Music playing At some point most of us have wondered about our significance in this life and have questioned who God is and if he really cares about us personally.
Well we're going to explore those questions today on Truth for Life and find out that there's no such thing as an ordinary person. Alistair Begg is teaching from Psalm 8. Music playing The writer of this poem, this 8th Psalm, knew what it was to sleep out underneath the night sky and to look up into the heavens and to wonder and to ponder. And if we're honest, each of us has occasion to do the same thing. It may not be that we are open to the elements. It may be that we are cocooned safely in the environment that is most comfortable to us. But when a new day dawns, we know what it is to address our own personal concerns—in some cases, our secret and private fears, the longings of our hearts. And in the midst of it all, we have to go somewhere, we have to go to someone, in order to find solace in relationship to these things. And the great temptation of our age, of course, is to believe what is most on offer to us—namely, the idea that we will be able to secure sufficient answers to these things by looking inside of ourselves. And so we're told that we have the capacity, if we would only just discover who and what we really are. But I don't know if you would agree with me when I discover what I really am and what I'm really like. It doesn't actually fill me with joy and with expectation. It actually fills me more with disappointment and concern and an increased sense of fearfulness.
Where are we looking for the help? What are we supposed to do when we confront these questions, fundamental questions, that are here in the psalm? They're essentially two. Who is God, and what am I?
And how do the two things interact with one another, and does it really matter? Is the question, Who is God?, just a kind of big philosophical question that bears no relevance at all to the needs and aspirations that are represented in our lives? Or is it, as the Bible suggests, that it is only in answering sufficiently the question, Who and what is God?, that we're able then to make any sensible attempt at addressing ourselves? Now, the psalmist frames this poem with the same statement. Verse 1 is the same as verse 9. So we need be in no doubt that he is conveying the fact that God is majestic in all the earth.
If we ask the question, Who then is this God?, the first answer is that he is Lord. Yes, you say, I see that in verse 1. He says it twice.
Oh, yes, he does. But if you're looking carefully, you will notice that the first word Lord is all capitalized, and the second word Lord only has a capital L and then three lowercase letters. That is because they're two different words. The first word is the word which is translated or is described as Yahweh, the unpronounceable name of God, the name that God took to himself, if you like, then put down in text, I am that I am. In other words, I am self-existent. I am God. I am the Lord. I am the covenant God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Jacob. I am your God, and I am the God of the people. The second word, Lord, we might translate simply as governor. So in other words, he's saying, O covenant Lord, you are the governor of the whole affair. How majestic is your name in all the earth!
Your name defines majesty. And you will notice that his name extends not only throughout the entire earth, verse 1, but his glory—that is, the manifestation of who and what he is—reaches even above the heavens. And his rule, his majestic glory, his position as God, is then declared not in a dramatic expression of power and of peculiar authority or of might, but strikingly—and I'll just immediately strike as quite surprising—that he then says, Out of the mouth of babies and infants you have established strength because of your foes to still the enemy and the avenger. In other words, when opposed, he answers it with children singing.
What kind of God answers the opposition to his majesty by saying, Let's have the children sing? Out of the mouth of babies and infants you have established strength. Now, does that mean simply, literally, just babies, like, through in the nursery?
Well, it definitely means that. But I don't want to be unkind in any way. But we are just a bunch of overgrown babies. I mean, we grew, but the baby factor remains. In fact, you could argue, psychologically, that many of us are trying constantly to trample this down and for people not to know. And in fact, the discovery of our own identity is directly related to our ability to acknowledge, I am tiny. I am frail.
I am feeble. In other words, to be prepared to challenge the contemporary perspective on humanity, which is, I am large, I am powerful, I am significant. Well, if you were saying that this morning, I hope you have a spouse, because they could have told you what a lot of rubbish that is. Now, what is the point? The point is a very straightforward point, and it is this—that when we acknowledge ourselves to be that, then we enter into a discovery of why God has made us enter into, if you like, an identity that is far stronger than any of our attempts to establish and to define our own identity.
And in an era of identity politics, surely this has something to say. So he is, then, the Lord. He is the covenant God, and he is the Creator. And that's why the heavens declare his glory. Verse 3, When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you've set in place, when I look up into the night sky, he says, I have to reach certain conclusions.
Now, think about it. David did not know what we know about galaxies. David did not know… If you'd said to him, What about the Milky Way? he would have said, The what?
If you'd said, What about the Andromeda? he would not have known. He did know that that day followed evening. He would have been able to observe that there were certain formations and structures in the night sky that over a period of time were observable and so on.
He didn't know a fraction of what we know. And yet he knew enough to know, When I look at this, I declare that you are the Creator God. And the further complexity of the universe, which is known to us now because of our ability to probe into the universe, ironically provides for many a basis for saying, There can't possibly be a great Creator God who is majestic in all the earth, when in actual fact the very complexity points to the Creator.
Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above join with all nature in manifold witness. Who is God? He's Lord, he's Creator, and thirdly, he's the Creator who cares.
Who cares? Now, this is distinctive to Christianity. If you probe religions today, you will find that people are constantly trying to reach up or build up or find a way up to a distant deity, whoever and whatever it is. The story of Christianity is that the Creator of the universe has stepped down into time. And indeed, he has done so because he cares.
Look at the picture. What is man that you're mindful of, then? The Son of Man that you care for him. Later, in one of his other psalms, he says, As for man, his days are like grass, which is true. He flourishes like a flower of the field, the wind passes over it, and it's gone, and its place remembers it no more.
Now, he's not being morbid. He's not simply reflecting on his smallness in the place of a vast universe. He is reflecting on the fact that although I am as I am— and incidentally, when it says, What is mankind? What is a human being?
What is a human being that you care for them? And the whole story of the Bible is the story of God who cares. That's why we sang some of the hymns this morning. One of my favorite verses is, Fatherlike, he tends and spares us. Well our feeble frame he knows. In his hands he gently bears us and rescues us from all our foes. You see, if we were able to take this morning and just run through, very superficially, the needs and cares and longings and difficulties and disappointments and so on that are represented even just in this second morning service, we fill up all of these screens three times, four times, five times. And everyone has a legitimate right to say, Is there anyone who really knows, and is there anyone who really cares?
Well, not if you live in a world of random, pitiless indifference. I invite you to acknowledge your tininess, your helplessness, and find how big God is, how good God is, how God cares. Since last Sunday, I have been in the company of those who have told me of some of the deepest sadnesses of their life.
I will not take time to articulate them. And the real longing of the human heart is to ask, Does God care? Well, the God that we are introduced to is not, as I've said to you so many times before, a God on a deck chair but a God on a cross. Nicholas Walter Storff, the professor at Yale who lost his son in a climbing accident when his son was, I think, twenty, in his little book Lament for a Son, at one point says, If you want to know who I am, I am a man who lost his son.
And here's the issue. God says, If you want to know who I am, I am a man who lost his son. Who gave… How will he not, then, who freely gave him up for us all, will he not also with him freely give us all things? That's enough on who God is. Just a word concerning, then, who or what are we?
What is man? Verse 5. You've made him a little lower than the heavenly beings. You've crowned him with glory and honor.
What does that mean? It's a reference to creation. The psalmist is reflecting on Genesis 1, 2, and 3. He's aware of the fact that God has made man in his image, that he has made him distinguishable from the animal world. He has given to man dominion over that world, and he has given to man—I'm talking mankind, now humanity—he has given to us stewardship of the earth. So we have, on the one hand, dominion, and we have, on the other hand, stewardship.
Why? Because we possess a dignity. What is the source of the dignity? It is that we have been made in the image of God, that he has made us in such a way that we might know him. He has made us for a relationship with himself. God has made humanity for him, and God has made the rest of the created order for that humanity.
So here is our glory, and here is our honor. You've never met a person who wasn't made in the image of God. There are no ordinary people. No ordinary people. There's no one who's like, Oh, well.
No! Made in the image of God. The person behind you on the bus. Made in the image of God.
And made to enjoy all the rest that God has given us. Who did this? Of course, if you're an atheist, did did this.
Who did this? Thanks be to nothing! You sit down and have your breakfast. Do you ever say thanks for your food? To whom do you say thanks? Who made the mountains? Who made the trees? Who made the rivers that run to the seas? And who put the moon in the starry sky?
Somebody bigger than you or I! And he gave it to us, all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful. The Lord God made them all. He gave his eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell.
How great is God Almighty, who has done all things well! That's our dignity. But wait a minute. Things are not quite as they should be, are they?
Why? Because of the fall of man. Because although God gave everything for the enjoyment of Adam and Eve, he gave them one thing that they mustn't do.
And they decided, with a little outside help, that that was the one thing that they really wanted to do. And the evil one who tempted them to that end said, The reason he doesn't want you to do this is because he wants to deprive you of things. When in actual fact what he was doing was giving them an opportunity to declare that they trusted him entirely, and that everything that he had given them to enjoy would be sufficient for them. That dignity is to be matched, then, by our depravity. Now, depravity is a kind of scary word, and it's often used to suggest something that isn't true. It doesn't mean that we are as bad as we could possibly be. It just means that there's no area of our lives that are unaffected by sin. It affects our wills, it affects our minds, our emotions, it affects our behavior. Because, you see, what the story of the Bible answering the question, What is man?
is this. It is that man is both marked by a dignity as made in God's image, and he is also dealing with depravity as being a sinner before God's sight. That's why instead of looking after the world in which we've been made, instead of looking after the garden, we want to exploit it or pollute it. Instead of living in peace with our neighbors, we become jealous, envious, fearful, filled with misunderstandings. When we think about ourselves, we most of us vacillate between two extremes—either a kind of narcissism on the one hand or self-condemnation on the other. Finding it really, really hard to get ourselves sorted out.
Why is this? Because we are a messed-up image of God. And when it comes to God himself, the God who made us for a relationship with him, what do we realize? That we are unfit for his presence. We're actually insensitive to his word.
We're unrighteous before his law. And what we like to do is set our own rules, create our own examination papers, and then grade them ourselves. And you never get less than a B, do you? It's like trying to fill in your scorecard after a round of golf when you never really paid attention. You do not find yourself saying, Oh, yeah, I think it was. I think it was a four.
It wasn't even close to a four! Okay. Well, we must draw this to a close. But here's the point. If you look at this, it says, this is what you've done. You've given him dominion, he's in control of everything, and you have put it in such a place that everything is under his feet. It's all under his feet. So you say to yourself, well, if it is all under my feet, there's a dreadful mess related to this.
It doesn't really seem that this is in place. You might look at this and say, somehow or another, we need a fresh start. Or if you're really perceptive, you might say, maybe what we need is a second Adam. Because the first Adam, he took us down a real bad path, if there was another Adam who would come. Now, for those of you who are paying attention, that's why we read from 1 Corinthians 15. And that is exactly the point that Paul makes. As in Adam all die, so in Christ will all be made alive. We are in Adam as a result of our rebellion and our sin, so by nature these things are true of us, so that the idea of this perfect world, where the animals are all living nicely and none of the plants wither and the control of the universe is all taken care of, we look around and say, No, it's not yet. There's got to be a missing piece here.
Well, yes, of course. Because this is ultimately fulfilled not in you and me as man but is ultimately fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ himself. So, for example, when the writer to the Hebrews quotes from this passage, he says, you know, here's the situation. And then he says, But we don't actually see this yet. But, he says, we see Jesus. So that that which is promised in this psalm is actually provided in Jesus and is fulfilled in Jesus. That the hope of the Christian is not that we will finally, somehow or another, manage to eke out our sorry existence in a universe that is running down and into oblivion, but that we will in Christ be awakened to a new day, to a new heaven, and to a new earth in which dwells righteousness. So instead of random, pitiless indifference, we have the prospect of being united with Jesus. Our time is gone, but here's the thought. You see, we're not going to be able to go in on our own basis—enter through the door.
Therefore, we're going to have to go in on the strength of somebody else. Like going to the masters. If you go in the dining room at Augusta, you have to have a green jacket.
Well, I could never earn a green jacket. But if somebody gave me a loan of his jacket, then I could wear that and sit at the table. Jesus Christ was stripped naked so that those who believe in him might be clothed in his righteousness. Jesus Christ made himself obedient unto death in order that those who trust in him might know the reality of life in all of its fullness. You're listening to a message titled God and Man on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. As you listen today, you may have thought of someone you'd like to share this teaching with. Maybe you'll lead a new members class at your church.
If that's the case, you'll want to request the study guide we're recommending today. This is a companion to the teaching in this series called The Basics of the Christian Faith. The study guide is a step-by-step manual that will help you introduce new believers to core biblical truths.
It's designed for you to use with a friend one-on-one, or you can use it to lead a new members class at your church or a small group, taking them through this helpful overview. Key topics include prayer, the church, the Trinity, salvation, and there's a lot more. This introductory study pairs the 13 messages taught by Alistair in this series with 13 lessons that include scripture readings, questions for discussion, prayers, and recommended resources for further study. Ask for your copy of The Basics of the Christian Faith Discipleship Course when you give a donation to support the Bible Teaching Ministry of Truth for Life today. It's easy to do using our mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate. By the way, there's a leader's guide for this study that includes tips, an answer key, other helpful information, and that's free to download at truthforlife.org slash Christian Faith.
Thanks for listening today. Next in our series, we'll explore the authentic Jesus. Is he God? Is he human? Is he both? Tomorrow we'll find out what the Bible reveals. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
