Why We Worship: Psalm 8 and the Foundation for Praise

We live in a largely self-absorbed world, and with that self-absorption inevitably comes a low view of God. While it’s not incapable of occasional flashes of altruism, ultimately, fallen humanity is imprisoned inside its own ego. Rather than living to the praise of God’s glory, we live to the praise of our own.

This self-centered worldview is opposed to a God-centered understanding of things. It doesn’t square with Scripture. The Eighth Psalm is framed with the refrain “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (vv. 1, 9).

The Bible’s approach to life is fundamentally different from that of individuals who don’t heed its truths. Scripture begins with God and His glory, not man with his need. It’s only in sufficiently answering the question “Who and what is God?” that we are able to address ourselves. Calvin comments, “Man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.”¹

A right knowledge of God is the foundation for praise. Psalm 8 helps us to know God and then to know ourselves in relation to Him.

Who Is God?

The opening verses of Psalm 8 describe God in terms of both His majesty and His creative power.

The Majestic God

The context for this psalm makes its truths all the more astounding. We see its author, the majestic king David, bowing beneath a greater Majesty, the eternal God. It would be a lot like sitting beside the late Queen Elizabeth, the longest-serving British monarch, and hearing her confess in worship, “O Lord, how majestic is your name!”

Our English translations place two occurrences of the word “Lord” beside each other. The first time, each letter is capitalized (“LORD)”; in the second, only the L is capitalized (“Lord”). And that’s because they are two different words in the Hebrew.

The Bible begins with God and His glory and not man with his need.

The first word is Yahweh (or Jehovah). It’s the name Moses received when he asked God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” and God responds, “I AM WHO I AM. … Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” (Ex. 3:13–14).

God’s name is the revelation of Himself. Bound up in His name is an explanation of all that He is: wondrous and magnificent, creator and sustainer of everyone and everything, eternal, infinite, unchangeable in His power and perfection, and so on. Irrespective of people’s reaction, God is everlastingly majestic. He is the Majestic One.

This majestic name of God, we notice in verse 2, is opposed by “the enemy and the avenger.” And this opposition is silenced not by man’s own power but by frailty: “Out of the mouths of babies and infants, you have established strength.”

Isn’t this how God works? It wasn’t by its strength, after all, that Israel defeated Goliath but by means of a God-dependent shepherd boy (1 Sam. 17:1–11, 23–45). Or consider Paul’s words to the Corinthians:

Consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. (1 Cor. 1:26–29)

When we acknowledge ourselves to be frail, we can embrace an identity stronger than anything we can muster by our own merit.

The Creator God

If the first two verses depict a king bowing down before a Majesty, verses 3–4 describe the shepherd-boy-turned-king lying on his back, pondering the vastness of the night sky. “The heavens,” David writes in one of his other poems, “declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1).

David knew only a fraction of what we know. He didn’t know about the Milky Way. He had no conception of light years, galaxies, billions of stars, etc. But as he lay there and looked, he realized that each star being in its appointed place, the alternation between nighttime and sunrise remaining constant, and all the other heavenly wonders he could perceive were results not of coincidence but of divine providence.

How different David’s words in verse 3 are from those of many in our world! Many today believe the universe to be merely a combination of “cosmic chemical accidents”²—a collection of molecules held in suspension and carried out by natural processes. But the biblical worldview says, “No, behind the universe is the creator God.”

And this all-powerful Creator is personally involved with His creatures. David marvels at the wonder that the creator God is “mindful of him” (v. 4). He cares for him. Indeed, that the Almighty sacrificially loves and cares for His people is distinctive to Christianity. The story of religion is one in which man tries to build up to a distant deity; Christianity claims that the Creator has stepped down into time.

What Is Man?

The psalm’s concluding verses speak of man in relation to both his dignity and his dominion.

Here is man as the central character in the work of creation. He’s “crowned … with glory” as God’s image-bearer and distinguished from the animals, over which he has dominion (vv. 5–6). That is, man receives the responsibility of ruling over God’s world under the authority of God’s Word. Really, these verses are a commentary on Genesis 1: man living under God’s Word, tending to the world in its pristine beauty.

Why, we wonder, does the world look so different today than how it’s described in Psalm 8? The answer is found in Genesis 3, which describes the fall and rebellion of humanity. In a word, our dignity is more than matched by our depravity.

Man rules over God’s world under the authority of God’s Word.

To be depraved does not mean that we are as bad as we possibly could be. Rather, it means that every area of our lives—our minds, wills, emotions, bodies, and behavior—is affected by sin. We are marked by dignity as made in God’s image, but also by depravity as sinners before God’s sight. The image of God in us is not extinguished but obscured, like the old castles of Scotland that have been ruined by the elements. Their beauty isn’t obliterated, but it is spoiled. They’re glorious ruins.

No doubt, our depravity spoils God’s good designs. Whenever we step out from underneath God’s authority, disorder ensues.

Jesus: Majestic God and Sinless Man

We read this psalm, then, with a sense of longing. We await its greater fulfillment, anticipating the day when the created order will be restored to its original purpose.

David wrote looking ahead to Jesus—the perfect man, the last Adam, the Good Shepherd and King of Kings. He fulfills all that is represented in Psalm 8. He is the Majestic One. He has been raised, seated far above all authority and dominion, above every name in this age and for the ages to come. And He has borne the curse that has befallen us in our ruin, beginning even now to remove the effects of our sin.

The Holy Spirit gives us Psalm 8 to awaken us from our self-centeredness, urging us to see ourselves in the light of the knowledge of God. Only then are we able to stand with the redeemed and say, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.”

This article was adapted from the sermons “The Foundation for Praise” and “God and Man” by Alistair Begg.