1 To the chief musician upon Gittith; a Psalm of David.
2 O Jehovah our Lord, how glorious [is] thy name in all the earth! Thou who hast set thy majesty above the heavens.
3 From the mouth of children and sucklings hast thou ordained praise because of thine adversaries, to still the enemy and the revenger.
4 When I behold thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established,
5 What [is] man that thou rememberest him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?
6 And thou makest him a little lower than the angels and [with] glory and honor thou crownest him.
7 Thou makest him to rule over the works of thy hands; thou hast put everything under his feet.
8 All sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field.
9 Birds of heaven and fishes of the sea, [that which] passes through the paths of the sea.
10 O Jehovah our Lord, how glorious [is] thy name in all the earth!
Notes on Psalm 8
This closes and crowns the series founded on the two prefatory psalms, the righteous man in the midst of the wicked (Jews though they were), and the Messiah the object of his trust and of the opposition of the nations and peoples, both the righteous and the Christ assured of God’s favor and establishment in blessing and glory according to promise. But even the Messiah was rejected beyond all, and the righteous meanwhile share His experience, to which His Spirit gives a voice as He directs their hearts purified by faith while they pass through varied trials. This we have been tracing in Psalms 3-8 is “To the chief musician upon Gittith: a psalm of David.” Learned men suggest an instrument invented at Gath, or an air of the vintage festivity: a holy but happy season for a pious Jew. Furst regards it as a hollow instrument from the verb “to deepen.” It is, however, sensibly distinct from the psalms before and after, as the anticipation of God’s counsels, and specially cited as such in the N.T. for the exaltation of the glorified Man over all things, after His humiliation unto death on the cross.
It is evident that we have here a glory far higher and wider than that of Psalm 2. Indeed it is the universe, if we heed the N.T., where the suffering of death is shown to be the hinge and ground of this conferred glory, heavenly and unlimited over all things. It is the great day of Jehovah in the rule of the second Man, the last Adam: His glory set above the heavens, but His name glorious in all the earth. He is the exalted Head over all things, consequent on His humiliation, wherein God was glorified as in nothing so much, though all His life glorified the Father.
Here also two psalms (ix. x.) open a new series which follows them, as Psalms 1, 2 prepared the way for those which last occupied us. It is not here the great principles of man righteous and the Messiah, with the experience of sorrow and trial to which this leads, and the heart’s expression to God which it forms, and the greater glory that results at last (as in Psalms 3-8). The new prefatory pair treats of the actual circumstances which the remnant are called to face (Psalms 9, 10), which plunges us in the crisis of the latter day, leading to the experience suitable to them and formed by the Spirit of Christ in the righteous accordingly (Psalms 11-15). This may serve to show what divine order reigns in that which might seem to a superficial reader the least consecutive, or mutually connected, book of all scripture; and how much more light from God is given than those look for who are verbally familiar with them every day, but misapplied!