In Christ, God first came as a little baby to call us all to come near to Him. He made Himself so approachable, and just like the stars in the sky in some way reflect God’s glory and majesty–which many of the psalms declare–so then, also, how can we not see the joy of the incarnation of our Lord reflected in what is, perhaps, the most profound moment of all in creation–every birth of every child?
Pastor Aaron Kalbas
“O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”
Now, that’s not a question. It’s praise. Notice, this first and last line of Psalm 8 ends with an exclamation point – “How majestic is your name in all the earth!” Of course, we could add the heavens, too… and all the universe… and everything!
However, even though this is a statement of praise, let’s turn it into a question. The psalm says: “O Lord, our Lord, HOW majestic is your name in all the earth!” Well, let’s consider: How majestic is our Lord?
Let’s look at some big numbers…
In order to illustrate the answer, I want to talk about numbers for a minute. And I caution you–this might blow your mind! First, let’s take one of the largest numbers we commonly refer to: A trillion. That’s a 1 with 12 zeros behind it. Let’s consider just how long a trillion seconds is.
You’d think a trillion seconds would have to be several years, right? That seems like a long time. But as it turns out, “several years” isn’t even close.
Here’s the facts:
One thousand seconds is equal to almost 17 minutes. That doesn’t seem like much. So let’s consider a million seconds. How much is one million seconds? It’s almost 12 days! That’s mildly surprising. Who would think that. A second is such a brief moment. But a million of them adds up to almost two weeks! But after a million, things get really, REALLY crazy. You’d never guess how long a billion seconds is.
It’s 31.7 years!!!
Yes, that seems impossible, I know… this means a ninety-five-year-old would barely live three billion seconds in his lifetime! Only three billion seconds!!!
So just how long is a trillion seconds? Well, hold on to your hat…
If a billion seconds is 31.7 years and a trillion is a 1000 billion, you’d need to multiply 31.7 years by 1000, and the result is that a trillion seconds is right at 31,700 years!!! Yes, you read that correctly—31,700 years! Its’ an unfathomable amount of time. This means that the universe hasn’t even been in existence for a trillion seconds—for it hasn’t even been one-third of a trillion seconds since God uttered the words, “Let there be light.” And remember, we are talking seconds, mind you! It means that we couldn’t even get close to counting to a trillion in a lifetime–or even 300 lifetimes–because it takes about 7 seconds just to say a big number like nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine (999,999,999,999).
Now let’s think about it another way–in terms of money. What if you had a trillion-dollar debt and you determined you were going to pay off that debt at the rate of a million dollars a day. But even if you had that kind of money, enough to pay a million dollars a day, it would take a million days to pay off that debt. That’s 2740 years! Which means, even if someone started paying off a debt like this 700 years before Jesus was born, the debt still wouldn’t be paid off today. It would take another 17 years or so—like sometime in 2041. At a million dollars a day!!!! That’s how big a trillion is!
— Now, don’t even think about that fact that our national debt is 34 trillion. That’s too scary! —
Hopefully your starting to get a sense of size and scale of these large numbers. But now let’s apply this to the universe. When astronomers look into the most powerful telescopes and begin to count (more like, estimate) the number of stars in the observable universe, they figure there are about 400 billion stars in our average sized galaxy, the Milky Way. They estimate around 160 billion galaxies in the Universe. You multiple those two numbers together and you get an even bigger number: 64 sextillion. That’s a 64 with 21 zeros behind it. And if the size and scope of that doesn’t blow your mind… this will: GOD CREATED EVERY STAR! How majestic is that!
I know we are used to considering God in light of the fact that He is eternal–before and after all things–but when you consider the sheer number of moments in time and the quanity of detail in the universe, it is truly and mind-blowingly majestic to consider the size and scope of God.
So, how majestic is our God?
He’s bigger than even the biggest number. Yes, indeed, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!”
Of course, King David—the author of psalm 8, had no idea how huge the universe really was. He didn’t have a Hubble telescope to peer into. He probably had no reason to concieve of huge numbers like trillion or sextillion. Just looking up at the stars in the night sky was enough for him to know how little he was in comparison. In psalm 8, he asks, “Who am I? What is man that you are mindful of him?” These are profound questions.
Each one of us is just a teeny, tiny little speck in comparison to the vastness of God’s universe. Put all the people who have ever lived into one spot, the billions and billions of people, and together we would still be just a minuscule, microscopic dot in a tiny corner of one galaxy. So, yeah… Who am I? Who are you? Why would God even notice us?
But God does. He does! I could almost end this article here and we’d have enough gospel in these two words–He does!–to last a lifetime. But there’s more to explore…
Just exactly how much does God care?
Despite our miniscule size, David says, “You have made [man] 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 the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and fish of the sea.” See how the whole scale of size and significance of everything in the universe is confounded in this psalm. Man, who is so fragile and small, is given so much importance in the grand scheme of things. How wonderous is the fact that God is so attentive to the details of our lives when there is an infinitesimal number of details in the universe to attend to every second. Consider how David describes us in another psalm—Psalm 139:
You formed my inward parts; You knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret…
Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.
David isn’t just talking about the biological process of how an embryo develops into a fetus–this, too, he says is a God-directed process–But David is also saying that when we were just embryos, God had already mapped out every last detail of each and every day of our lives! How incredible it seems that the God of the universe takes the time to fearfully and wonderfully knit us together, right down to our fingers and then fills every day of life for the future with His purposes for us. He knows each of us and our thoughts and even the hairs on our heads (by the way, every scalp has roughly 90-150 thousand hairs on it and the bible assures God knows the exact number. cf. Luke 12:2) and He knows where we go and what we do every minute of every day. Who are we that God is this mindful of us? Even the smallest of us, even the tiniest baby, even in the womb.
Babies and infants demonstrate the truth of God’s care more than anything else in all creation.
In Psalm 8, it deliberately says, “Out of the mouth of babies and infants” God establishes His strength and defeats His enemies. What a profoundly wonderful statement. There are so many theological truths touched upon by this statement about babies in Psalm 8. But at a bare minimum, it makes me wonder how so many Christian groups can reject baptism for babies because they think that babies can’t have faith or can’t really have a relationship with God. David says otherwise! He says that God’s care of babies and infants more than anything confounds and disables the enemy. That certainly sounds like baptismal language to me. And, even more so, how much more beautiful is the fact that our Lord Jesus Christ, Himself, when He came into creation, began His earthly existence as nothing more than an infant? In light of the Incarnation, it boggles my mind how anyone can say that babies can’t know God when Christ Himself was a baby. Because of this simple fact that we all celebrate every Christmas, why would we not bring our little ones to Holy Baptism for Psalm 8 makes it clear that babies certainly matter to God. Again, Jesus, himself, was once a baby!
Yes, indeed, “What is man that You, O Lord, are so mindful of him, and the son of man that you should care for him?” … What is man that God should become one of us? What is man that God should be so mindful of us?
But now this then prompts another good question:
How mindful are we of God, in return?
Big numbers aside, let’s talk about little numbers for a minute: We’ve only got seven days in a week and most weeks we probably all struggle to give even the most basic attention to the things of God. Even if we go to Bible Study and Worship on Sunday morning, that’s only two hours out of 168 hours, only 10,200 seconds out of 604,800 seconds. And that’s just our time. In the grand scheme of our lives, how much credence do we give His Word? Do we shape our lives and our choices around His commandments? Do we honor Him and His will for our lives before our own—you know, all those days He’s mapped out for us mentioned in Psalm 139? And do we give even a fraction as much attention to the lives of others that He gives to us?
The answer: No! We haven’t. We don’t. And even if we passionately say we want to and that we will start doing so… deep down we know we are lying. If we are being honest. Indeed, we are poor, miserable sinners in this way. We say we want to do good, and we know the good we should do, but we do the opposite anyway (Romans 7:14-21). And if we deny this, then as the bible says, “we are only deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).
But this psalm isn’t just about us and our sinful problems — this is good news.
It’d be easy to read Psalm 8 as if it’s just glorifying man by saying we are so lucky that God cares about us as much as He does. But, again, this psalm isn’t just about us. It also has some serious undertones that make it a wonderful prophecy of Jesus Christ.
Four times Psalm 8 is quoted in the New Testament—Matthew 21:16; Hebrews 2:5-8; 1 Corinthians 15:27; and Ephesians 1:22. In the last three instances, the authors of the New Testament latch on to the fact that though Christ became man and was for a time lower than the angels, God “put all things under His feet.” But Jesus, himself, quotes from this psalm. After His entry in Jerusalem and mere days before His death, the Pharisees were upset that some children in the temple were proclaiming, “Hosanna to the Son of David.” So they said to Jesus, “Do You hear what these children are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies You have prepared praise for Yourself’?”
Jesus Christ, who was God Himself, the One who became a babe, used this psalm to highlight how even the Old Testament speaks of the wonderful mystery that God would become flesh to save and reconcile humankind through the Holy Child born to Mary. The God who made a sextillion stars and is eternal and infinite and majestic in every way, would become one seemingly insignificant baby, born in a most unholy and unmajestic way. In Christ, God would be more than just “a little beneath the angels.” He would take on the weakest and most despised of forms–everything from the manger to the cross.
I guess you can’t really blame the Pharisees for not understanding this. Indeed, not understanding something is not necessarily a sin. However, not wanting to understand something can indeed be sinful. (cf. Isa 6:9-10). And such was the case with the chief priests and the scribes. Their hardhearted unwillingness blinded them to the fact that this verse demonstrates that the Lord Jesus is the LORD, Yahweh, Himself—even little children understood this, and expressed it loudly with their praises.
Yes, “Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger” (Psalm 8:2)
I just love that verse!
To conclude, I want to point out one final important thing.
In a sermon filled with large numbers, I want to mention one more: The number 63,459,781. That is the total number of known abortions that have been performed in this country since 1973. Today is national Sanctity of Human Life Day. This past weekend hundred’s of thousands of people marched at various state capitals and at our national capital in D.C. to create awareness of the terribleness of abortion so promoted by our increasingly godless culture.
But in keeping with the sermon theme, I would argue that just like the pharisees refusing to see how Psalm 8 could speak of Christ, so also, promoting abortion is just another form of denying the truth about Jesus Christ. How?
The answer: To devalue the majestic wonderfulness of God’s knitting a baby together in the womb and to argue that an unborn baby has no intrinsic worth beyond the choice of the mother to keep or kill that baby, is in some way, also, a devaluing of the mystery and wonderfulness of our Lord’s own incarnation.
In this season of Epiphany, we are reminded that God came into this world to reveal that He is indeed on our side. That’s what Epiphany is all about. Yet, God didn’t come to us in His ALL-MAJESTIC form. That would have been too much and too scary. But who is afraid to approach a little baby?
Do you see the connection, here?
In Christ, God first came as a little baby to call us all to come near to Him. He made Himself so approachable, and just like the stars in the sky in some way reflect God’s glory and majesty–which many of the psalms declare–so then, also, how can we not see the joy of the incarnation of our Lord reflected in what is, perhaps, the most profound moment of all in creation–every birth of every child? Let this New Year bring the world closer to reverence for every birth, every child, every life. For Jesus’ sake and in Jesus’ name. Amen.
O Lord, open my lips... 
Excellent analogy. Thank you for speaking for the unborn & sanctity of life in Christ’s name!
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