GLORY ABOVE THE HEAVENS

David, the faithful Israelite, begins this psalm by linking three things: God’s covenant people (seen in the word “our” in v. 1); His glory set above the heavens, and His Name exalted in all the earth. This expanding thought (Israel, the earth, the heavens) takes in the great sweep of David’s appreciation of his God. Immediately following, however, comes his realization that things are not as they should be, for God has to take unusual steps to establish His purposes. The simple, unaffected words of a two-or-three year old illustrate God’s use of “foolish things … to confound the wise” and “things which are not, to bring to nought things that are”, 1 Cor. 1. 26-29. God’s enemies are overcome by His power displayed in weak things; David’s experience with Goliath is an example of this.

Turning his eyes heavenward, David contemplates the grandeur of the night sky, noting the detail that God has worked into the moon and the stars. He cannot but wonder again at the great condescension of God in thinking and caring for frail mortal men, who are only the descendants of Adam. Adam’s original privileges made him king of the natural world; crowned with the glory and honour of being God’s representative on earth. Sin, however, snatched the crown away and stripped him of his glory, leaving him without his spiritual crown and covering. Man was expelled from Eden, having lost his dominion; hence David had to fight off a lion and a bear.

When the writer to the Hebrews takes up the subject of dominion in “the world to come” (the millennium), 2. 5, he too notes that in the present world man does not have dominion. Like David, however, he looks to heaven, not now seeing the stars, but looking beyond he sees “Jesus … crowned with glory and honour”, v. 9. The Lord Jesus Christ, though rejected down here, is honoured in heaven. Because of His death, the Father is able to bring many sons to glory, not now as sons of Adam who had lost his glory, but as those on their way to share glory with the Captain of their salvation. Let us therefore look up into heaven, seeing there the spiritual equivalent of David’s “glory above the heavens”, that is, seeing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”, 2 Cor. 4. 6, and seeing Him “let us run with patience the race that is set before us”, Heb. 12. 1-3.