Strength Where You Least Expect It

Introduction (8 min)

If you have your Bibles, I invite you to with me to the book of Psalms. This morning, we’re going to look at a well-familiar psalm: Psalm 8.

Now, by way of introduction, I’ll say this, that as a father of three boys, and being a current large adult-sized boy myself, I’ve come to learn some effective ways of gaining my boys’ attention.

And one of the ways that I can quickly focus their attention and gain their interest is a simple question: Want to learn about the world’s biggest ________.

It doesn’t really matter what comes after.

Biggest ship

Fastest car

Biggest snake

Biggest tree

Tallest mountain

You men who have boys will understand this strategy. Sure it can work on girls. But it’s an especially powerful for boys. My boys are naturally drawn to big things. Powerful things. Dangerous things. And the bigger, the more powerful, the most exciting to them.

So, for instance, they might find it interesting that the world’s most powerful locomotive is the Shen-24 located in China. It’s a massive electric locomotive consisting of six sections that combined produce a enormous 38,631 hp. This locomotive is used in China to haul coal, and because of it’s immense power it can haul up to 10,000 tons of coal up a 1.2 percent slope. By way of comparison, a common modern diesel locomotive you might see pulling a freight train produces around 3,000-5,000 hp.

Or consider the world’s biggest, most powerful diesel engine, called the Wartsila RT-flex96C. The engine has 14 cylinders producing a whopping 107,389 hp as well as 7,000,000 newton-meters of torque. The engine itself is 44’ tall and 90’ long, which is longer than the height of a 4-story building, and it’s used to drive massive cargo and tanker ships in the ocean.

Now, these are all examples of how we as humans understand the world to work. It’s basic physics. We expect that the size and the physical strength of something naturally equates to it’s ability to perform work. So, the bigger the engine, the most powerful it is. The more powerful it is, the more work it can perform.

And because the physical world works that way, we might naturally assume that the spiritual world would operate under those same principles.

We might expect, for instance, that the people with high intellectual abilities; those with exception business acumen; those with dynamic leadership skills; or those with extraordinary interpersonal skills, would be the most effective at kingdom work.

We might be surprised, however, to discover that none of those things guarantees spiritual effectiveness. Sure, none of these are bad things in and of themselves…but they don’t automatically guarantee usefulness for kingdom work.

The prophet Isaiah, speaking for the Lord, wrote to Israel:

Isaiah 55:8–9 LSB

8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” declares Yahweh. 9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts.

That is to say, there is a mysteriousness about the way God thinks and about the way God does things. God’s ways and God’s thoughts are not always compatible with man’s ways and man’s thoughts.

Whatever we know about the physical world, we have to recognize as believers that God operates in ways that defy human expectation and human thinking.

The spiritual physics of the universe—we might call it—aren’t the same as regular physics.

Transition: And this is where Psalm 8 comes into play. This short, concise psalm paints a picture of a God whose strength is seen in the most unexpected places. He is a God who flexes his muscles in the most counterintuitive ways.

He is a God who is in the business of doing big things through small, seemingly insignificant means.

Let’s read this psalm together, and then we’ll dig in a little bit and explore this principle of spiritual physics at work:

Psalm 8 LSB

For the choir director. According to the Gittith. A Psalm of David. 1 O Yahweh, our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth, Who displays Your splendor above the heavens! 2 From the mouth of infants and nursing babies You have established strength Because of Your adversaries, To make the enemy and the revengeful cease. 3 When I see Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have established; 4 What is man that You remember him, And the son of man that You care for him? 5 Yet You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You crown him with glory and majesty! 6 You make him to rule over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet, 7 All sheep and oxen, And also the animals of the field, 8 The birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, Whatever passes through the paths of the seas. 9 O Yahweh, our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth!

I’ve divided this psalm into four points just to help us organize it in our minds:

The Principle Revealed (v. 1)

The Principle Illustrated (v. 2)

The Principle Applied (vv. 3-8)

The Principle Reviewed (v. 9)

Transition: Let’s look at the first point.

1. The Principle Revealed (v. 1)

Now, as we begin, I want to note for a moment the setting of this psalm.

We see from the superscription at the beginning of the psalm that this is a psalm written by David.

We don’t know when he wrote this psalm. Was he a young man? Was he still just a shepherd boy? Was he already Israel’s king? We don’t know the answers to any of those questions.

But we can certainly imagine what that setting might have been.

David certainly spent many nights out in the field as a young man watching after his father’s sheep. I’m sure he often gazed up into the night sky and saw the vast, uncountable haze of stars that comprises of the Milky Way galaxy spread across the sky before him.

And naturally, this vision of the cosmos moves David to praise the creator God, and so he writes in verse 1,

Psalm 8:1 LSB

1 O Yahweh, our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth, Who displays Your splendor above the heavens!

David sees this magnificent scene of celestial wonder and he recognizes in it the majesty and sovereign power and epic magnitude of God.

“majestic” = speaks of power

It describes something that’s powerful and that causes people’s jaw to drop in awe or even in intimidation

Psalm 93:4 = God’s might is greater than the “mighty breakers” of the sea

Illustration: Everything about the cosmos is big. It’s on a scale beyond our comprehension. And with our technology now we get to observe aspects of the cosmos that David never got to see.

The Hubble Telescope has given us images of deep space in quadrants of the night sky that appear only as blackness to our naked eyes.

But now we know that there are millions and millions of—not stars but—galaxies of stars in those supposed dark, empty spaces.

Space is far greater and more vast than we can imagine, and it puts on cosmic display the power and glory of God.

In fact, that’s what David writes in another well known psalm:

Psalm 19:1 LSB

1 The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And the expanse is declaring the work of His hands.

The heavens are a cosmic stage upon which God’s incomparable might can be put on full display to an earthly audience.

But what sticks out in this opening verse more than anything else is that David sees in the heavens not a demonstration of the power of some distant, aloof God who’s far too transcendent to be known by His creatures.

Rather, he recognizes the amazing condescension of God who is both wholly transcendent and yet imminently knowable to us.

And we see that in the opening phrase: “O LORD, our Lord.”

In the OT, whenever you see the word “Lord” spelled with lower case letters, it represents the Hebrew word Adonai, which means “lord” or “master”—“One with authority.”

But when you see “LORD” spelled with capital letters, it’s standing as a fill-in for the actual revealed name of God, “Yahweh.”

Application

The fact that God reveals himself and reveals his name to his creatures tells us something about God. He isn’t far away, unknowable, or aloof. He’s not the unknowable Allah of the Koran.

He’s the intimate God who enters into covenant relationship with people.

He’s the mighty and powerful God of Genesis 1, who created everything by speaking it into existence.

And he’s also the intimate Yahweh God who formed Adam personally from the dust of the ground and breathed life into him and spoke personally to him and walked in the garden with him.

The fact that David can call out to the God of the universe by name is a staggering thought and perhaps the most profound realization you can ever has as a human being.

To have a personal relationship with the God of the universe is not something to be taken lightly, and certainly not something to discard indiscriminately.

It is the name of God, David says, and the power of God, that are put on full display in the heavens.

So we might say that the fundamental principle revealed in the opening verse of Psalm 8 is the mighty name of God revealed in the world.

Transition: But what we’re going to see in verse two, is that even in this, spiritual physics is at work because God’s might is going to be revealed as well in the most unlikely of places.

2. The Principle Illustrated (v. 2) (8:00)

Psalm 8:2 LSB

2 From the mouth of infants and nursing babies You have established strength Because of Your adversaries, To make the enemy and the revengeful cease.

Verse 2, admittedly, takes an unexpected turn. It is unique in all the OT. No other verse is like it or says something similar.

It’s hard to see how David could go from seeing God’s mighty name on display in the heavens to seeing his strength established through the incoherent babble of babies. The juxtaposition is enormous.

And yet this is spiritual physics at work.

Humanly speaking, there is no better illustration of weakness than a defenseless baby. It’s the epitome of helplessness and weakness.

And yet it’s not even the baby itself that is the focus. Notice that it’s what comes “from the mouth of infants and nursing babies.”

Somehow, David is asserting that God’s power is put on display through the inarticulate babble of infants and young babies still too young for solid food.

Illustration: Anyone who has had children remembers the soft, gentle cooing of an infant. It’s delightful!

But it’s not necessarily what blast from a loudspeaker to get the team pumped up before the big game.

Or to replace The Ride of the Valkyries as the helicopters fly in to drop napalm in Apocalypse Now.

It just doesn’t quite communicate that sense of power and strength. At least not to us.

And so these cooing babies become the perfect illustration for the principle at hand: God’s strength is seen in the most unexpected places. In fact, God delights to demonstrate how powerful and mighty he is by working in and through the things that seem to be the smallest and the weakest.

Why does God decide to work this way? What would possibly motivate the transcendent Creator God to use booing infants to display his strength when he could use something seemingly far more “impressive?”

Well, he says in the second line of verse 2, it’s “because of Your adversaries, to make the enemy and the revengeful cease.”

This is talking about all human opposition to God. These aren’t David’s enemies. They’re God’s enemies. And their words are rash. They are arrogant. They are defiant.

And what David is praising the Lord for is that God has determined to show up his enemies using the innocent babbling of little children and babies as his weapons.

The humanly weak cause the humanly powerful to cease. Only God can do that. That’s why he does it this way.

Illustration: David himself experienced this personally. Remember in 1 Samuel 17 when none of the warriors in the army of Israel were willing to face off against the mighty Goliath, this 9-foot behemoth of a man who was a descendent of the Rephaim.

And so God was pleased to kill this experienced warrior using a teenaged shepherd boy armed only with a sling and five smooth stones.

This is how God operates. The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians,

1 Corinthians 1:27 LSB

27 But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong,

Now what’s interesting is that when Jesus was in the temple complex during his final week of ministry leading up to his arrest and crucifixion. And in Matthew 21, is says,

Matthew 21:14–16 LSB

14 And the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the marvelous things which He had done, and the children who were shouting in the temple, saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they became indignant 16 and said to Him, “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’?”

Understanding the context of Psalm 8, you see why Jesus quoted it the way he did. Because it was exactly what David had described.

On the one hand, you have the chief priests and scribes who personally witnessed the signs Jesus was performing, and yet refused to recognize in those signs that they demonstrated that He was the Messiah.

And so when they hear the sound of children shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David” from Psalm 118, a clearly Messianic psalm, they become indignant and demand that he make them stop.

But what they fail to see is that God’s power is being displayed right before their eyes.

The most religiously educated in the entire nation couldn’t recognize the Messiah right in front of them

But the most insignificant members of Jewish society—the children—saw His works, recognized who He was, and sang praises to Him.

1 Corinthians 1:27 LSB

27 But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong,

That’s spiritual physics at works. That’s God working opposite of how humans think.

Transition: And it’s here that David now takes this principle and applies it to what’s really on his mind. And so we go from (1) the principle revealed…God’s mighty name revealed in all the earth…to (2) the principle illustrated…where God’s might is revealed in how he chooses to use humanly weak things to accomplish his purposes…to (3)…

3. The Principle Applied (vv. 3–8) (12:38)

Psalm 8:3–4 LSB

3 When I see Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have established; 4 What is man that You remember him, And the son of man that You care for him?

Now we’re getting to the heart of what’s on David’s mind.

As David stares up into the night sky and sees the vastness of the heavens, it strikes him just how big and majestic God really is and just how small and insignificant he is.

The heavens, he says, are simply the “work of Your fingers” which is a way of amplifying the enormity of God. The cosmos, which seems so big to us, is only the product of God’s “fingers.”

And he has “established” them— “set” them in place as if he has hung a painting on a wall.

Only someone greater and more immense than the cosmos could set the heavenly bodies in their places in the heavens.

All this has caused David to feel very small and very insignificant. With everything in the universe, and all it would seem to take to care for such a massive cosmos, man seems pretty tiny and puny in the grand scheme of things—like a small ant in a massive forest.

And so he asks the question of all questions: “What is man that You remember him, and the son of man that You care for him?”

What would possess the Creator of the universe to take any concern for such a tiny aspect of His massive creation?

“man” = enosh = man as mortal, finite, frail

“son of man” = adam > adamah = “dirt” (cf. Gen. 2:7)

Both terms for man work together to emphasize the fact that man is frail and insignificant compared to the majestic grandeur of the cosmos. His is simply a mortal son of dirt!

KEY: And yet there’s a couple of important truths implied.

For one, the implied answer to the question is that, man really is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

But more importantly, the question implies that God does remember man, and he does care for him! If he didn’t, David would have no reason to say it!

God pays far more attention to us than would seem warranted. And that’s what is so astounding to David.

That human beings—so frail and weak and helpless as we are—would be cared for and attended to so graciously by the majestic Creator of the massive cosmos.

Application

I want to just here and stop make sure you understand the significance of this.

Whatever you’re going through, or whatever you might be struggling with. Whether it’s something physical like with your health, or if it’s something with your marriage, or with a child, or with parenting, or with your job—you’re never alone in that. You’re not the only one who is concerned.

Psalm 8 tells us that God is concerned, and he cares for you, and he wants the best for you.

Jesus told his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount:

Matthew 6:25–26 (LSB)

25 “For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on…. 26 “Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?

If the Lord cares for the birds, won’t he care for you, since you’re worth much more than a bird?

The apostle Peter wrote,

1 Peter 5:7 LSB

7 Casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.

I can’t answer why God has you going through your specific situation. But I can tell you that God’s not just bigger than the cosmos, he’s bigger than your struggles and your trials and your burdens. So much bigger that he can use those struggles for his glory and your good. In fact promises to do just that.

Transition: Now, beginning in verse 5 David starts to unpack just how imbalanced this really is. Despite man’s smallness and frailty and mortality, he has been given a position and a responsibility far higher than his station.

A. Seen in Man’s Royal Status (v. 5)

Psalm 8:5 LSB

5 Yet You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You crown him with glory and majesty!

On the spectrum of things that God has created, there is nothing more powerful than the host of angels that attend to God and serve Him.

Yet man, David says, is given a status that seems completely unbecoming of his frailty and mortality. God has made him a little lower than the angels.

And he has “crowned him with glory and majesty,” which are attributes normally used to describe God not people. And yet God has given his glory and his majesty and placed them like a crown not on angels but humans.

This isn’t something he has earned. It’s not based on his abilities, on his strength, on his power, on his might, or on his intelligence. It’s based on God’s sovereign purposes.

Transition: He goes on in vv. 6-8 to say that not only has mankind been given a royal status but he’s also been bestowed with royal responsibility.

B. Seen in Man’s Royal Responsibility (vv. 6–8)

Psalm 8:6–8 LSB

6 You make him to rule over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet, 7 All sheep and oxen, And also the animals of the field, 8 The birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, Whatever passes through the paths of the seas.

That’s all simply a poetic summary of all of Genesis 1. Everything that God made…from the heavens, the earth, the sea…it’s all been placed under the rulership and authority of man.

The Image of God

Now, at this point, it’s pretty obvious that even though David doesn’t actually use the phrase, he’s clearly alluding to man’s special status as the image of God.

In Genesis 1, after God had created the heavens and the earth and specially prepared them, and after he had filled them with lights and trees and plants and fish and birds and animals.

After all that, He creates man in a unique and distinct way.

Genesis 1:26 LSB

26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, so that they will have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

This verse sets apart human beings from all the rest of creation.

In no other place in creation week does the Trinity deliberate amongst itself before creating. Only with man.

No other creature is made to be God’s image, or created in God’s likeness. No other creature is given dominion or rulership. No animal. No angel. Only man.

Man has been given dominion over it all, which is expressly stated in the second half of verse 6: “You have put ALL THINGS under his feet.”

God made man very special. He set him apart and gave him a unique responsibility.

The image of God in man is not so much a thing you look like or something you’re like. It’s the essence of who you are.

That’s why it’s better to translate Genesis 1:26 not, “Let Us make man in Our image,” but rather, “Let Us make man as Our image.”

Think of man as a living, breathing statue that God has placed on earth.

This statue looks like God. It has his likeness.

We have reason and intelligence.

We’re moral creatures

We possess the communicable attributes of God

But the function of the statue is that it serves as a representation of God on the earth.

God made man to be his second-in-command

His vice-regent

He placed man on the earth to ruler over it for God

Man is God’s representative on the earth.

And the implications of this are enormous:

It’s what gives man his unique worth and dignity.

It’s what gives man his purpose.

It’s what makes murder such a cosmically violent act, because according to Genesis 9:6 assaulting the image of God is equivalent to assaulting God himself.

So as we read Psalm 8, and you wonder why David is so astounded when he looks up into the heavens. It’s because he realizes that, though he is tiny in comparison, as the image of God, he and every other human being has been given dominion and rulership over it all.

And that thought astounds him. And it should astound us.

God, in his infinite and unsearchable wisdom, decided that he would demonstrate his might and glory by handing over the keys to the entire universe to us as caretakers of his grand masterpiece called creation.

And in so doing, he put immense power and responsibility into the hands of what would seem to be the most insignificant of creatures.

Transition: So finally, after all that, David can come back to the same statement he made at the start by revisiting the principle he opened the psalm with.

4. The Principle Revisited (v. 9) (1:00)

Psalm 8:9 LSB

9 O Yahweh, our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth!

Word for word, it’s identical to the first line of verse 1.

But after everything he’s said about God’s might and God’s power and how God uses weak things to silence his enemies, and how he applies that to how he has placed mankind over all his creation—now when he talks about the majesty of the name of God in all the earth, it has a different significance, doesn’t it?

Before it seemed like just a generic statement. Now it has teeth. Now it has specificity.

We’ve been invited to reframe the entire way we think about God and about His power and about what He can do even with the weakest of instruments…like us.

Conclusion

Now, as we come to the end of the psalm, let’s think for a moment about how Psalm 8 might impact how we live and how we think about our lives, particularly as Christians.

Transition: The first thing I want us to note is this:

1. God wants to work through your weakness not your strength, because being weak forces you to depend on him, on his power, and his grace

Isn’t that the essence of the principle we’ve been talking about? How God uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong. And he demonstrates the awesomeness of his might by working through weakness rather than strength.

Paul experienced this personally.

He had a special concern for the church in Corinth. He had poured his heart and soul into that church. He had dealt with their issues. He had pastored them.

And so it hurt him so deeply to find out that they had welcomed into their fellowship false apostles who were accusing him of all sorts of things, from doing ministry to get rich, to sexual sin.

And they had turned the Corinthian believers against Paul.

And so to encourage him, God allowed him a glimpse into heaven. Something that he couldn’t really even speak about. But then he says this:

2 Corinthians 12:7–10 LSB

7 Because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me—to keep me from exalting myself! 8 Concerning this I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might leave me. 9 And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. 10 Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions and hardships, for the sake of Christ, for when I am weak, then I am strong.

That right there is spiritual physics. God doesn’t want to work through your strengths. He wants to work through your weaknesses.

So that as you persevere and keep going and keep believing and keep killing sin, and keep struggling to the finish line despite the obstacles and the pain and the weakness, you can point to Him and say, “I could never have done it if not for Him. I could never have made it. He made me strong in my weakness.”

That’s why you consider at all joy when you face various trials, because you recognize that God uses those as a way of refining you, humbling you, and making you stronger by showing you how weak you are and how much you need to depend on Him to grow and the persevere and to prove out your faith.

2. The gospel saves through weakness, not strength

From a wordly perspective, the gospel is an inherently foolish idea and a weak message.

And that’s just how God wants it. If the gospel was something man could come up with on his own, then it couldn’t save anyone.

Think about it. What does it take to be saved?

It doesn’t take strength.

It doesn’t take wisdom.

It doesn’t take intelligence.

It takes humility and weakness,

It requires that the sinner say, “I can’t” rather than “I can.”

It requires that we say, “Save me because I can’t save myself.”

So faith is nothing more than trusting in Christ’s work on the cross as the only effective way of escaping the wrath of God and recognizing that I’m unable to atone for my own sin and make myself right with God.

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:18

1 Corinthians 1:18 LSB

18 For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

To the unbeliever, the gospel is foolishness and weakness.

To the believer, it’s divine power.

And when people come to faith in Christ and come to see the gospel not as weak but as powerful to save, God demonstrates his power by saving people through a message the world thinks is powerless.

That’s why Paul writes,

1 Corinthians 1:26–27 LSB

26 For consider your calling, brothers, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble. 27 But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong,

Because God works backwards from the way people think.

3. Kingdom work requires weakness not strength

I mentioned this at the start but I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring it up again.

I think we tend to put too much confidence in natural abilities when it comes to ministry work.

We think that the people who are the most effective for God are…

the highly intelligent

the exceptional businessman

the dynamic leader

the people person

But really all these things won’t amount to much if they’re done apart from dependence on the Spirit of God.

It takes weakness to be effective in the kingdom. It takes humility.

It takes people who are willing to be last not first.

4. Ultimately, Psalm 8 is about Jesus

And I say this not in that David was writing a purely Messianic psalm. When he talked about man he’s talking about all of us.

But it’s no coincidence that the writer to the Hebrews quotes from Psalm 8 in order to demonstrate that Jesus is superior to the angels.

Hebrews 2:6–9 LSB

6 But one has testified somewhere, saying, “What is man, that You remember him? Or the son of man, that You are concerned about him? 7 “You have made him for a little while lower than the angels; You have crowned him with glory and honor, And have appointed him over the works of Your hands; 8 You have put all things in subjection under his feet.” For in subjecting all things to him, He left nothing that is not subject to him. But now we do not yet see all things subjected to him. 9 But we do see Him who was made for a little while lower than the angels—Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone.

You see what he is doing there. The writer to the Hebrews saw in Psalm 8 the incarnation of Christ. And isn’t the incarnation the epitome of God’s condescension to us?

Just think for a moment about the way Jesus came into the world. He came in as a helpless infant. He grows into a man. He lives out his life.

Paul tells us that this was all done in abject humility (Phil. 2:6). Christ didn’t consider his status as the second-member of the Trinity to mean that this was beneath him, even though it was SO beneath him. He voluntarily humbled himself. He took the form of a human being. He served other people.

According to Psalm 118:22-23, he’s that stone rejected by the builders. They looked at him and didn’t see anything useful to build with.

The world rejected him. They considered him unworthy of honor. In Isaiah 53:1-3, it says:

Isaiah 53:1–3 LSB

1 Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of Yahweh been revealed? 2 For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, And like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or majesty That we should look upon Him, Nor appearance that we should desire Him. 3 He was despised and forsaken of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; And like one from whom men hide their face He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

In Isaiah 53:7

Isaiah 53:7 LSB

7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He did not open His mouth; Like a lamb that is led to slaughter, And like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, So He did not open His mouth.

Christ’s earthly life was lived out in weakness and humility. And through that weakness and humility God has accomplished our salvation.

Isaiah 53:4–5 LSB

4 Surely our griefs He Himself bore, And our sorrows He carried; Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, Smitten of God, and afflicted. 5 But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our peace fell upon Him, And by His wounds we are healed.

That’s what the writer to the Hebrews means when he says,

Hebrews 2:9 LSB

9 But we do see Him who was made for a little while lower than the angels—Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone.

He tasted death for you and I. And because of his humility in death God has highly exalted him, and according to Ephesians 1:20-22

Ephesians 1:20–22 (LSB)

20 …raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22 And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church,

Paul sees in Psalm 8 a decisive proclamation of the universal reign and rule of Christ.

And he is coming to establish a kingdom that is universal and in which every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that He is Lord.

And what this NT perspective on Psalm 8 indicates is that when Jesus does sit down on his throne and rule over his universal kingdom in the future, he will fulfill what God had originally intended for man to do all along as his images—to rule and reign and have dominion over creation as God’s representatives.

We messed that up through sin.

But the Son of God humbled himself, became a man, and as the true image of God He will one day sit and rule with all things in subjection under his feet, just as God had originally designed it.

And the Bible says that all who are saved through faith in Christ, who are currently being conformed into the image of Christ, will one day join Christ and rule and reign with him (2 Tim. 2:12).