The People of His Majesty

One of the reasons we still love the Psalms after three millennia is that they are songs. They are Hebrew poetry, written to be sung. Written by hearts moved by powerful emotions, written into verse designed to capture those emotions and convey them to others, even to later generations — even to us, three thousand years later.

For Christians today, we have at least three ways of reading the Psalms. These are not options, but three ways to read every psalm:

• First, as original compositions: from a human author and for a first audience
• Second, in relation to Jesus: how Christ himself fulfills the deep longings in the Psalms, and how he himself, as man and Israelite, took these precious songs on his own lips
• Third, how these songs then relate to Jesus’s new-covenant people, his bride, his church

We need to have all three of these perspectives in mind this morning, but I want to focus especially on the last one, the church — and not just the church in general, but you, my dear brothers and sisters in Sweden, and your churches. Could I be so bold as to address the Swedish church this morning? (Not the “state church,” but Christ-adoring, Bible-believing, born-again Christians.) Our orienting question is this: What would Psalm 8 have Swedish churches be?

Worship His Majesty

Psalm 8 casts a vision for the future. It not only rehearses some past fundamentals of our world, and not only marvels at God’s grace in the present, but Psalm 8 swells with hope for a coming future. And that’s not just a future for David and the original audience, but a future for us today, halfway through 2025. Psalm 8 gives us, as Christians — and you, as Swedish Christians — a vision for corporate life as a people who cherish God’s majesty.

I love the word majesty. This is a psalm that celebrates the majesty of God. Majesty brings together both God’s greatness and his goodness, both his strength and his beauty. Majesty is not only a fitting term for mountain majesties but a particularly appropriate descriptor of God, who is, above all, “the Majestic One” (Isaiah 10:34).

Majesty is emotive, or affective. It indicates greatness (in sight or sound) that is also wonderful — bigness that is beautiful, imposing size that is viewed with delight, imposing power received as attractive. Majesty calls attention to the greatness of God’s glory and the glory of his greatness. For God’s enemies, his greatness brings terror. But his friends declare his majesty.

God’s majesty is first glimpsed in the world he made. This is God’s natural majesty. The last part of verse 1 says,

You have set your glory above the heavens.

That is, God’s majesty is above the majesty of the heavens. Their majesty declares his greater majesty. And so, David looks at those heavens in verse 3, apparently at night (no sun):

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
     the moon and the stars, which you have set in place . . .

Don’t miss that David looks. He observes. He takes the time to look up at night, and he pauses to see the glory overhead as the majesty of his God. He observes divine majesty, he meditates on it, he feels it deeply, and he crafts a poem, a song of praise, so others might see and feel and express God’s majesty.

I want to be observant like this: observant of God’s world and observant in God’s word. As I look at the wonders of the world, I want to wonder at the God they reveal! I want to find the pace of life shaped by Psalm 8, rather than by the city and the pressures of modern life. Oh, how tragic it would be if I were awake to the glories of this world and blind to the one whose majesty far exceeds them.

I love that verse 3 says “your heavens.” It’s not just “the heavens,” but your heavens. And they are “the work of your fingers” — that is, easy work (not just detailed). This world, in all its majesty and splendor — majestic mountains and waterfalls, splendid forests and oceans, with all their stunning detail and beauty — didn’t take any heavy lifting from God. He just used his fingers.

Majestic as the great features of the creation are, our God is the majestic one. The majesty of mountains and oceans is as nothing compared to the majesty of the one who made them with his fingers and didn’t break a sweat doing it.

People of His Majesty

So, what would our majestic God, through Psalm 8, have our churches be? I have five charges for you, my dear brothers and sisters in Sweden, and for your churches.

1. Be a commending people.

By commending, I mean a praising people. This is a psalm of praise. And the great refrain that begins and ends the psalm commends God and praises him. (The whole psalm is second-person praise to God.)

O Lord, our Lord,
     how majestic is your name in all the earth! (verses 1, 9)

To praise God’s name is to praise God himself. You cannot praise his name without praising him, though you could praise someone without knowing their name. But if you know his name, and praise his name, you praise him.

What name emphasizes is that God has revealed himself to his people. He told his old-covenant people his name through Moses. And he has revealed his new-covenant name to his church in the name that is above every name: Jesus. And the Father of Jesus. And the Spirit of Jesus.

To praise God — not just as generic God, but to praise him by name — is to receive and cherish his revelation of himself to us. The God of majesty whom we praise is not a God of our imagination or speculation or best intuition or reasoning. He is the one true God, who made the world and introduced himself to the world through his old-covenant people and has most fully revealed himself to us in Jesus.

Just last month, before I knew I’d be coming to Sweden, I preached on Psalm 8 to the First Swedish Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The church’s name is now Bethlehem Baptist, but it was founded in 1871 as First Swedish Baptist, and that was its name until April 1945.

When I preached Psalm 8 at the old First Swedish Baptist last month, I commended them for being a praising people. They sing. And because they sing, their ten-year-old daughter church in Saint Paul sings. Visitors often comment to me about how the people of Cities Church sing. Do you know what I say? “We got that from our mother, Mama Bethlehem. (And don’t you talk bad about our mama!)”

And you are a people who sing praise to our majestic God. So Psalm 8 would say, “Abound still more.” Don’t lose your penchant for praise, but lean into it! Keep loosing those allegedly reserved Swedish tongues to praise our God, and with your loosed tongues commend each other.

Being a praising people overflows. When we learn to praise our God, we find ourselves more ready to praise and encourage each other. God is not threatened by Christians praising each other for evidences of his grace. He is very secure. He delights in our vertical praise and smiles at our horizontal praise as we see good in our fellows and commend it.

2. Be a called people.

By called here, I don’t have in mind the call of conversion, but the call of vocation. Psalm 8:6–8 says,

You have given [man] 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.

Now, what does that sound like? Beasts, birds, fish? Any other passage? This is an echo of Genesis 1:28.

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.

The first sense of call in Psalm 8 is to the original commission God gave humanity at creation. Sometimes we call this “the cultural mandate.” Being in God’s image, as his representatives, as his vice-regents over the created world, we humans are called to grow our number and expand our borders. We are to bring new humans into the world and raise them up, and venture out into new territory and bring order to the uncultivated, raw wilderness.

And as humans increase and spread out across the earth, we learn to work together (be more fruitful) and find our specific abilities in the great calling. The aspirations of our hearts and abilities of our hands meet with tangible needs in the world to produce a God-given calling.

“Psalm 8 gives us, as Christians, a vision for corporate life as a people who cherish God’s majesty.”

So, a charge for us today from Psalm 8 is to be good at our God-given vocations. Trace them through Psalm 8, and back to Genesis 1, and under the providence of God. Your work this week and tomorrow morning really matters. Don’t just work for a paycheck; work with a divine purpose. See God’s sovereign significance in your work.

I said this psalm carries in it an energizing hope for the future. As Christians, being called and having dominion brings into view not just the cultural mandate but the Great Commission.

I really believe that a people can do both — that you can be both in Gothenburg and beyond. You can be excellent in local work and energetic in global mission. That doesn’t mean that our individual lives have to be portioned fifty-fifty. But as a church, we carry both of these callings together. We make our local labors excellent, and we go and send in the global cause of our majestic God. Healthy churches care for the global movement and for their own city.

3. Be a candid people.

By candid, I mean honest, real, straightforward. Be honest about weakness, honest about smallness, and honest about sin.

Another way to say it would be humble. Be humble, like David’s astounded question in verse 4. Remember, he has just marveled at God’s majesty in his heavens and his moon and his stars, and then he says,

What is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?

The answer is not that man is great. The answer is that God is great, and man is the undeserving recipient of grace.

God is strong — so infinitely strong that he doesn’t need to gather up the strong to reinforce his strength. Rather, he’s so strong that he gathers up the weak, shares his omnipotence with them, and shows himself strong through them. God Almighty doesn’t need our strength to shore up his or to fill in gaps in his strength. He puts his strength on display by making weak people his instruments and defeating seemingly strong foes. So, in verse 2, David says,

Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
     to still the enemy and the avenger.

Our God helps babies and infants, which means our God helps the weak. We are that! So, be candid. Be honest. You don’t have to play strong. When you have this God, you dare not. Own your weakness, confess it, and cry for help. Our cries for help connect us to the strength of God. (Second Chronicles 16:9 says, “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him.”)

Psalm 8 praises the God of majestic power who chooses to use the weak, not the strong — the little, not the big — and so turns our calculus for strength and worth upside down. Like Paul, we embrace weakness. We rejoice in suffering. We don’t despise the day of small things. We cherish God’s strength and glory — his majesty — on display in human weakness and disability and suffering.

At the heart of Psalm 8 is not God’s natural, expected majesty, but his peculiar, unexpected majesty. He is not just majestic over the stunning heavens and beyond the great majesties of his creation, but he is all the more majestic in defeating his foes through empowering his weak people. He gives man, not angels, his dominion. Then, even more, he gives the weak, not the strong, his salvation.

And you, Swedish church, are not only small and weak but also opposed. There are “foes” (plural), says verse 2, and there is a singular enemy and avenger. The church is often threatened, sometimes embattled — which leads to the next charge.

4. Be a conquering people.

What I have in mind here is that strange last part of verse 8: “whatever passes along the paths of the seas.” Why this extra line? He already said fish. The loop is closed — beasts and birds and fish (and fish is plural). Then something singular lurks at the bottom of verse 8. Whatever seems like a good translation to me. Can you imagine how scary the sea was before people started pretending we knew what was down there?

Elsewhere in the Psalms (74:14; 104:26), and twice in the book of Job (3:8; 41:1), and again in Isaiah 27:1, we hear about a creature called Leviathan, the fleeing, twisting serpent — the dragon that is in the sea. Remember, Psalm 8 is poetry. It’s a song of David. Songs often draw on imagery and don’t speak with the precision of epistles. But even if this line isn’t clear, our call to conquer as a people is clear enough.

If it hints at Leviathan as the epitome and metaphorical embodiment of evil, then our call is clearly related to sin and evil: Defeat it. Tread on it. Put it under your feet. Don’t give the serpent any leash to slither around your garden. What is a Leviathan for you right now? Whatever it is, don’t make peace with it. Put the heel of your soul on the snake of temptation.

But at this point, we might be missing the most important piece of the psalm, which is verse 5.

As it stands, Psalm 8 is stuck. We’re to be a commending people, a called people, a candid people, and a conquering people, but there’s a glaring problem. Here’s how Hebrews 2:8 puts the problem, as he reads Psalm 8:

We do not yet see everything in subjection to him.

Psalm 8 echoes Genesis 1, but something has gone wrong with the world in the meantime, and something is not yet complete when David writes Psalm 8. God, in his peculiar majesty, has given humble man dominion over the works of his hands and put all things under his feet. But Hebrews says, “We do not yet see everything in subjection to him.”

What’s the solution? Hebrews 2:9:

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.

The vision of Psalm 8 was locked until Jesus opened it. So, we end with Jesus as the hinge that brings the majesty of Psalm 8 into our lives of weakness and hope.

5. You will be a crowned people.

Crowned means you will be honored — with final, unending, unchanging honor. It’s an honor that only grows and sweetens forever. How so?

After asking in verse 4,

What is man that you are mindful of him,
     and the son of man that you care for him?

verse 5 says,

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
     and crowned him with glory and honor.

Christ has come and fulfilled the destiny of humanity by going to the cross for us, rising again to new life, ascending to heaven, and sitting “down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:3). Now Jesus, as man, is crowned with glory and honor.

Jesus is crowned, right now. And he is building his church and beautifying his church. And his church, with her groom, will one day rise with him and ascend with him to the throne, and with him be crowned with glory and honor.

And so, we, his church, are a Christ-adoring people. We commend him (and in him commend each other). We are called in our local vocations and commissioned in his global cause. We are candid about our smallness and weakness and sin and need. And we seek to fight back and conquer sin and evil, beginning in our own hearts. And we know that as Christ has been crowned, so we too, his people, will be crowned. And we will adore him and be luminaries of the majesty of God and the name of Jesus.