Daily Devotional - 08/27/2008

The Lord is with us!

Psalm 8 is first and foremost a psalm of praise.  The words of the opening verse are perhaps familiar to you , as they are to me, from the opening stanzas of a praise chorus from several years ago;

"O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is Your name in all of the earth!"

As an astronomer I find the lines of the second half of verse one and verses three and four particularly meaningful given the number of long nights I have spent looking up at the sky and marveling at both the beauty and grandeur of the midnight sky adorned with the jewels of the stars and planets in their nightly dance.

"You have set your glory 
       above the heavens.

When I consider your heavens,        
      the work of your fingers,
      the moon and the stars,
       which you have set in place,
what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, 
       human beings that you care for them?"

It would be easy for me here to wax poetic about the creation and how amazing it is but I think that there's so much more to talk about in this psalm that's really deep and powerful.  I find David's question at the end of verse four a very good one, "Who are we that the God that created all of the heavens and who has placed His glory above them would care about or for us?"

The answer to this can be found in the psalm itself.  God has created us and we are His.  He can no more not love us or care for us than He could stop receiving the praise of even children and infants.  This is an amazing bit of theology right here.  Most religions create Gods who are huge and powerful and who care little or nothing for the affairs of humans beyond what they can exploit from them, either in terms of sacrifice or in terms of illicit liaisons to produce various offspring.  This God, David's God, cares for and loves human beings beyond that.  This love is the dominant theme and recurrent strain throughout all of Scripture.  God loves us and seeks relationship with us from the time of walking with Adam in the Garden to His choice of death on a cross to reconcile us to Him to bringing us together as a body and a New Jerusalem.

Look again at he first verse and recognize that the Lord's name, His essence, His being, is IN all the earth.  He is to be seen in all that He has created; His stamp in on all of it.  Yet, as verses five through eight tells us, He has placed us in a position of authority over it all.  We are rulers of all the earth and all that is in it.

For many in our culture, this is viewed as a license to us our world as a means of personal profit and material gain.  For them, the creation is something to be exploited to produce wealth and power and prestige.  They see the extraction of various resources as a personal right and privilege regardless of the cost to the rest of creation.  I've read many born-again evangelicals argue that God will eventually destroy the earth and make a new heaven and new earth and so there's no problem with us doing whatever we'd like to use this one up before we go.

Others in our world choose instead to deify the earth and deny that human beings have any special role, place or claim to the resources found on the earth.  They argue that we should live in such a way to not impact the earth or the species that inhabit it in any way.  We have no special rights over other animals so we shouldn't eat them, we have no special claim over the land so we should make as little impact as possible and, in extreme cases, there are those who say that we are so destructive as a species that we should reduce or eliminate our growth by taking significant population control measures up to and including the termination of the lives of unborn and elderly.

To be honest, I think both positions are deeply flawed and unbiblical.

I believe that this psalm argues for a position that both recognizes the authority God has given us over creation and the sacredness of the creation itself.  We are given rulership over the earth and all that is in it but every piece of that creation has God's name in it.  An awareness of that should affect how we as Christians enact our authority.  Let me see if I can give you an example.

Let's pretend that God gave you a jar full of some wonderful substance that contained His love (and since God is love, it really contains Him) in some mystical and mysterious way and told you that you were the person with the authority to distribute the substance as you saw fit.  The substance would have the power to heal brokenness, sustain the lost, bring peace and joy and end suffering but there's only a certain amount of it.  What would you do with it?  In your exuberance to share it would you use it up all at once?  Would you say that no matter what God might have said you don't have the wisdom to best use the substance and so bury the jar in your back yard?  Would you use the substance to get rich; selling it (and hence selling God) to the highest bidder in small amount making it available only to those who were already rich and powerful?  Would you decide that the power was given to you and you alone and set yourself up as the only, ultimate authority?

When we see creation as something that is co-created with us and thus sacred and containing, in some mysterious way, His name it should change how we exercise our authority.  Brian McLaren, in his book "A Generous Orthodoxy," suggests that we should view the earth as sort of "Sister Earth" to whom we are an older brother when we make decisions about how we think of it when making decisions that have global consequences and treat it when doing things that might affect the local environment.  Such a view might suggest that we have a right to mine coal to heat our homes but that we should do so in such a way that recognizes that the ecosystem in which we do that was created by God and in some way bears His name and should be nurtured, protected and restored when damaged even if that means the coal costs more to mine and our electricity (which the coal is used to produce) costs more to buy.  On a local level that might mean that we chose to buy products that create less waste in the packaging materials that end up in landfills or as environmentally destructive waste products.

I believe that it is in these sorts of decisions that we live out our spoken praise, "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"

Peace and Grace.

In Him,

Chad  

Psalm 8
For the director of music. According to gittith. A psalm of David.

LORD, our Lord, 
       how majestic is your name in all the earth! 
       You have set your glory 
       above the heavens.
Through the praise of children and infants
       you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
       to silence the foe and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens,
       the work of your fingers,
       the moon and the stars,
       which you have set in place,
 what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them,
       human beings that you care for them?
 You have made them a little lower than the heavenly beings
       and crowned them with glory and honor.
 You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
       you put everything under their feet:
 all flocks and herds,
       and the animals of the wild,
 the birds in the sky,
       and the fish in the sea,
       all that swim the paths of the seas.
 LORD, our Lord,
       how majestic is your name in all the earth!