This psalm is entirely given to prayer, and, though it is a psalm of David, it is not a personal or private prayer, but a prayer of God’s people together: O LORD our Lord… It contains no petitions at all but is entirely devoted to praise.
It is a psalm of praise to God for his revelation in creation. The Belgic Confession talks about this revelation in Article 2. The universe is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to see clearly his invisible attributes, even his eternal power and Godhead. This psalm is an expression of that truth: God reveals his glory in his creatures, and especially in the son of man.
But the psalm goes beyond prasie for the first creation. Verse 2 mentions the Lord’s enemies, and describes them as being silenced by infants. Clearly, David has in mind the promise to Adam and Eve that the seed of the woman will be victorious over the seed of the serpent. Hebrews 2 also quotes the psalm as prophesying about our dominion with Christ in the new creation. We must interpret the psalm in that light.
The structure is interesting. The psalm begins and ends with the very same words: O LORD our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth. The revelation of the glory of God is the dominating idea. But at the very center of the psalm stands verse 5: For you have made him a little lower than the angels, And you have crowned him with glory and honor. All the rest of the psalm from, verse 2 to verse 8, revolves around that. In verses 2–4 David emphasizes the insignificance of man in himself and in verses 5–8 the glory of redeemed man in the position to which God has exalted him. This is the second theme of the psalm and serves the first in that it is especially in the son of man that the Lord shows his glory. So we can divide the material of the psalm into three parts: the insignificance of man, the glory of man, and the glory of the Lord.
The Insignificance of Man (vv. 2-4)
In the first two verses of the psalm there is a movement downward from God, to the heavens, to babes and nursing infants, and finally to the enemy and the avenger. Man stands at the bottom of this hierarchy. He is not God, and he does not belong to the heavens. In fact, in verse 2 the psalm does not even consider man in general but the babes and nursing infants among men, and these are superior to the Lord’s enemies.
Our Lord quoted this verse in Matthew 21:16. When he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey the people sang and shouted their praise. The next day the little children in the temple, in imitation of what they had heard, shouted to him, Hosanna to the son of David. The leaders of the Jews objected, but Jesus replied, Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have perfected praise?’ He saw the praise of the little children in the temple as a fulfillment of this psalm. So David has in mind literal children. John Calvin says, The tongues of infants, even before they are able to pronounce a single word, speak loudly and distinctly in commendation of God’s liberality towards the human race. Nourishment is ready for them as soon as they are born. They have the skill to suck because God has fitted their tongues for doing this.
However, it is likely that he also means us to understand this in a figurative way, in the same sense that we call ourselves children of God or that John uses the phrase “my little children” in 1 John 2:1 and 3:18. Matthew Henry says that God reveals his glory first in the kingdom of nature. He takes care of little children, they are under his special protection, and nature has made provision for them to the glory of God. Also in the kingdom of providence: in the government of the world God makes use of men who have been babes. He serves his purpose sometimes by the ministry of those who are still, in wisdom and strength, little better than children. And in the kingdom of grace even the apostles were considered as babes, unlearned and ignorant men. In Psalm 119:98-100 David contemplates his own inferiority to his enemies, his teachers and the ancients, but still insists that God, through his commandment, has made him wiser than them all.
We come finally to the enemy and the avenger. David has in mind here enemies of God who hate God and his ordained order. They hate also their place in that order and seek to avenge themselves on God and those above them in that order. But God uses the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and the weak things to confound the things that are mighty. In the wordless babblings of an infant, in the inconsequential prattlings of very young children, in the tuneless and stumbling singing of the handicapped, in the stammered glimmerings of understanding in the mouth of a teenager, in our own childish, halting and wholly inadequate praise of God, is great strength: strength enough to silence the enemy and the avenger. We are fearfully and wonderfully made.
The psalm is not so much a celebration of the first creation as it is of the second, in which God exalts man to a glory higher even than that of the angels.
The Glory of Man (vv. 5–8)
In these verses David traces again the downward movement of the first stanza, but with a couple of differences. He begins again with God and the heavens, but this time, instead of talking about little children and the avenger, he talks about the son of man and the animals.
David began the psalm in an objective way. God has set his glory above the heavens, and he has ordained strength from the mouths of babes and nursing infants. Now he shows us his subjective reaction to the revelation of the glory of God. He considers the night sky, especially the moon and the stars. He is impressed with how incomprehensibly vast they are. He probably knew nothing of galaxies, light years and super novas, but such knowledge only increases our awe. All this is the handiwork of God. His fingers made it. He fashioned the whole and each part with the care and skill of a great artist, and he ordained each planet and star in its own place. They are his and he holds them all in the hollow of his hand. The whole is wonderfully beautiful, and declares the glory, power and wisdom of its creator, for he has set his glory above it.
But it also makes us reflect on our own insignificance. When I consider your heavens… what is man that you are mindful of him, We are creatures formed from the dust of the ground. We are of the earth beneath, and not of the heavens. Even though the name son of man is a name given to Christ, especially in the gospel of Luke, here it is not especially a name of honor. It emphasizes our humanity and therefore our very humble station in relation to God.
We see then that there is a hierarchy in the creation. God stands at the very pinnacle. He is above all. Under him are the heavens. Next in this hierarchy is man, not only below God, but also below the heavens, and so far below them as to be completely insignificant.
And yet David does not continue in this vein but turns his attention instead to man’s glory (vv. 5–8). Even though he is very insignificant in comparison to the heavens, God has given him a place of honor. He made him a little lower than the angels. The Hebrew word here is actually elohim, which is almost always translated God: he made him a little lower than God. We’ll see how important that is a little later, but for right now we can accept the translation as it stands. Man is, according to his creation, a little lower than the angels, but that is not meant to emphasize his inferiority with respect to them, but rather his glory with respect to everything else (v. 5). There is a strong emphasis here on man’s royal dignity. Three times David repeats it. God made him a ruler in the creation, gave him authority, and put the works of his hands under him.
Thus, the hierarchy of verses 1-4 is extended further. Man does not stand at the bottom of it. There is more to the creation, and it is all under his feet. David turns his gaze downward now and sees all those creatures that are subject to man: And as he turns his gaze downward, he must also begin to look outward. He sees first the domestic animals, sheep and oxen, that are most immediately and obviously under the authority of man. Then the wild animals, the beasts of the field, and finally even the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. All these are under him. Notice too how carefully he defines the sphere of each, the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea. Man’s dominion covers land, air and sea. Even the paths of the seas, those great ocean currents that carry along an enormous amount and variety of marine life, and those watery highways that the salmon follow as they return to the streams of their spawning, and that the great whales take as they migrate from north to south and back again, are part of man’s dominion. He has a position of high honor in the earth.
But we would be remiss if we stopped there. We must turn our attention also to the New Testament quotations of this psalm.
One of them is in 1 Corinthians 15:24–28. There the apostle Paul applies the line, You have put all things under his feet, to our Lord Jesus Christ. God has exalted him, the Son of Man, to a position of authority in the creation. It is a position in which all things, with the single exception of God himself, are put under him: the heavens and the angels, as well as earth and men and the creatures of the earth. He has absolute authority over all of the creation and is above all.
The second is Hebrews 2:5-9. In the first four verses of the chapter the apostle talks about how great is the salvation that God has given to us in the New Testament. It is a greater salvation than he gave to the saints of the Old Testament. Therefore, any neglect of this great salvation also brings greater judgment than such neglect brought in the Old Testament. In verses 5–9 the apostle explains how great this salvation is, and he does it by quoting from and interpreting Psalm 8.
Notice how he begins. He tells us that he is not talking about this world, but about the world to come. So Psalm 8 is primarily a psalm about the new heavens and new earth, not the existing heavens and earth.
The apostle goes on in Hebrews 2 to say that God has not put this new creation in subjection to angels and then quotes from Psalm 2 to show that it is put in subjection to us. And that us does not mean men in general, but the redeemed. It is to the race as redeemed in Christ that God has given royal authority in the new creation, to us who are his people.
Furthermore, in this new creation our authority extends to the whole creation. For in that He put all in subjection under him, He left nothing that is not put under him. Even the heavens and the angels become subject to us. Just as with Christ in 1 Corinthians 15, so with us here in Hebrews 2, the words of the psalm, You have put all things under his feet, are to be taken literally. Nothing is excepted except God himself. That’s why the psalm uses Elohim in verse 5.
However, we do not yet see this. We are still waiting for the day when this honor will be ours. We do not have it now, but we do have a guarantee of it. For we see Jesus who was made a little lower than the angels (notice the allusion to the psalm) now crowned with glory and honor (another allusion to the psalm). He became man and the Son of Man and was thus made lower than the angels. But God has exalted him now above the angels, crowned him with glory and honor above all creatures, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. That glory will also be ours, for we are in him and what is his, is and will be ours. All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.
The Glory of the Lord (vv. 1 and 9)
The conclusion of all this must be not how great and glorious a creature man is, but how great and glorious a God he is who has given such glory to man. David closes the psalm with the same words with which he began it: O LORD our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth.
He is the LORD or Yahweh. God made himself known to his people by this name and shows himself in it as a faithful covenant God. But the name also reveals something of his attributes as they exist in himself apart from any relationship with his creatures. He is the I AM, the eternal one who was before the world began, is now, and ever shall be. He is the self-sufficient one, who has no need of any of his creatures. All that is necessary to his existence, well-being and happiness is found in himself. Though he created us for his glory, even his glory cannot be enhanced by our praise. He is finally the absolutely and eternally unchangeable one: I am the LORD. I change not.
He is also our Lord. He rules over us and he owns us. We are his slaves and he our master, who has the power and authority to do with us as he pleases. He is infinitely exalted above us. He is the potter and we the clay, he the shepherd and we the sheep, he the creator and we creatures of his hands.
We also see his glory in his name: how excellent is your name. The word name here refers to his revelation of himself to us, to what we know of him, especially in the creation. He has a most excellent name, a name that is above every name. There are many excellent and glorious things in the earth—mountains and lions and flowers and insects and oceans—but his name stands above them all.
In the next line we move downward to the heavens. God’s glory is above them. The heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built? Heaven is his throne and the earth his footstool. The new creation is greater than the old, and his glory as revealed in it is very great. He is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, for of him and through him and to him are all things.
The word all in verse 9 carries a great deal more weight than it did in the first verse of the psalm, doesn’t it? There it was easy to pass over, but now the psalm has shown exactly what is included in that all—not only the world and all that it contains, but also the heavens and all that is in them. All are his and the work of his fingers. Throughout the psalm the emphasis is on God’s doing. He set his glory above the heavens, he ordained strength from the mouths of babes and nursing infants to still his enemies, he made the heavens, the moon and the stars. He crowned the son of man with glory and put all things under his feet.
Praise him. Praise him for the glory of the heavens. Praise him for the strength he has put into the mouths of little ones. Praise him for the glory of man in creation. Praise him for the glory of the Son of Man. Praise him for the glory he has given to you, his redeemed ones. Praise him for his glory revealed in all the glorious things he makes in this world and in that which is to come. His name is excellent in all the earth.