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The Psalm now is this: as Christ suffered and then was exalted, so we are also in him.
In Psalm 8, David gives us one of the great gospels “from the mouths of babes” (Psalm 8:2a). Yet this Psalm has also become a junk pile of half-truths and self-adulation. Translators have distorted every word to bury God’s truth since they want to crown themselves with glory and honor (Ps. 8:5b). Yet, in the end, God proceeds with his process of belittling his Son before crowning him. Initially, Christ suffers and is exalted, subsequently, sinners like you and me— proud mouths— are shut up until only the mouths of babes sing out, “How powerful is your name in all the earth” (Psalm 8:1 and 9).
God does not look upon the big, wealthy, and holy; his eyes are focused only on the lowest sinners.
No one wants this twofold work of the “fingers of God” that first suffers us and then exalts us. Yet, God does not look upon the big, wealthy, and holy; his eyes are focused only on the lowest sinners. He doesn’t even allow his poor and downtrodden to look at themselves without first attaching them to his only Son. In this Psalm, David answers the greatest question in life, “Why does God care?” with this gospel knowledge. Only through Christ can you see why God cares about the Son of Man, and because God cares about him, God then cares about us who suffer with a whole army of foes.
1 To the choirmaster: on the The Gittith. A Psalm of David.
As with previous psalms, David’s preface is either “to the choirmaster” or “to victory.” No one knows what “on the Gittith” means—perhaps “winepress” or, as Lyra and Luther both imagined, a musical instrument. Yet, throughout the Psalm it is not unreasonable to notice that “winepress” is used often in Scripture for oppression and suffering: “I have trodden the winepress alone” (Isa. 63:3). The whole of Psalm 8 concerns the suffering cross that precedes Christ’s elevation “above the heavens.”
1b O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth! Who has lifted up thy glory above the heavens.
David begins addressing the all-high name “Yahweh” (nominative, “O Lord”) who dwells in himself—by speaking directly to the earthly ruler “Adon” (our Lord). In English and Latin, these two names lose the distinction made in the original Hebrew between Yahweh and Adon. Yet the Psalm concerns the hidden God who cannot be addressed (Yahweh, whose name becomes unusable) and his kingdom on earth by which he has dominion over us. As king of God’s chosen, David understands that he is not the fulfillment of God’s majesty on earth. That title belonged to David’s promised Seed (2 Samuel 7). This unseen one, Jesus Christ, is known by faith, ruling not by law but by his propitiation (mercy, grace, and forgiveness) by which he brings us near the Father. Thus, we learn to pray: “O Lord, our king,” and speak directly to him, even if we do not yet know his name, “Christ.” David is thus praying directly to “O Lord, our King/Savior/Adon. Better yet, “O Lord, our Seed!”
Sometimes the phrase following God’s names is translated as a praise of God: “Your glory is sung above the heavens,” but it is best understood as an identifier: “Who (Yahweh) has set thy (Adon’s or Christ’s) glory above the heavens.” This means the most significant thing God does is not to exist as God— in and of himself— but that he sends “the Seed” of David to take the world's sins. God subjugates Christ below the law, to lift him to his right hand where he will judge the quick and the dead.
2 by the mouth of babes and sucklings, thou hast ordained strength because of thine enemies, to still the enemy and the avenger.
David knew what it meant for him, the great king and soldier, to give up his glory unto God. Jesus used this verse later, after his entrance into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the Temple when the priests accused Jesus of whipping up the innocent children to support his cause: “Do you hear what these children are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read that Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, Thou have brought perfect praise?” (Matt. 21:15-16).
God’s exaltation of Christ is opposite to our pension for magnifying the big and powerful. Sinners lift up whoever they think looks like them, but Christ is magnified by the opposite:the humble. You can’t get humbler than the “babes and sucklings.” They are simple and trusting rather than wise in the world. Like David, the praisers of Christ end up conquering their enemies and avengers not by worldly strength but by the foolishness of the word. David understood that he had received the power of God, but only through the simple word which comes “by the mouth of babes.”
We do not add a bit to God’s Word. Instead, like David, we give ourselves to prayer that God alone, without us, would accomplish in the hearer of our preaching whatever he speaks.
Luther notes that this power is an ordination of the mouth rather than the hand or sword. Like children, we wait until we are called into the preaching office, not puffing ourselves up and deciding we are going to speak for God as had happened in the time of Jeremiah: “But I never sent them! I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied” (Jer. 23:21). We especially lay aside any confidence that by speaking for Christ in front of our enemies we are somehow co-operating with the Word. We do not add a bit to God’s Word. Instead, like David, we give ourselves to prayer that God alone, without us, would accomplish in the hearer of our preaching whatever he speaks.
Yet God still wants to use us as his preachers to get his word out. By ourselves, we are unable to give God’s Word to anybody or receive God’s Word from anybody. We are merely babes and our strength comes wholly from God’s Word.
What power is unleashed by the preaching of God’s Word? It destroys Christ’s enemies—in church or state—by faith alone. Be warned, preachers, you will have enemies! However, there is a “fixed certainty” to Christ’s word that it will obliterate us as sinners into a brand-new life.
3-4 When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established; what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?
If you do not grasp that Christ is the subject of this Psalm, David’s “beholding the heavens” devolves into something like an astronomer looking up to the stars and noticing (as modern science does) that the universe is vast! It is so expansive, that it seems infinite. And therefore, the laws of nature that govern must be the same: even if gravity somehow curves, it must still be eternal and universal. In our comparison of the stars of heaven to our little selves, we discover the modern form of angst: “I am a speck of the universe—insignificant and pointless. Why would God be mindful of me in the infinite expanse of this beautiful, and frightening, order of the universe?”
Yet, we have already learned from the opening prayer that David does not use the “heavens” and “moon and stars” to reach this secular, vacuous, frightening conclusion about the universal law. When Christ is in mind, rather than the eternal law, the whole world (and my place in it) changes radically. As Martin Luther noticed, these words should be translated not as an endless, dreamy “when I look at thy heavens.” Instead they are a future promise given to David in faith: “For I shall see thy heavens and the work of thy fingers…” David is not star-gazing, but eschatologically foreseeing (as a prophet does) what the almighty God sees when he looks down upon the world. He sees me— a little sinner!
David is being given faith to see the state of the church and the world as they head to the end of all things. To the world, God’s baby preachers are surrounded by enemies who see only a bunch of fools crying out about Christ. The “work of God’s fingers” always means the Holy Spirit in Scripture as opposed to the work of a man’s fingers, as when the magicians of Pharaoh spoke of Moses’ plague: “This is the finger of God…but Pharaoh’s heart was hardened” (Ex. 8:15).
Baby preachers are how Christ casts out demons and justifies the sinner. They are the fingers of God.
David is not giving you a secular vision of the world, he is consoling preachers. The little mouths of babes, ordained into God’s word, look pitiful now, but they will triumph over the world soon. Why? Because our Lord in the person of Christ is “mindful of him and the Son of Man cares for him.” Now we learn why God cares. David is not referring to a general theory of God’s love over the universe (as if the universe will make things work out for you) but that God is explicitly arranging everything for his baby preachers to mouth off as the work of God’s own fingers. This preaching of the Word is why God cares for David—not “mankind” abstractly but “the suckling preacher.” Baby preachers are how Christ casts out demons and justifies the sinner. They are the fingers of God.
Sinners answer the question posed in verse 4, “Why does God care?” by attempting to establish their power and standing before God. Christians and Jews alike have struggled to interpret Psalm 8 as an extension of the goodness of God’s creation as outlined in Genesis 1. This interpretation says, first, that God saw what he made and declared it “good.” Second, that God made man—male and female— “in our image” as his procreators who were given dominion over the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea” (Ps. 8:5-8; Gen. 1:26-28). All of this is true, but what can we conclude from this origin? Does it tell us why God bothers to care for what Psalm 8:4 calls sinful “man” and the “son of man”? No.
While true, the goodness of God’s creation does not help to explain why God loves us now, despite our sin and in the midst of our suffering. If Genesis 1 was all the information we had, we might go to bed each night saying to ourselves: Despite some personal imperfections, and a few enemies in life, we have God’s full approval. We try to assure ourselves that God loves us because he loves himself, and we are created in his image. The long consensus of Christian exegetes (including our beloved Augustine, Athanasius, and Ambrose) say that Psalm 8 refers to original creation. The moment we learn to “look up to the heavens” in awe and wonder at the beauty of God’s creation is the moment we can be sure of God’s care. Even though we may feel small, we must take comfort that our little speck exists in God’s lawful order of all things. For this reason, the New Revised Standard Version, for example, translates the singular reference for “man” in the Hebrew (bar-Adam, Nephish and Adon) as a plural reference to the general species, saying, “human beings,” “mortals,” and “you have made them” (Ps. 8:4).
Who is David referring to here—we sinners, Christ, or both? It turns out that David means both sinners and Christ—but the shocking reality is that Christ is put with us into this terrible pile of sinners. “Son of man (Bar-Adam)” refers both to Christ (since he is God who has indeed become a man) and to us sinners at the same time. “Son of man” means a loser, a fool, especially when Hebrews uses the two nouns in the same sentence to say the same thing: Adam and Enos underline the fact that “man” is not seen as holding the old, created “image of God.”
David is not having us look for the little divine light left in humanity after original sin. Augustine tried to argue for this by claiming that there was a difference (“conjunctive disjunctive”) between “what is man” (8:4a) and “son of man” (8:4b) so that David meant man or son of man rather than a simple copulative “and”. He wanted to say that the first reference “nan” is to lowly humans, but the second is to the lordly Jesus Christ (Son of God as a “magnifying” title).
But, thanks to the Holy Spirit, Hebrews 2:6-8 quotes this very text to say that both “man” references refer to Jesus Christ—and both say that humans are truly sinners—yet Christ enters that sin. David is stepping back in absolute amazement at the true nature of the incarnation. His Seed will be God’s way to care for sinners—by becoming sin himself (2 Cor. 5:21). How could God care for us— not by finding some inner light that has not succumbed to going back to our original creation—but rather by making his Son into sin? The two references to men are then the human and divine views of the same pile of sin: Enos sees God’s ordained preachers precisely as other men see them—vile and despised losers. Bar-Adam (son of man) refers to God who sees men as afflicted and miserable sinners.
Strangely, God sees sin in the same way humans see sin, yet God proceeded to make his own son incarnate, as a true “likeness of men” (Philippians 2). This is the way God cares about us. David asks: What will you do, God, when you look down and see this sin—not only on us, but even on your own Son? When Pilate saw the same thing, he said, “Behold the man!” to the poor, whipped and bleeding Jesus. Pilate saw Jesus and despised him as another useless sinner. Is God going to remember the sin the same way? Or will God care for the man under his wrath according to the law—apart from the law?
5 Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor.
Since Adam and Eve, man has lost faith. Yet, God continues to have faith in his word, and through his preachers, he gives faith to sinners. God, who remembers everything, somehow forgot sin—starting with his own Son. To clarify the point, Luther noticed that this is a case of David expressing honor to God by addressing the second person in the third person: “so thou hast made him a little lower by God…” Jesus is not God-like, only less so. He is not a poor second to the whole God. God, you have made him a little lower, under the law—all by yourself—with full knowledge and desire to do so.
Because the name “Elohim” is used here, and that title is often a reference to princes or judges on earth, or to angels in heaven, there has been an attempt to translate this as “made him little less than angels.” It is appropriate to do so, as in Hebrews 2, as long as it is clear what is happening to Christ in this situation. “Him” refers to the Son of God who, being in the form of God, knew it was not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself lowly, taking the form of a servant and made man in the likeness of men (Philippians 2). God did this. “Little less” does not refer to a lower substance or less divine. It refers to time, specifically to the fantastic and frightening time of the incarnation and cross in which God sent his own Son to the cross—and the Son agreed! God forsook his own Son for a time, as when he cried out “Eli, Eli, Lema sabacthani?” (Matt. 27:46). Christ was an Enos in the remembrance of the Lord—despised by men and forsaken by God.
Luther called out to God now: You left your Son for a little while! How is this possible? But with great glory, you still “fathered” him, showing him how far you were from forgetting him, as in Isaiah 54:7-8: “For a small moment I have forsaken you, but with great mercies will I gather you. In a little wrath I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting kindness I will have mercy upon you, says the Lord.” The Hebrew “min” used here can ask a question, but in this case, it is stepping back and expressing astonishment: How did you do this, Lord? You made him weak, forsaken, dead. Christ, our head, goes before us, and we now undergo the same cross—only then to be crowned.
6-8 Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea.
Christ, therefore, being made man (Enos) for us (forsaken and afflicted on all sides and by all, as Luther says) now has dominion over all things. He has a dominion that is seen, celebrated, praised and famed—with him resting in all things. He is now honored, adored and sought by all—not a single creature in the world does not know him because Christ has sent forth his angel-preachers to preach to every creature precisely for his honor. Of course, it cannot go unnoticed that David ends his Psalm with the honor of Christ—but he puts it in precise terms of the First Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before sin. Genesis 1 tells us that Adam and Eve were made in God’s (“our”) image and given dominion over sheep, oxen, beasts of the field, birds of the air and fish of the sea.
Yet this does not mean that it is “mankind” that David addresses here rather than Christ. It means instead that when Christ is preached for the forgiveness of sin, he not only is honored after first being humiliated, but that the end of sin is also the end of the law. Then what God intended to have happen in original creation—before sin—finally happens. The kingdom of Jesus Christ, which takes us into his glory with him, now has dominion over animals. With Christ finally preached and believed in, we now have true worship. No more sacrifice of animals or men to gain God’s favor! There is no dominion by law, and only dominion that acknowledges all creatures of God as his own.
Christ’s kingdom will have all the creatures! They will also be under our dominion in heaven–not by law, but by gospel—as we freely and joyfully care for our animals as Christ cares for us.
9 O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!
Finally, after Christ’s cross and resurrection, after our sin had covered us and then was covered by Christ, we return to David’s original prayer: O Lord, O Christ, how majestic is your name in all the earth! From the mouth of Babes, why do you care, Lord? It is hard to believe that sinful man has ended. It is harder yet to believe that Christ’s name is the one known throughout the whole earth, since he was so lowly and so despised, yet he is now preached throughout the world. It is harder yet to believe that Christ is exalted by faith alone. But we have heard from Christ’s preachers that our God is mindful of us— through his Son. He visits us; he crowns us—by Christ.
The Psalm now is this: as Christ suffered and then was exalted, so we are also in him. Only when we have been reduced to nothing—even unto death—does God remember to exalt us as his Christ. What kind of people does God have his eye fixed on? The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, but not because of their work. He cares for us because his Son has taken our sin. God regards only the lowly things—men or angels—since his way is mercy rather than merit, making his name great in all the earth.
