Sermon Tone Analysis

Psalm Eight “Weak weapons are mighty in the hands of the Lord”

Introduction

Good morning.

It is good to be with the saints of the Lord this morning.

Today is an exceptional day because we have Christians from three different churches present this morning.

When Churches gather together in join services, it is an excellent reminder to the watching world that we have a unity that others do not.

We can gather together, sing, and worship because we find unity in the gospel of Jesus Christ, our Lord, and savior.

First off, I want to thank the saints of Northgate Baptist church for being such a great partner.

Thank you for allowing us to use your equipment for our mission teams, and thanks for allowing us to use your venue for any events that we plan.

Thanks for allowing our core team to meet in your fellowship hall on Wednesday nights for a year leading up to the launch of our church.

Secondly, if I can speak directly to the members of Northgate, thanks for calling such a wonderful pastor.

Josh has been a great encouragement, and I believe he and Carrie will do some incredible stuff here in the community.

For those who are new or don't know me, my name is Noah Toney.

I am the pastor/church planter of Redemption Church.

We are a new church plant in Beckley.

In two weeks, we will be celebrating our one-year anniversary.

At Redemption Church, we exist to proclaim the gospel and make disciples for the glory of God.

That is our vision statement, the heartbeat of our church, gospel proclamation, and disciple-making.

If you have your bible, please turn to Psalm 8.

Context

This summer Redemption Church has been going through a sermon series called "Summer in the Psalms."

My personal goal is to return to the psalter every year and preach ten psalms a summer.

This week we are jumping into Psalm eight.

If you are new to studying the psalms, allow me to quickly tell you how the psalter works.

Do not think about the psalms as a random collection of 150 poems; no, think about the psalter as a unified and strategically organized book of poems that tell a unified story of God's mighty deeds for his people.

Just as the Iliad, or the odyssey, is an ancient epic poem that chronicles the works of mighty kings and their people.

The psalms is an epic poem that follows the story of God's mighty deeds through the history of his people.

Psalm One teaches us about the blessed man who is the perfect citizen of God's kingdom, who walks in the way of the righteous and turns from the way of the wicked.

Psalm Two teaches us about God's Messiah-King, who will reign forever despite the raging nations.

Psalm Three teaches us about God's chosen king, David, who, when the nations are raging against him, responds in faith and trust in God.

Psalm Four teaches us that when God's people are in distress, we should reflect on God's past faithfulness to find future hope.

Psalm Five teaches us that God's people can find comfort in the character of God.

Psalm Six teaches us that God's people will experience anguish and despair, yet we find our hope in God's steadfast love.

Psalm seven teaches us that God is the righteous avenger and the Righteous defender.

This week: Psalm eight teaches us that God chooses to use the weak things of the world to defeat his enemies and establish his glory.

Psalm 8:1-10

“To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith.

A Psalm of David.

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens.

Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him 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 also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

Pastoral Prayer:

Jump In:

“To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith.

A Psalm of David.

These superscriptions in our bibles do not have verse numbers; they almost function like titles.

They are easy to overlook in the text, but I want you to know that these are extremely important.

These superscriptions are in every manuscript of the Psalms that we have.

Meaning these titles are the inspired word of God and deserve to be treated as such.

I have been using an illustration of a photo album.

Imagine you have a photo, and it is black and white.

It is a picture of a young man and a beautiful young woman sitting in a green field with a picnic basket.

This was before you were born, and you have no memory of this event.

But you take the picture, turn it over, and it says "fourth of July 1956 our first date."

That superscription on the back of this photo tells you the picture's context.

It tells you information that you would not know without it.

This is how these superscriptions work for the psalter, and if you do not understand this, you are very likely to misinterpret the psalms as you go and study them.

Psalm 8starts with "to the choirmaster: according to the Gittith.

A Psalm of David."

Quick this word "choirmaster" could also mean "preeminent one", or exalted one.

I think that if you go and read through the chronicles, you will see that David himself is the choirmaster of Israel.

It is David, who commands the Levites to select men to go and sing before the Lord every day, it is David who writes songs that will be sung, and when the time comes for the tabernacle to come into Jerusalem, David dresses up like the band of priests, and he leads the procession into the city and he is dancing and singing to the Lord, and this ends with David's song in 1 Chronicle 16.

David sings this song and 1st Chronicles ends with "and all the people praised the Lord."

So I am arguing that David see’s the king of Israel as this exemplary person who is the leader of the band, this Choirmaster over God’s people.

He is to be the example of what it looks like to worship God.

However, when David writes “to the choirmaster” he is not writing a song for himself, no I believe that David is looking forward to the future king of Israel who will come and lead God’s people in praise forever.

Did you know that?

not only is Christ the object of our Worship in heaven, but he will also be out choirmaster who will lead us in song forever as we give all glory and honor to God.

If you need more proof this, go and check out Hebrews 2:12.

Next in Psalm eight’s superscription is says, “according to the gittith.”

Most bibles should have a foot note, that says “probably a musical or liturgical term.”

That usually means that we have no idea what the word means.

But we can look at clues and take educated guesses.

The root word, is the word “Gath.”

There was a famous battle in the Old Testament where the champion of the Philistines was from Gath.

His name was Goliath.

This is important because 1 Samuel 17 tells us that after David defeated Goliath, he perused the philistines all the way into Gath.

Why does this matter?

We might not know exactly what this superscription means, but there is a translation of the psalms in Aramaic called the Targum, and it translates this “on the instrument taken from Gath.”

If this is true, this lets us know that David has the narrative of his victory over Goliath in mind when he is writing this.

V.1 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens

David starts Psalm eight by extolling God.

Notice in your bibles that the first word LORD is in all caps, that is because David is calling God by his own name.

Oh Yahweh our Lord.

First, we see God’s glory in the earth.

“How majestic is your name in all the earth!”

There is nowhere on this earth that does not declare the glory of God.

Everything that has life has life because it is sovereignly sustained by God.

God is the creator, sustainer, of all things.

God created the heavens and the earth, and everything was good and perfect.

Man has sinned and we now live in a fallen state, yet even now God’s name is majestic though-out the whole earth.

The physical creation screams of his glory, they scream of his brilliant design.

Everything has his handprints all over it.

From the beautiful Rockies mountains, that every year God descends to place a white crown around their crest, to that the world sees the majesty of God in them.

God’s glory is seen in the freshness of the pine trees that with a new spring gust of wind causes your senses to be revived.