The Sky and the Infant

Psalm 8 begins and ends with the same line, praising the majesty of the LORD's name in all the earth. Between those two bookends David looks in two directions, up and down, and finds the same glory in both.

Up first. Verse 3 speaks of the heavens as the work of God's fingers. That is a tender picture. Not his arm, not his fist, but his fingers, the way a craftsman sets a jewel or a parent arranges a child's hair. The moon and the stars are the fine work. They are enormous to us and small to him.

Then down. Verse 2 says that from the lips of children and infants God has established strength, or as some translations have it, praise, to silence the enemy. Jesus quoted this verse on the Monday of Holy Week, in Matthew 21:16, when the chief priests were indignant that children in the temple were shouting hosanna. The religious professionals were offended. The children were right.

Hold the two images together. The God whose fingers hung the galaxies chooses to defeat his enemies through the unpolished praise of small people. Not through the eloquent or the armed, but through the weak, the young, the ones nobody would put on a stage. This is not a sentimental thought. It is the way God has always worked, from a shepherd boy with a sling to a manger in a small town to a cross outside the city.

On a Sunday morning, many of us will sit in rooms where someone is singing off key, a baby is fussing, and the sermon is not polished. Psalm 8 says that this is not an obstacle to God's glory. It is one of its main channels. Something happens in a congregation of ordinary people praising an extraordinary God that the heavens themselves cannot do. The stars declare, but they do not sing. We do.

So here is the turn toward life. Do not wait to feel adequate before you praise. Verse 4 asks what human beings are, and the honest answer is not much. Verse 5 answers that God has crowned them anyway. Bring the crown he gave you and the voice you have, whatever its quality, and add it to the sound. The enemy is silenced not by our strength but by our worship.