the closer we get to realizing the vast majesty of God.