I want you to take an imaginary tour with me this morning. Let’s imagine that we are in town, walking down the street, and we see a sign: PUBLIC ART SHOW, DISPLAYING WORKS BY _________. So we enter. First we are face with a huge painting, covering almost an entire wall. We stand amazed. It is magnificent! The sheer size, the sweep, the effect is almost overpowering. We stand mesmerized for many minutes. Then we move on.

One of the displays consists of miniature sculptures. Each one is so perfect and yet so tiny, we almost need a magnifying glass to appreciate the details. And so we move on from display to display, amazed at the mastery of this one artist in almost every medium of art. Gradually we realize, though, that the entire display is organized and centered around one particular work. It is the artist’s ultimate masterpiece, a sculpture of great originality, incredibly crafted, beautifully formed in every detail. The title of this great work has a simple title: SELF PORTRAIT.

After our tour, we walk away in silent awe. What an artist! Surely the greatest in history.

In a sense, you and I have the opportunity to take that tour every day. We live in the midst of the display. The artist is God. His art is the creation around us. And what is even more awesome, we are his masterpiece; the pinnacle of his creative work. His self portrait. "Made in his image," the Bible tells us.

We are looking today at Psalm 8. I always find it a little difficult to decide what to preach on during the summer. There is so much coming and going, that it is difficult to do a series that requires any kind of continuity. So I am doing what I have often done in the past, reverting to the Book of Psalms, where each Psalm stands alone, without necessary reference to what has gone before or what comes after. We might call the series of messages, "Sipping from the Psalms." During the heat of an Abu Dhabi summer, that seems like an appropriate and refreshing metaphor. Without any particular pattern or plan, I am simply going to choose a different psalm to focus on each week. Today we are focusing on Psalm 8. Let’s begin by reading it. (Read Psalm 8)

In this psalm, David’s thesis is that God’s creation displays his greatness and leads to meditation and praise.

David begins the psalm with praise: O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

David is not being redundant or repeating himself in this first line. If your Bible is like mine, you will notice that the first rendering of the word LORD is in all capitals, while the second one has only the first letter in capitals. This is not a typographical anomaly. When your Bible prints the word LORD in all capitals, it means that it is translating the special name of God. It is the name that is sometimes translated as Jehovah, and more correctly rendered as Yahweh. This is the name that God revealed to Moses in Exodus 3 when Moses asked, "What is your name?" God responded my name is "Yahweh", a play on the Hebrew verb "to be." "I AM, that’s what my name is," God answered.

The second Lord is the Hebrew word Adonai, which literally means lord or master. So what David is declaring here is "O Yahweh, our master and lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth." It is impossible for us to overemphasize the importance of names in Hebrew culture and literature. The name was more than just a title, but represented the person’s reputation and his very identity.

God’s name, the name Yahweh, his reputation, his identity is majestic, awesome, in all the earth.

You have set your glory above the heavens. In Psalm 19, David begins with the words, The heavens declare the glory of God. Here David states that God has set his glory above the heavens. While the glory of God is declared in the heavens, it actually exceeds it. The creator is greater than his creation. He is bigger than his creation. His glory is above the heavens.

The next verse is rather difficult to interpret: From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. I am not sure I fully understand what David’s point is in these words. In some way, God has chosen to display his strength and glory through little children. I would suggest two ways that this is true.

God’s greatness is displayed in the sweep of the heavens and in the simple praise of children. God’s creation displays his greatness and leads to meditation.

David now, either in fact or in memory, is back with his father’s sheep on the Judean hillside. It is night, and he is alone, looking up at the sky. What he sees there causes him to meditate; to think; to ask questions. A sense of awe overtakes him. God hung the moon and the stars. We came back from our holiday, and found one of the large pictures in our living room had fallen down. I can’t even hang a picture so it stays up! God put the moon and stars in place – and they’re still there. And they’ll be there until he decides to take them down!

One of the dangers of our technological age is that we tend to become fascinated with our own cleverness, and the noise of our inventions can drown out the greatness of God’s creation. We marvel at man’s cleverness in having put men on the moon. But God made the moon and put it there and keeps it there.

In light of God’s greatness, spread out before him on the canvas of the night sky, the first thing that comes to his mind is the insignificance of man.

I remember reading about a boy who was on his first camping trip. As they sat admiring the sky, his father realized that his normally talkative little boy had fallen strangely silent. "What are you thinking, son?" he asked. After a pause, a quiet voice came back: "I never realized before that I was so small."

David uses a word for "man" here that emphasizes his weakness and vulnerability. David knows that God cared for him. Remember, he’s the one who wrote the words, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…he leadeth me…" He knows it’s true, but faced with the awesome sweep of God’s creation, he now marvels at the fact, and wonders why. In size so tiny. In strength, so puny. Why should God care?

Yet as he continues to meditate under the stars, what amazes David is not man’s insignificance, but rather man’s significance.

David’s meditation has taken him back to Genesis 1-2 and the account of God’s creation. There is a difficulty in the translation here. The word translated as "heavenly beings" in this verse is actually the Hebrew word "elohim". In almost every other occurrence, this word is translated "God". In Genesis 1:1: In the beginning God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth.

It’s almost as though the richness of this thought, that God created us as a little lower than himself, was too much for the ancient translators. When the Jews were translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek in the years before Christ’s birth, they translated the word as "angels" and translators have tended to follow suit ever since. But what makes this double complicated is that when this passage is quoted in the New Testament, they chose to quote the Greek translation and use the word "angels".

So is it "God" or is it "angels"? I am not sure we can answer with any certainty. But in the final analysis, it really doesn’t make any difference to our understanding of the passage. David is overwhelmed by the high place God has given to man. In the order of the creation, man is the very pinnacle, the high point, the centerpiece of all that God made. He made the heavens and the earth, the sun, moon and stars, the earth and sea, the plants and all that grows, all the animals, birds and fish. And finally he said: "Let us make man in our own image" and he created humans, male and female, in his own likeness. And then he gave us dominion over all the rest of creation.

I have been privileged to be close to elephants in the wild; their calm dignity, and almost silent way they walk on their padded feet, and above all their sheer bulk and size. Yet I’ve also seen elephants working, lifting logs, and doing tricks like a clown at the instruction of human trainer.

During our years in Alaska, we were also privileged to see whales swimming in the ocean from close quarters. Once again, their sheer size takes the breath away. Yet Eskimos in little skin boats and simple harpoons were able to hunt and kill them to provide for their families.

Man is physically so small and seemingly powerless. Yet God has placed us over his creation. He has linked his reputation to ours. "I will make him in my image," he said. "I will give him dominion over the earth."

Now we all know that man’s dominion over the earth has gone seriously wrong. That in rebelling against God’s authority, we have turned from caring for the earth to exploiting it for our own greed. We know that the image of God in us has been spoiled by sin.

But I am not going to focus on that this morning, for the simple reason that David does not focus on it in this psalm. We know that God is in the process of restoring a race of people to his likeness. The writer of Hebrews quotes this psalm to show that Christ as the true man, the second Adam, will restore man’s rightful rule over the creation. But again, I am not going to dwell on that, because I am not preaching from Hebrews 2, I am preaching from Psalm 8.

In Psalm 8, David is struck almost speechless, first by the size, majesty and glory of God’s creation. Against that backdrop, he can only marvel – first at man’s smallness, and yet also at the incredible place of privilege and responsibility that he has given the human race, as his image bearer and the one entrusted with dominion over the earth.

God’s creation displays his greatness and leads to meditation and praise. And so, having completed his meditation he returns to the words of praise with which he began. O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

One of the things that stood out to me in this psalm is how personal it is. It is all in an "I – You" frame of reference. This is not David talking about God. This is David talking to God. As Christians, we often say that Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship. This psalm illustrates that. David sits under the night sky, marvels at what he sees, and talks to God about it. When is the last time you did that?

One of the things I fear we too often lose is the ability to see God everywhere we look. We get so busy with all the stuff of life, and making a living and coping with all the stresses of life and even so busy doing things for God – that we forget God. We forget to marvel at a flower or a sunset or a night sky, or a baby’s smile.

God’s creation displays his greatness and leads to meditation and praise. But we have to take time to look at it. We have to take time to smell the roses, and marvel at the rose maker.

I must confess that one of my pet peeves over the years has been the person that says: "I don’t need to come to church. I worship God in nature, in the forest and by the running stream." As I read the Bible, such worship is not complete. There are necessary lessons you will never learn. You do need to gather in worship with other believers.

But let’s not swing to the other extreme, and neglect what God does reveal of himself through creation, and the opportunities he gives us to fellowship with him and worship in awe at his craftsmanship.

During the hot, Abu Dhabi-summer months, we are Sipping from the Psalms in our Friday services. Each week, Pastor Cam leads us in meditation on a different psalm, seeking spiritual refreshment and renewal.

I have a vivid memory of a day I spent doing that. It was some years ago now. I was in Kenya and I had traveled to the town of Kisumu to speak at a pastor’s conference. I arrived in the morning, and the conference was not due to start until the evening, so they took me to a hotel in Kisumu for the day. It was an old, colonial style hotel, with a mature garden, large trees and park-like grounds that swept down onto the edge of Lake Victoria. After going through my lesson notes for a couple hours, I still had some time to fill. So I just began to wander through the grounds and in the beauty of the setting, I could sense the very presence of God. My walk became, almost unconsciously, a prayer walk. Only I was listening as much as I was praying. And for long periods of time, I was just quiet. When a thought would take shape, I would speak it, and when no particular thought came, I was quiet. But I was very conscious throughout that I was in the presence of majesty. It was almost as thought the artist was giving me a personally guided tour of his workmanship, and inviting me to respond. It was intensely relational. I walked among the flowers. I took off my shoes and walked across the grass. I marveled at the many species of birds. I reveled in the shrill cry of the fish eagles. In the late afternoon I climbed up on a bent tree that hung out over the water and I sat there with my feet hanging down, just touching the water. As I did so, a herd of impala, one of East Africa’s most beautiful and graceful antelope, walked out of the trees and began to graze on the grass. They seemed immune to my presence and grazed up to within a few feet of me. I sat there enthralled as God and I shared the beauty together.

As the time came to an end, I remember saying simply to God: "Heavenly Father, I really enjoyed that." And it was almost as if I heard him say: "I enjoyed it as much as you did."

God’s creation displays his greatness and leads us to meditation and praise. Life is busy. It gets intense and frantic. But somehow, we need to find the time to step aside from it all, and simply marvel at something God has made. Maybe a single flower, or a bird, or a little child. And make it relational. "You made that, God. That’s incredible! Thanks for sharing it with me."