"What is man that you are mindful of him?"
Thoughts on Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2:5-9
Psalm 8 is quoted in today’s text (Hebrews 2), so it’s important to understand what it’s talking about. Here’s the Psalm in full:
O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Psalm 8 starts out like many other psalms and songs of praise: O Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Then, the psalmist - King David, by the way - spends a few verses telling us about some of the ways in which Yahweh, the Lord God, is majestic.
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
But then, David poses a question, and it is this question that will occupy our time this morning.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Science fiction writer Douglas Adams once dreamed up an imaginary device that would instantly fry anyone’s brain. It was called the Total Perspective Vortex, and the way it worked was by showing it’s victim the entirety of the universe in all of its size and scope, and then the machine would show the victim his relationship to the universe - a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot that says, “You are here.” The moral of the story was that the one thing you absolutely couldn’t afford to have was a sense of proportion!
Now, the Total Perspective Vortex is obviously made-up, but it does make the point that compared against the backdrop of the immensity of the universe, we look really, really, really small and insignificant.
Just one example. You probably know that the Sun is a lot bigger than the Earth, right. It’s so much bigger, in fact, that you could fit 100 Earths side by side across the inside of the sun! Think about how small you are in relation to the sun.
Let’s take it a step further. I was standing on my back deck one night in my last house, looking up at the night sky, and the constellation Orion was clearly visible in the southern night sky. The reddish star that makes up the head of Orion is called Betelgeuse, and Betelgeuse is what’s called a red giant. It’ll probably go supernova in the next 100 years. If Betelgeuse were dropped into our solar system where the Sun currently is, the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and possibly even Jupiter would all be inside the star. Feeling puny yet?
So, let’s ask David’s question again. Given that God has created stars that are bigger than half our solar system, why would he waste any time on insignificant creatures like we humans?
But David answers his own question, and his answer is breathtaking:
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
Is this not breathtaking? We have been made a little lower - which can mean either “for a little while” or “just a little bit lower” - than the heavenly beings - the angels. We have been crowned with glory and honor. We have been given dominion over all of God’s creation. All things have been put under our feet - a sign of rule and dominion. All the animals. All the birds, all the fish, everything.
No wonder that David concludes again: “how majestic is your name in all the earth.” It turns out that mankind isn’t insignificant in God’s creation - we were created to rule over God’s creation!
Now, I’m sure that raises some questions in your mind, but look at over to Hebrews chapter 2, and I think you’ll see the answer to some of those questions. But before we look at Hebrews, we need to remember something about the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. As Christians, we believe that the Old Testament is the inspired Word of God, just as much as the New Testament is. But we also believe that the Old Testament is not a complete revelation - which is why God gave us the New Testament. One of the consequences of that is that we must allow the New Testament to interpret the Old Testament for us.
So let’s look at Hebrews 2, starting in verse 5 and going through verse 9:
For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere,
“What is man, that you are mindful of him,
or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned him with glory and honor,
putting everything in subjection under his feet.”
Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
Let’s break this text down into three parts, and since I grew up Baptist, I’m going to make them all start with the same letter. (It’s just an little service I provide - no extra charge!) We’re going to look at the PROMISE, the PROBLEM, and the PIONEER.
The Promise
First, the PROMISE. Look at verse 5:
For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking.
Earlier in this series, we noted that the author of Hebrews - we don’t know his name - has been making his case that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is of a greater rank than the angels. You can see this starting in verse 5 of chapter 1. And then, at the beginning of chapter 2, he stops his argument so that he can warn us to pay very close attention to Jesus so that we don’t drift away from him. Now in verse 5, he picks the argument back up - he’s talking about angels again. He says that God did not subject the world to come - the newly re-created heavens and earth - to angels. Angels are not placed in charge over God’s new creation.
And that raises the question, which the author obviously wants you to ask, “who did God subject the world to come to, if not the angels?” Now, at first glance, we would all be tempted to say “Jesus!”, right? And you would be right. Or, more precisely, you would be half-right.
Because if you look at what comes next, it’s a little surprising. Hebrews quotes from Psalm 8, which we just looked at above!
It has been testified somewhere,
“What is man, that you are mindful of him,
or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned him with glory and honor,
putting everything in subjection under his feet.”
In Psalm 8, these verses are talking about mankind in general. However, some scholars think that because verse 6 uses the phrase “son of man”, and that was a title that Jesus used for himself, that these verses are talking about Jesus and not mankind in general.
And that is a possibility, but I don’t think that’s the case. You’ll see why as we continue through the passage, but if we take these verses at face value, the answer to the question “to whom has God subjected the world to come”, would be “mankind”. Not the angels, but people. Human beings. Men and women.
Now, in order to make sure that we’re not out on a limb somewhere, we should ask the question, “is this idea taught anywhere else in Scripture?” And the answer is a very definitive YES. Here are just two:
In I Corinthians 6:3, in the middle of telling the church in Corinth not to take their internal disputes to court, but rather to the elders of the church, Paul says this: “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?”
In Revelation 5:9-10, depicting a scene in heaven: “And they sang a new song, saying,
“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.”
So that’s the promise that God makes - that mankind will one day exercise some form of rule over his created order. And it’s the entire created order, not just part of it, as the writer of Hebrews notes in verse 8: Now in putting everything in subjection to him [that is, mankind], he left nothing outside his control.
The Problem
But there’s a problem, and it’s pretty obvious: That kind of dominion over God’s creation is not what we experience on a day-to-day basis, is it? If God made us to rule, then why are we not ruling?
The author of Hebrews sees this problem as well - look at the end of verse 8: At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. Something has happened to short circuit God’s original design. I call it “God’s original design” because if you look at Psalm 8, it sounds very much like what Adam experienced in the Garden of Eden, doesn’t it?
Listen to Genesis 1:26-28:
“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
When God created Adam and Eve, the first humans, he gave them dominion over all of the creatures of the earth. That’s not quite the same as what we see in Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2 - in Genesis, Adam and Eve’s dominion didn’t extend over all of creation, just over the animals of the earth.
But even that partial rule was lost, because we most certainly do not have dominion over the animals. The animals do not do my bidding. Mostly my cats.
Why did we lose this dominion, this status of ruling? We lost it because of sin. Sin distorted and twisted God’s good design for Adam and Eve and all mankind. When Adam fell, God told him that growing food would now be a hard labor for him - the physical world was no longer subject to him. He had to work hard for his food.
But remember, Psalm 8 was written long after Adam and Eve had fallen into sin. Hebrews 2 was written later still, and both texts tell us that this loss of our status, this loss of dominion over God’s creation, is temporary. In fact, if anything, the dominion promised in these texts of Scripture is greater than the dominion Adam and Eve experienced before the fall!
So how can this be? If sin caused us to lose our status as rulers over God’s creation in the first place, but a greater status, a greater rule is promised to us, then something has to be done about our sin problem, right?
The Pioneer
And that leads us to our third point, the pioneer. Remember what the end of verse 8 tells us - we don’t yet see this promised dominion. We don’t yet see all things subjected to us.
But look at verse 9:
But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
We don’t yet see our own rule, but what do we see now? We see Jesus. We see Jesus, who was for a little while made lower than the angels. We see Jesus crowned with glory and honor. In short, we don’t see ourselves in the position that Psalm 8 promises for us, but we do see Jesus in that position.
How was Jesus made “for a little while lower than the angels”? By becoming a man, by taking on humanity. And this was not a trick, like Jesus just pretending to be human. No, Jesus became fully human without in any way ceasing to be fully God. So, like the rest of mankind, Jesus was made lower than the angels.
But wait a minute - wasn’t the whole point of chapter 1 that Jesus is greater than the angels? If Jesus was made lower than the angels, how can it be that he is greater than the angels now, because Jesus is still fully human as well as fully God?
The answer is that when Jesus died in our place - when he tasted death for everyone, as verse 10 says - he was dealing with our sin problem - the very thing that caused us to lose our dominion in the first place. I love that phrase “tasted death” - a taste is a temporary experience. Jesus tasted death, but he defeated death. And by defeating death, he was crowned with glory and honor.
I’ve called Jesus our “pioneer” here because in verse 10 and following, Hebrews tells us that Jesus’ suffering and resurrection paves the way for our own resurrection, and for the promised dominion of Psalm 8 to finally become a reality. Jesus paved the way for us to follow Him into glory, honor and dominion.
Conclusion
You may be reading this today, and things in your life aren’t looking so good. Your health may be failing. Your family may be falling apart. You may be a million miles from God, wondering why in the world He would care for you.
But if Psalm 8 is true - and it is - and if Hebrews 2 is true - and it is - then God has something wonderful in store for you. You have a role to play in the eternal Kingdom of God, and that role isn’t sitting around on clouds playing a harp! You were made to reign with Christ!
But Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2 can only be a reality in your life if you deal with the sin problem. Just as sin separated Adam and Eve from God’s good purposes for them, sin separates you and me from a glorious purpose in the world to come.
But the good news is that Jesus Christ, our pioneer, tasted death on our behalf. He died in our place, bearing the punishment for sins, and offering forgiveness for all our sins to everyone who will turn away from their sins and trust in Jesus alone to save them.
Jesus alone can save you. Jesus alone tasted death for you. If you place your faith in him, you will have a glorious future with Jesus in the world to come. If you refuse to turn from your sins, you will not experience the glories of the world to come, but everlasting torment. Yes, that means Hell. The message of the Bible is simple: You either go to Christ or you go to hell. Those are your only two options.