PARADISE WAS LOST

The Bible tells the tale that something terrible happened within humanity. The Reflection Of God Became Impaired By Sin. That happened in the paradise lost story, when Adam and Eve got the whole ball rolling. Like a snowball on a hill, it got larger and large affecting us all. Mankind today is only remotely like the ideal humanity portrayed by the psalmist in Psalm 8. The original Adam and Eve was ideal humanity. The human possessed the God-given capacity of self-determination, which meant that he and she had freedom to choose to obey God or to disobey. To disobey would be a violation of the relationship with God. When the original humans from whom we came, chose to disobey God, that act of rebellion defaced the image of God in the human and has affected the entire race. Long after creation, Solomon observed the tragedy that man did not remain as he was created. "This only I have found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes" (Ecclesiastes 7:29).

TO UNDERSTAND WHO WE ARE, WE MUST UNDERSTAND GOD

To understand who we are, we must understand who God is. Psalm 8:1 says, “O Lord our Lord, how majesty is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.” God is the ultimate reality, existing in and of himself with an infinite existence that is unlike any other being in the universe. He is without a beginning and he doesn’t have an end date. God has personality and the essence of God is distinguished in three persons, a trinity of persons, who are neither three gods or three parts or modes of God but rather are coequal and coeternal.

David wrote this psalm to praise the incomparable Creator of this entire universe. How big a deal is that?

We view the sun positioned in the heavens of our planet. The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter. If we create our own scale, reducing the sun to the size of a beach ball two feet in diameter, we can commence a staggering comparison. You step off eighty-two paces (a pace being two feet long), and put down a mustard seed to represent the first planet Mercury. Sixty more steps and you put down a beebee for Venus. Walk seventy-eight more paces and for earth you put down a pea. One hundred and eight steps further you will be at Mars and you will put down a pinhead. Then you may scatter some fine dust to represent asteroids and mark off seven hundred and eighty-eight more steps and mark Jupiter with an orange. Nine hundred and thirty-four steps further and for Saturn you put down a golf ball. Another two thousand and eighty-six steps and Uranus will be marked by a marble. Two thousand three hundred and twenty-two steps more and you mark Neptune with a cherry. That will have taken you two and one half miles and you aren't even near Pluto. However, if you swing this two and one half mile arm around you will have a mass surface of five miles in diameter and that will represent our solar system. You will have to travel another six thousand seven hundred and twenty-two miles on the same scale before you meet another two foot ball to represent the nearest other star.

GRASPING HOW MUCH GOD CARES FOR US

To best understand that God infinitely cares for each of us, I must begin with the Big Picture. Somewhere in the broad window of pre-history God determined to create humanity and a world in which the species would live. You and I are sitting in different places, a library, a living room, a Starbucks, some place where we can read. That’s the small picture. The big picture is that we are at this moment part of a whole human history. Human history had a beginning and it has always been moving toward a target. It is a matter of design, and this design originated with God. That design bears upon the theme that intrigued David, the psalmist, shepherd, soldier and king of ancient Israel. He wrote memorable conversation to God which is recorded as Psalm 8 in the Book of Psalms of the Old Testament.

8:1 O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
2 Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.

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

5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

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

DAVID WAS AMAZED THAT GOD MADE HIM

The psalmist David wrote a hymn that captures his own sense of wonder that God created the human creature to fashion Himself, that is to bear God’s likeness, to be the image or reflection of God. In Psalm 8, you read “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens… 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, (Psalm 8:1,3-6 ESV)