Psalm 8
1 O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.
2 Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas. 9 O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
God is more glorious than the heavens. The Creator is always more than his creation. We watch the science fiction movies about the great evil genius who makes the robot or super intelligence and it eventually takes control and sometimes even kills its creator. And mankind is testimony to the fact that it is possible to create something that becomes too powerful to manage. One thinks of nuclear weapons. Right now we are witnessing what happens when we are able to drill a hole in the bottom of the ocean without the skill to plug it up should it start to leak.
Mankind has the intellectual skill to make things and hardly any social or moral capabilities to keep them under control and used for only good purposes. So they become uncontrollable and destructive, which is a horrible combination. We are very poor creators. And God is nothing like us in this respect at all. What He creates He controls. What He brings into being He is able to use for His purposes and it shall never rise up and take over. He made the heavens and for all their glories and wonders, and there are endless numbers of those, they are dwarfed by God Himself. For all the mind boggling things that there are in the heavens, God is greater, more stunning and more awe inspiring. He simply cannot be usurped.
One could dwell on such thoughts for a very long time. But the Psalm we are focussed on takes us elsewhere in the very next phrase. “Out of the mouths of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger”. The God who is greater than all the wonders of the heavens, brings triumph to His cause, over His enemies, through babies and infants. This is real power.
God is not like some nuclear equipped super power that gets what it wants because it is able to flash a great arsenal of weaponry. He is the God who takes ordinary little nothings and triumphs through them. Gideon, a little coward of a man is threshing wheat in a winepress so that the Philistines won’t find him, is called by God to lead an army against those same Philistines. God whittles the army down because, as He says in Judges 7:1, if he works through greatness, people will think that it was the army that won the day. God defeats Goliath through a young man named David who kills him with a rock form a sling. God calls a stuttering murderer to lead His people out of Egypt. He calls a young child Jeremiah to stand up and pronounce the judgement of God against a whole country. He selects Peter, the foot mouthed apostle to lead the first church. He chooses a murderous hater of Christians to be the greatest evangelist the world has ever seen.
God shows His power, in part, by using people and things who cannot do anything by themselves. He does this so that they will not get the credit – because it wasn’t they who did it. The galaxies cannot come close to imitating the magnificence of the glories of God. And He chooses to defeat nations and demonstrate His power and bring people to faith through babies and infants. What a wonder it is to be called a child of such a God. And what a wonder to seize upon the opportunities that God gives us knowing that the success of them is not a matter of our power, money, intelligence or anything else. It is about being used by Him, out of His love for us and for His greater glory.
Thank you Lord
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