If you were to ask any normal churchgoing person to define a psalm, I suppose that what he or she would most naturally compare it to is a hymn. A prayer perhaps, but chiefly a hymn in which David or one of the other authors of the psalms praises God. And the person would be right! For more than anything else, the psalms in our Bibles are praise hymns.
In seeing Nebuchadnezzar’s insanity in taking the glory for himself that should have gone to God, I have noticed that this is precisely the way our society increasingly regards itself. Western society has lost sight of God. It no longer sees man as a creature made in God's image, whose chief end is "to glorify God and enjoy him forever." It has eliminated God from its collective conscience. Then, because it no longer looks to God to derive its sense of identify and worth from him, it looks in the only other direction it can look. It looks downward to the beasts and derives its identity from the animal kingdom.
But here is the interesting thing. When the psalm gets around to describing man specifically, it describes him as being "a little lower than the heavenly beings" rather than "a little higher than the beasts." It could have been written the other way around. If man really is a mediating being, as the psalm maintains, it would have been equally accurate to have described him as slightly higher than the beasts rather than as slightly lower than the angels. But it does not, and the reason it does not is that, although men and women have been given a position midway between the angels and the beasts, it is nevertheless man's special privilege and duty to look upward to the angels (and beyond the angels to God, in whose image women and men have been made), and so become increasingly like God, rather than downward to the beasts, with the result that they become increasingly beast-like in their behavior.
Yesterday we concluded by making the observation that it is quite astonishing that the God who created this vast universe should actually care for us. Yet that is what he does. And not only that. Not only does God think of us and care for us, which is what verse 4 asserts. He has also crowned us with "glory and honor" (v. 5), which means that he has given mere human beings, mere specks in this vast universe, a significance and honor which is above everything else he has created.
Psalm 8 is quoted a number of times in the New Testament, on one occasion by Jesus. He had entered Jerusalem in triumph on what we call Palm Sunday. While he was in the temple area, healing the blind and lame who came to him, the children who had observed the triumphal entry continued to praise him, crying, "Hosanna to the Son of David." This made the chief priests and teachers of the law indignant. But Jesus replied, referring to Psalm 8, “Have you never read, ‘From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise’” (Matt. 21:16)?
