What Is Man?

Read Psalm 8 in full before proceeding; it is nine verses. Notice how it opens and closes with the same line of praise, and how its central question, what is man?, is set against the vastness of the heavens. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

O LORD, our Lord, how magnificent is your reputation throughout the earth! You reveal your majesty in the heavens above.
Psalm 8:1

We come to the last of our psalms, and it lifts our eyes from the long history of God’s people to the silent vastness of the night sky. Psalm 8 is short (only nine verses) and luminous, one of the most beautiful poems in the Psalter. It frames the whole of human life between two identical declarations of God’s majesty, and at its center it asks the oldest question a person can ask while standing under the stars: When I look up at the heavens, which your fingers made, and see the moon and the stars, which you set in place (v. 3), what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (v. 4 ESV). The NET renders verse 4 collectively (the human race … mankind), but the Hebrew is singular, man … son of man, and Hebrews 2 builds its whole reading of the psalm on that singular.

It is a question with two faces. On the one side, it is the question of our smallness: set against the immensity of the heavens, what is this tiny, fleeting creature of dust, that the God who flung the stars into place should give him a second thought? And on the other side, it is a question of wonder: that He does. That the Maker of the moon and the stars is mindful of man, cares for him, stoops to notice and to love so small a thing. The psalm holds both together, our littleness and our astonishing worth, and refuses to let us fall off either side, into either the despair that says we are nothing or the pride that says we are everything.

And it gives a staggering answer to its own question. Small as man is, 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 (vv. 5–6 ESV). The creature of dust is a crowned creature: given glory, given honor, given rule over the creation. That is the dignity of man as the Bible tells it: not a greatness we have achieved, but a crown we have been given, and given by the very God whose majesty frames the whole psalm.

But the psalm’s deepest answer is one David could not fully have seen, and it is the reason this psalm closes our journey so fittingly. For the New Testament takes up Psalm 8 and reads it, in the end, as a psalm about one Man in particular. The Letter to the Hebrews quotes its words (What is man that you think of him or the son of man that you care for him? … You crowned him with glory and honor. You put all things under his control) and then says that while we do not yet see all things under man’s control, we see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death. The question what is man? is finally answered by the Man: the Son of Man, the last Adam, who became one of us, tasted our death, and was crowned through His cross.

So we will end the volume’s journey through the Psalms by gazing, with David, at the heavens and asking what is man?, and by following the question to its answer in the Lord Jesus. We will consider God’s majesty that frames the whole; the smallness and the dignity of man held together; and the Son of Man who regained for us the crown that the first Adam lost. And we will find that the last psalm of our study, like all the rest, points us finally to Him.

How Majestic Is Your Name

O LORD, our Lord, how magnificent is your reputation throughout the earth! You reveal your majesty in the heavens above (v. 1). The psalm opens with a shout of God’s majesty, and it will close with the very same words (v. 9), so that the whole psalm is bracketed, top and bottom, by the glory of God. This framing is not incidental; it is the key to everything in between. Whatever the psalm will say about the dignity of man, it says inside this frame, so that man’s glory never floats free as a thing in itself but is always held within, and pointed back toward, the greater glory of God. The psalm is finally about God’s majesty, not man’s greatness, and the dignity of man, when we come to it, will turn out to be a dignity that exists for the praise of God.

And notice what David praises: not first God’s power or His works, but His name, the word the NET renders reputation. How magnificent is your reputation throughout the earth. In the Scriptures a name is never a mere label; it stands for the whole person: his character, his reputation, who he is. So to say God’s name is magnificent throughout the earth is to say that God Himself, in His revealed character, is glorious everywhere, fills the whole creation with His weight and worth. And David addresses this majestic God with a striking doubling: O LORD, our Lord, that is, O Yahweh, our Master. The first is the personal, covenant name of God; the second confesses Him as the One to whom we belong. The God whose name fills the earth and who reveals His majesty in the heavens above is not a distant, nameless force. He has a name, and He has made Himself ours. That is the wonder the whole psalm will press: that such majesty should stoop to be our Lord, mindful of us, near to us, ours.

And then a surprising thing: having spoken of a majesty revealed in the heavens above, the psalm turns at once to the smallest and weakest of voices. From the mouths of children and nursing babies you have ordained praise on account of your adversaries, so that you might put an end to the vindictive enemy (v. 2). God ordains His praise and silences His foes not through the mighty but through the mouths of nursing babies, a paradox that runs all through Scripture and reaches its height at the cross, where God’s power was hidden in weakness and His victory won through apparent defeat. It is no accident that the Lord Jesus quoted this very verse. When the children cried out Hosanna to the Son of David in the temple courts, and the chief priests were indignant, He answered them with these words: Out of the mouths of children and nursing infants you have prepared praise for yourself. The praise of children, which the powerful despised, was the praise the psalm had foretold: God ordaining praise from the lowly to put an end to His foes. The majesty of God is so secure that He can defend it with the voices of toddlers.

When I look up at the heavens, which your fingers made, and see the moon and the stars, which you set in place (v. 3). Picture David doing exactly this: a shepherd on a hillside at night, or a king on his roof, looking up at a sky undimmed by any city’s glow, blazing with more stars than we, in our lit-up age, ever see. And notice how casually he describes the making of it: the heavens are what your fingers made. Not even God’s mighty arm, just His fingers, as though the moon and the stars were a bit of fine handiwork, idly fashioned. The same God who would later be said to have stretched out His arm to redeem His people flung the galaxies into place with His fingertips. And under that immensity, David feels his own smallness press in upon him.

What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (v. 4 ESV). It is the question the vastness forces out of us. Set against a hundred billion stars, what is a human being? A brief flicker of dust, here for a few decades and gone, on one small planet circling one ordinary star. The modern mind, having measured the heavens far more precisely than David could, often draws from the measuring a conclusion of despair: that we are cosmic accidents, insignificant specks, that our lives mean nothing against such a backdrop. But David draws the opposite conclusion, and a far more wonderful one. The marvel is not that we are small (of course we are small) but that the God who made all that immensity is mindful of us. The wonder of Psalm 8 is not the size of the heavens but the tenderness of their Maker, who bends His attention to creatures the universe would never miss.

And the word David uses is intimate. To be mindful of someone is to hold them in mind, to remember them, to attend to them; and the word translated care for carries the sense of visiting: coming to someone, drawing near. So the question is really: what is man, that the Maker of the stars should keep him in mind and come to him? And here the deepest answer begins to dawn, an answer David could not yet have known the half of. For God was so mindful of man, so unwilling to leave him alone in his smallness, that He did the unthinkable: He visited us in person. He came. The Maker of the moon and the stars took the dust of which we are made and became a man, and walked among us under the very heavens His fingers had fashioned. The answer to what is man that you are mindful of him is, in the end, the manger and the cross: God so mindful of us that He became one of us.

And there is a phrase here we should hold onto, for it will open the whole psalm before we are done. David sets two words for humanity side by side: what is man … and the son of man. The first word pictures man in his frailty and mortality; the second, son of man, means simply a member of the human race, a child of Adam, one of us. It is an ordinary phrase, and yet, centuries later, it would become the title that One Man chose for Himself above all others. The Lord Jesus called Himself, again and again, the Son of Man: not a son of man but the Son of Man, the representative human, the one in whom humanity itself is summed up. When David asks what is the son of man that you care for him?, he is asking a question that will one day have a face and a name. The psalm’s wondering about humanity in general turns out to be, in the deepest sense, a psalm about the one Son of Man in whom what humanity was meant to be is finally seen.

Crowned with Glory and Honor

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 (vv. 5–6 ESV). Here is the staggering dignity, and the little word yet carries it. Yet, for all his smallness, God has crowned this creature of dust. Man stands just below the heavenly beings, crowned with glory and honor like a king, and given dominion over the works of God’s hands: the sheep and the oxen, the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, all of it placed under his rule. This is the vocation given to humankind at the beginning, in the garden: to bear God’s image and to govern His creation as His stewards. The dust is crowned; the speck is given a kingdom.

And we must be careful to hear where this dignity comes from, for it is the answer to one of the deepest aches of the human heart. In our day, people labor and strive to establish their own worth (through achievement, through beauty, through wealth, through the approval of others), and the labor never ends, because a worth we must build ourselves can always be torn down, and is never quite enough. The psalm cuts beneath all of it. Your dignity is not something you achieve; it is something you have been given. You were crowned by God before you ever accomplished anything, simply because He made you and is mindful of you. This is a word for everyone who feels small, overlooked, insignificant, unworthy: the God who set the stars in place has crowned you with glory and honor, and that crown does not depend on your performance, your usefulness, or anyone’s opinion. It is His gift, and His gifts He does not take back.

But the psalm raises a problem even as it sings, for the dignity it describes is plainly not the dignity we see. All things under his feet, and yet things are manifestly not under man’s feet. We do not master the creation; we are mastered by it. The very ground brings forth thorns; disease and disaster overtake us; and the last enemy, death, puts every one of us under its feet at the last. The crown is real, but it sits crookedly on a fallen head. The first man, given dominion, grasped at more than was given and lost what he had; and ever since, the creature made to rule has been a creature in bondage to sin, to futility, to death. The psalm sings of a glory we were made for but do not possess, a dominion granted but not exercised. And so it leaves us looking for someone in whom the song comes true.

Before we leave the crown, though, we must let it do its work on how we see one another. If every human being, every creature of dust, has been crowned by God with glory and honor and made to bear His image, then there is no such thing as an insignificant person, and no human life that may be treated as disposable. The dignity Psalm 8 describes belongs not to the impressive only but to every member of the race: the unborn and the aged, the powerful and the forgotten, the brilliant and the disabled, the stranger and the enemy. Each one wears, however marred, the crown God gave humankind, and is the object of the same astonishing mindfulness of God. This is the root of every true regard for human life, and it stands against every attempt to rank some lives as worth more than others. The same psalm that tells me I am crowned tells me that the person beside me, and the person I am tempted to despise, is crowned as well. To honor God’s majesty is, in part, to honor the dignity He has stamped on every bearer of His image.

We See Him

And the New Testament tells us exactly where to look. The Letter to the Hebrews takes up Psalm 8 and reads it with the gospel in hand, and makes a move that changes everything. It quotes the psalm (You put all things under his control) and then admits the very problem we have just felt: For when he put all things under his control, he left nothing outside of his control. At present we do not yet see all things under his control. We do not see it. The dominion is promised but not visible; the world is not under man’s feet. And then comes the turn, one of the most thrilling sentences in the New Testament: but we see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death.

We do not yet see all things under man’s control, but we see Jesus. The “him” of the psalm, the man crowned with glory and honor and given all things, is here named: it is Christ, the true Man, in whom everything the psalm says about humanity is at last fulfilled. We see the Lord Jesus, the Son of Man, who took up the human vocation that Adam dropped. He was made lower than the angels for a little while; that is the incarnation, the Maker of the stars taking our dust, becoming the small and mortal creature of Psalm 8’s question. And He was crowned with glory and honor, but mark how the crown came: because he suffered death. The way to the crown ran through the cross. The Son of Man was crowned with thorns before He was crowned with glory; He went down into the smallness, down even into death, and it was through that descent that He was exalted. This is the pattern at the heart of the gospel: the road to glory is the road of the cross, and the One who humbled Himself to the lowest place was for that reason given the name above every name.

And the pattern by which the Son of Man was crowned is the pattern He has stamped on the lives of all who follow Him. The crown came through the cross, and the Lord Jesus told His disciples plainly that the road to glory would run the same way for them: that the one who would save his life must lose it, that the way up in His kingdom is the way down. This is not a grim fate but a deep comfort for the believer who is, at present, low: humbled, suffering, made small by grief or hardship or the simple wearing-down of life. The descent is not the opposite of the crown; in the gospel it is the path to it. The Christian who is brought low is not falling out of the story but walking the very road his Lord walked, the road that leads through suffering and death to glory and honor. We do not seek out suffering, and we do not pretend it is pleasant; but we are not destroyed by it, because we know whose footsteps we are following, and where they lead. The Son of Man went down before He was lifted up, and so, in Him, will we.

And Hebrews tells us why He did it: so that by God’s grace he would experience death on behalf of everyone. He went down into our smallness and our death not for His own sake but for ours: to experience, on our behalf, the death that puts us all under its feet, and to break it. He is the last Adam, the apostle Paul says, the true and final Man, who succeeds where the first Adam failed, who does have all things put under His feet, and who, the same apostle writes, must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet, the last enemy being death itself. The dominion man lost, the Son of Man has regained: not yet fully visible, but already secured, for He is risen and crowned. We do not yet see all things under His feet; but we see Him, crowned with glory and honor, and that is enough to know how the story ends.

Hold onto that already and not yet, for it is one of the great comforts of the Christian life. We live in the gap between the crown that is already set on the Son of Man’s head and the day when all things will visibly be under His feet. And in that gap, the world looks very much as though no one is in charge. Evil flourishes, the innocent suffer, death carries off everyone we love and will one day carry off us. If we judged by appearances, we would conclude that nothing is subjected to anyone, that history is a chaos running toward the dark. But Hebrews trains our eyes elsewhere: we do not yet see all things under his control, but we see Jesus. The Christian does not deny the chaos; he simply fixes his gaze on a higher fact than the chaos. The Lord Jesus is already crowned. The decisive battle is already won; the outcome of the war is no longer in doubt, however fierce the fighting looks from where we stand. So when the world seems out of control and death still reigns, we do not pretend otherwise. We look to the One who is crowned, and take heart that the not-yet is held secure by the already.

The Last Adam, the True Man

So the question that has hung over the whole psalm, what is man?, finds its final answer in a Person. What is man? Look at the Lord Jesus, and you will see. He is the true Man, the image of God in whom our defaced image is restored, the last Adam in whom the first Adam’s ruin is undone. In Him we see at last what humanity was always meant to be: a creature small enough to be made of dust, yet crowned with glory and honor; given dominion, and exercising it rightly; mindful of God as God is mindful of man. The answer to the riddle of human nature is not found by peering into ourselves, where we find the crown lying broken in the dust. It is found by looking at Him, where we see the crown set straight at last on a human head.

And here is the wonder for us: His crowning is not His alone. He became the last Adam in order to bring many sons to glory, as Hebrews goes on to say. He took our smallness and our death so that we might share His glory and His dominion, so that we, united to Him by faith, are restored to the destiny man was made for and lost. The Scriptures dare to say that those who belong to Christ are heirs of God and also fellow heirs with Christ, being conformed to the image of the Son, and that in the end they will reign with Him. The crown that sits straight on the head of the Son of Man is the crown He is preparing for all who are His. The dominion we cannot exercise now, we will exercise in Him then, when all things are at last put under His feet and we reign with Him over a creation set free.

And the crown will sit, at the last, on bodies raised from the dust. This matters, because Psalm 8’s question began with our mortality: what is man, this creature of dust, this breath soon gone? The gospel’s final answer to that smallness is not that our souls escape the dust but that the dust itself is raised. The same apostle who calls the Lord Jesus the last Adam says that as we have borne the image of the man of dust, so we shall bear the image of the man of heaven; that what is sown perishable is raised imperishable, sown in weakness and raised in power. The lowly body, Paul says elsewhere, will be transformed to be like the glorious body of the risen Christ. So the dignity Psalm 8 sings, the creature of dust crowned with glory and honor, is not a poetic exaggeration awaiting disappointment at the graveside. It is a promise that reaches all the way down into the grave and brings the dust back up glorified. The Son of Man was crowned through death and out the other side of it, in a risen and glorified body; and those who are His will follow Him through the same door, their dust raised, their crowns made fast, to reign with Him forever.

And then the psalm closes as it opened: O LORD, our Lord, how magnificent is your reputation throughout the earth! (v. 9). The frame snaps shut, and it is the same frame: God’s majesty, first word and last. For all of it (the heavens that humble us, the dignity that exalts us, the Son of Man who restores us, the glory that awaits us) serves the majesty of God. We are crowned, and the Son of Man is crowned, and we will be crowned in Him, so that the name of the LORD might be magnificent throughout the earth. The last psalm of our journey ends where the Psalter has been pointing all along: not at the greatness of man, but at the glory of God, a glory now wearing a human face, the face of the Son of Man, crowned with glory and honor, in whom the question what is man? is answered forever. How majestic is His name in all the earth.

Gathering the Threads

We ended our journey through the Psalms under the night sky, asking the oldest question of all. Psalm 8 frames the whole of human life within God’s majesty (how magnificent is your reputation throughout the earth, first word and last) and at its center sets the question the vastness forces out of us: what is man that you are mindful of him? (v. 4 ESV). We saw that the marvel is not our smallness, real as it is, but the tenderness of the Maker who is mindful of specks of dust and stoops to visit them, a mindfulness that reached its depth when God became one of us. We heard the staggering answer the psalm gives: that the creature of dust is crowned with glory and honor and given dominion. It is a dignity not achieved but given, a word of worth for everyone who feels small and unworthy, since the God who set the stars in place has crowned you, and His gifts He does not take back. But we also felt the problem: the crown sits crookedly on a fallen head; we do not see all things under man’s feet, for the creature made to rule is in bondage to sin and death.

And so the psalm sent us looking for the One in whom its song comes true, and the New Testament pointed us straight to Him. At present we do not yet see all things under his control, but we see Jesus, the Son of Man, made lower than the angels for a little while and crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death. The crown came by way of the cross; He went down into our smallness and experienced death on behalf of everyone, the last Adam who regained the dominion the first Adam lost. The question what is man? is answered in the Man, in whom our defaced image is restored; and His crowning is not His alone, for He became the last Adam to bring many sons to glory, so that we, united to Him, are restored to the destiny we were made for and will one day reign with Him. And it all closes within the frame where it began: how magnificent is your reputation throughout the earth. The last psalm of our journey ends, as the whole Psalter does, by pointing past the greatness of man to the glory of God, a glory now wearing the human face of the Son of Man.

For Discussion

The psalm opens and closes with the same line: O LORD, our Lord, how magnificent is your reputation throughout the earth! (vv. 1, 9). Why does the psalm frame everything, including the dignity of man, within the majesty of God, and what does this teach us about where human worth comes from?
Gazing at the vast heavens, David asks, what is man that you are mindful of him? (vv. 3–4; v. 4 ESV). How does the cosmic perspective humble us? And yet why is the deepest wonder not our smallness but that God is mindful of us and draws near to us?
The psalm says God has crowned [man] with glory and honor and given him dominion over creation (vv. 5–6 ESV). How is human dignity a gift from God rather than something we achieve, and how has sin broken the dominion we were given?
The Letter to the Hebrews applies this psalm to the Lord Jesus, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death (Hebrews 2:9). How is the question what is man? finally answered in the Son of Man, and why did His crown come by way of the cross?
Hebrews says, At present we do not yet see all things under his control, but we see Jesus … now crowned (Hebrews 2:8–9). How does this already and not yet comfort us when the world still seems out of control and death still reigns?
For anyone who feels small, insignificant, or unworthy, what does it mean that the God who set the moon and stars in place is mindful of you, cares for you, and became one of us in the Lord Jesus, the Son of Man?

Looking Ahead

With Psalm 8 we have reached the end of our journey through the individual psalms: from the blessed man of Psalm 1 to the Son of Man of Psalm 8, by way of the cross and the empty tomb, the laments and the thanksgivings, the King and the Shepherd, the prayer book of Christ in all its range. Two sessions remain, and they are not new psalms but a gathering of the whole. In the next session we will step back and consider how the New Testament itself reads the Psalms, for the Psalter is the book the apostles quote most of all, and they quote it, almost always, as a book about the Lord Jesus.

We will trace how the Lord Jesus prayed the Psalms, fulfilled them, and taught His disciples to find Himself in them (everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled), and how the early church, following Him, read psalm after psalm as the voice of Christ, the testimony to Christ, the prayer book He gave His people and prayed Himself. We will gather the christological threads we have followed all through this volume into a single picture: the Psalms as the things concerning Himself.

Before the next session, look back over the psalms we have studied in this volume, and notice how often the New Testament has been our guide in reading them. Consider, in preparation, Luke 24:44, where the risen Lord Jesus names the Psalms among the Scriptures that speak of Him.

Closing Prayer

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! When we look at Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have set in place, we are humbled by our smallness, and amazed beyond words that You are mindful of us, that You care for us, that You drew near and visited us in person. We thank You that our worth is not something we must build and defend, but a crown You have given; that the God who flung the stars into place has crowned us with glory and honor and called us His own. To everyone among us who feels small, overlooked, and unworthy, speak this word again: that You are mindful of them, and that Your gifts You do not take back.
We confess that the crown sits crookedly on our fallen heads, that we do not see all things under our feet, but find ourselves in bondage to sin and death. And so we look away from ourselves to the One in whom the song comes true: the Lord Jesus, the Son of Man, who was made for a little while lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death; the last Adam, who tasted death for everyone, and regained the dominion the first Adam lost. We bless You that He became the last Adam to bring many sons to glory, and that, united to Him, we are restored to the destiny we were made for and shall one day reign with Him. Let all of it (our smallness, our dignity, and our redemption) serve the majesty of Your name, now wearing the human face of Your Son. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.