FRIDAY 17th
Psalm 8
NIV (v4) ‘. . . what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?’
ESV (v4) ‘. . . what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?’
When we were returning from New York in November, our flight was an overnight flight and fortunately I had a window seat, once we had got to the cruising altitude, we had come above what few clouds and mist there had been and the sight was amazing, as I looked up, I could see the stars, and the moon, while we had been in New York there had been a lunar eclipse, one of the longest lasting eclipses for a long time, unfortunately we didn’t see it, but I did see the full moon earlier the same evening. There is something enchanting about the moon, I love to try and photograph it from our house, especially when the sky is crystal clear, to me it is no wonder that there has been all the effort made to get to the moon, not just to see it from afar but to land on it. (Incidentally I have photographed the moon tonight December 16th)
David the psalmist was enchanted with the moon and the heavens, in our psalm today he says ‘When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place . . .’ I don’t know how much they knew about the moon back then, how little, or how much they understood about it, but whatever, David looked at it in awe and as he considered it, he continued with ‘what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?’ David was thinking ‘what or who am I in comparison to everything else you have created. Look at the glory and the splendour and the wonder of the heavens stretched out before me, who am I, what is my worth in comparison?’ But he then considers that man has tremendous worth to God because in all that had been created, man had been given the greatest responsibility of all, that of looking after the earth. (v6)
What is man? What is our worth? Well, we could come up with many answers, but perhaps the most important is this, God considers every single human being as a person of worth, so much so that he was willing to become a man and step into this world to save sinners. As we have entered a Christmas season again,
may we never forget this wonderful truth, Jesus came into this world because of God’s immense love for us, remember what it says in 1 John 4:10, ‘In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.’