Artist: Sean Seal

1 O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
2 Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
4 What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
5 For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
6 You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
7 All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,
8 The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.
9 O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!
Psalm 8

O Lord, our Lord. How we exalt Your name!

We praise Him, glorify Him, and understand our place in His creation. He has given us life and we are aware of who we are and what we are. We are ordained within the will of a loving God. He is the God Whom we seek in supplication. We pour out our hearts to Him. We grow in a personal relationship with Him. We are inferior, but we are superior in this place in creation, in the sense that we are special individually to the most high God. We are special enough to enjoy His personal presence and praise Him as the omnipotent and omniscient God of everything.

Who are we to have this ability set forth by our God? We are thus made in His image for His pleasure, given free will, fail, and given His universal yet personal, grace. His glory is above all He created and we stand in awe of our place within the entirety of all creation. Who are we that should have company the Divine Lord? In this company we are made to use weakness for strength, poverty for richness, death to eternal life. We are but babes, helpless and insecure, made fully useful under His protection and love. We ask in reverence because even as we know Him more, our awe of His focus upon us, His work in us, and His protection over us still brings us to our knees. It is never rhetorical, it is sincere:  Who are we? We never stop feeling the wonder of being engrossed with His imparted love. We need to never lose this awe and continue to ask lest we become complacent. But in asking is only our humility. In our trust is the surety of who we are.

Above all the honor we give Him, the praise for Him , and humility we present Him, He gives us Jesus:

Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! John 1:29

He places all under His feet, For Jesus our Savior was at the beginning and came in perfected flesh to draw man from the inability to grasp and hold the physical Law, to a state of having His spiritual law written within us on our hearts. He crushes the enemy under His heel and defeats death. We fear no more the grave for we have now eternity through the grace of our Lord in Jesus Christ.

So, we praise Him!

Matthew Henry pens regarding Psalm 8:

“It begins and ends with the same acknowledgment of the transcendent excellency of God’s name. It is proposed for proof  that God’s name is excellent in all the earth, and then it is repeated as proved  in the last verse.”

He who is glorified, is thus glorified always. We stand in awe always, we have redemption always  as we place our life in Jesus.  Who are we? We are the sheep of the Shepard. The beloved of creation held gently in His arms. We are His children.

Rick Stassi

1/22/2012