Psalm 8: Pale Blue Dot
Accompanying this talk are several media files:
These can be opened individually or when prompted in the text.
We have noted that the majority of the Psalms are of a lament or angry nature. However, there are praise Psalms too and Psalm 8 is one of them.
It is a Psalm that emerges out of David’s observation of the natural world around him. Dr Dick observed rightly in his “The Solar System”, “A survey of the solar system has a tendency to moderate the pride of man and to promote humility.” And this is the effect in the psalmist.
Over the last few days we have had some clear night skies with a shimmering full moon and bright stars. You may have stopped to look up and wonder. To remember that men have walked, allegedly, on the surface of the moon. But then looked past that hanging lantern which seems vaguely connected to our earth to the stars beyond and ponder what they are and what they mean.
In 1977, I had just finished my A levels and turned 18. On 20th August of that year they launched the Voyager II space probe. It was intended to investigate Neptune.
Neptune is the eighth planet from the sun, out of nine, the fourth largest by diameter, third by mass. It orbits 4,504,000,000 km from the sun.
Voyager travelled toward Neptune at the speed of a bullet, 30,000mph.
In 1989 I had married Alison. We had lived in Leeds, then Nottingham and then we moved to London, we had started two businesses, joined the fledgling SW London Vineyard, had a 1 year old son and were 12 years older.
In 1989 Voyager II reached Neptune and took some pictures which it sent back to earth. Bored, it then carried on off into the solar system. It is probably still going and neither you nor I will be alive when it reaches the nearest star. That will be in 958,000 years.
Our galaxy (which includes the Milky Way) is estimated to contain 100,000 million stars in it. And there are thought so far to be at least 100,000 million galaxies out there.
The scale of creation is mind-boggling and Genesis 1 v.16 says, almost as an after-thought, “…He made the stars also”.
I don’t know what your view is about creation, which theory you find most appealing. I have concluded that however long it took to create the solar system and however it happened, someone did it.
You may have heard or read Richard Dawkins, a very clever chap whose own religion is one of full blown scepticism about religion. An atheist and evolutionist who is scathing about anyone who believes in God. I read one of his books last year, “Unweaving the Rainbow” to try and understand where he is coming from.
He is a very good writer even if you feel that he is lecturing you all the time. Anyway, I am puzzled by someone who can write this and not conclude that there must be God who put it all together:
Page 72 from “Unweaving the rainbow” describing how we hear an orchestra.
Concluding, “Such a feat of unweaving and reweaving, or analysis and synthesis, is almost beyond belief, but we all do it effortlessly and without thinking.”
And at the beginning of the book (p6) he writes, “Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? … To put it another way round, isn’t sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born?”
Precisely, but unfortunately without a belief in God, Dawkins can’t come up with an answer to his own question. But the psalmist does.
Psalm 8 starts and ends with a simple, poem of praise, as though to say, “I have run out of words, I am just stunned, amazed.”
Then in between there are statements about how great God is;
an acknowledgement of man’s place in the scheme of things;
and a glimpse of God’s plan to save us through Jesus.
You can read the Psalm or view the “Psalm 8 for reading with images”.
Andrew Murray (a famous 19th century preacher) used to say, “The power of our prayer is in proportion to our understanding of who it is to whom we pray!”
Here is a slide sequence that helps us see the sheer scale of God’s creation in which we play an amazing part.
The slide show is a little old now but the effect is still mind-stretching. The slide sequence starts with a view of the planet earth placed within a square 100,000 kilometres across. Then we are taken through a series of pictures each 1/10th smaller than the one before. We start feeling very small in comparison and we end up feeling enormous. The square inside each square is the approximate frame for the next photo.
Carl Sagan, the scientist, astronomer and novelist said in a lecture entitled Pale Blue Dot:
“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
It seems that Sagan has not read bible. Although pre-science the bible helps and encourages us to read the scientific map and respond in awe and reverence to the wonder of God’s creation.
I would like you to meet a friend of mine, Prof Clive Beggs, who knows more than most about some of this stuff. He is Professor of Medical Technology at Bradford University and is in the throes of publishing some astonishing work on understanding DNA.
The more he learns about this the more convinced he is in our creator God and the stronger his faith.
On the Psalm 8 podcast you can hear the interview with Clive.
Going back to Psalm 8: as we read through these verses we see the psalmist turning to the skies and declaring in awestruck tones how great God must be, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens…when I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place …”
And then he lowers his eyes and looks at the people around him and becomes aware of himself and the fact that he is able to respond to his creator God and know a relationship with him, “From the lips of children you have ordained praise … what is man that you are mindful of him?”
Then there is a clear understanding of man’s role to look after the created world and to care for animals. It is a picture of the garden of Eden, when God charged man with the stewardship of the created world. It is also another example of the kingdom perspective of the psalmist as he looks back to God’s intended created order and looks forward to when the fulfilment of this order and created perfection will come to be.
Although all things are under “man’s feet” it is obvious that, despite this commission, despite our powerful resources and scientific advances, we still haven’t got to the point either of ruling over everything nor of doing what we are doing really well.
But this is a glimpse into the intended order, what God meant creation to be and what it will be.
Importantly this is also a profound Christological statement. What that means is that this psalm also talks about Jesus and explains something very important about who he is and his role.
Before we look at that let me show you the photograph taken by Voyager II looking back into our solar system as it sped away.
Can you see the tiny speck of white?
The photo above was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, more than 4 billion miles in the distance. Having completed it primary mission, Voyager at that time was on its way out of the Solar System, on a trajectory of approximately 32 degrees above the plane of the Solar System. Ground Control issued a command for the distant space craft to turn around and, looking back, take photos of each of the planets it had visited. From Voyager's vast distance, the Earth was captured as a infinitesimal point of light (between the two white tick marks), actually smaller than a single pixel of the photo. The image was taken with a narrow angle camera lens, with the Sun quite close to the field of view. Quite by accident, the Earth was captured in one of the scattered light rays caused by taking the image at an angle so close to the Sun.
In that same lecture, Pale Blue Dot, Sagan's went on to say,
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.”
I can understand what he is saying and his perspective.
But he is wrong in his conclusion: God looks at this pale blue dot and loves it and loves the tiny people on it. And so he decided to rescue them. It is unfathomable and impossible to get our minds around so great a grace that would make itself so small to save us.
The psalmist writes, “You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour.”
This was written 1,000 years before Jesus. But after Jesus had been born, had died and had risen again, an early leader in the church, St Paul, explained that this does refer also to Jesus (Hebrews 2).
The psalmist is, unknowingly, predicting the time when God will step into our humanity in the person of Jesus, God’s love made into a real human being. He will, says the psalmist, for a time become man. He has, as we have seen, for a time become man, a little lower than the angels.
A lifetime of humanness that did what was necessary to rescue us from the desperation of lives devoid of hope and meaning. A life and death and resurrection that did the deed that restored our relationship with our creator.
We do indeed have a wonderful story to be part of and to tell.
Let’s listen to a hymn that celebrates this.
The next slide in the main power point, “Psalm 8” has this song embedded in it. It is also filed as a separate media file, “Hymn of praise.”
David Flowers, 11/12/2006