” O Jehovah our Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth! You have set Your glory above the heavens! Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings You have ordained strength, because of ones vexing You, to cause the enemy and the avenger to cease. When I look at Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have established; WHAT IS MAN that You are mindful of him, and the son of man, that You visit him?”
The above excerpt taken from the book of Psalms 8, starting at the first up until the fourth verse is a favorite of mine because I like to imagine a sort of council in Heaven with several different cadres of divine dignitaries in attendance. Given the time and the opportunity to raise a question before the almighty God of the Universe, that the entirety of Heaven has long since wanted an answer to- WHAT IS MAN?
The vastness of God’s workmanship and creations set in array for all the hosts of Heaven to gaze upon in their transcendent splendidness and sublime beauty but yet even the Lord of Hosts seemed to be most concerned about one which at an initial look appears to be the least and maybe even insignificant in comparison to the more elaborate and extravagant of His handwork; Man. WHAT IS MAN?
An entire complex Universe shows the supreme wisdom and ingenuity of this divine Monarch, such intricate design and purposeful placement of heavenly bodies: the stars, moons, sun and planets all in an orderly rotation and orbit to the extent that times and seasons can be clearly discerned from their alignments, when we put a creation fashioned from dirt and clay, the earth molded, we cannot help but join the angels in their curiosity as we all wonder WHAT IS MAN?
The question we are looking at here is not “Who are you?”, it is “What are you?” What is it about this apparently lower ranking member of all God’s creations that He would go to such extents as to leave the excellency of His personal abode all the way in search of fellowship and communion with him. Why does God care so much about you that He would want to “visit” you? What is man? WHAT ARE YOU?
You see the Lord of all has gone through a great deal for your sake, He has staked His everything, even laid down His life just so He could have you and for what? Could it really possibly be that there are no other beings in existence capable of fulfilling the role that He has for millennia sought man to play? What is it about YOU?
Captured in the rest of Psalms 8 are insights to what this creation of God might just be ” For You have made him lack a little from God, and have crowned him with glory and honor. You made him rule over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet: all sheep and oxen, yes, and the beasts of the field; the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, and all that pass through the paths of the seas. O Jehovah, our Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth!”
Now in retrospect to this it seems more obvious that the question was more rhetorical than inquiring because now it’s obvious to me that it was never about YOU in the first place, it had always been about God. In the creative studio of eternity God had fashioned you, designed you and wired you to be a carrier of His glory, to be a vessel unto honor. He went all out even as scriptures testify about man being fearfully and wonderfully made. That is incredible! God was being careful when He making man, when He was making you. It was never about the material of our creation but it was always about the purpose for which we were made. Locked up in the heart of God was a desire that only man had been given the capacity to fulfill; to represent Him, to spread His influence, to be LIKE HIM. Nothing else in all of creation could even come close, so man was second to none but God Himself.
And so our testimony is as written in 2 Corinthians 4:7 ” But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us;”. It was never supposed to be about us and we were never meant to be excellent in ourselves. We were created for His glory, for His sake and for His pleasure, to extend His dominion and be a revelation of Him upon the Earth.
So the next time you take a look in the mirror and you wonder just like the immortals did, let this be your realization: What is Man? MAN IS NOTHING WITHOUT GOD.
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