Psalm 8 is one of my favorites among the songs of the Hebrew scriptures. Attributed to King David and perhaps reaching its final form within a couple of hundred years of David’s reign, this lyrical hymn turns its eye heavenward toward the stars.
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (New Revised Standard Version)
I can just imagine the Psalmist, looking up into a clear night sky over the Judean hills and seeing the stars undimmed by air pollution or peripheral light, shining like diamonds sewn into black velvet. The Milky Way meandered above him like a ribbon of white, celestial smoke. Constellations already tracked and studied by Zoroastrian astrologers held fast to their secret messages.
We can understand the Psalmist’s question, “…who are we…?” The stars do that; they beckon the human imagination to expand beyond the spheres of our mundane lives and invite us to “consider,” and the King James version renders it, things beyond what we can measure and comprehend within the limits of the human mind.
I still remember the Christmas when my parents gave me my first telescope. It was a four-inch reflector model that could pull the rings of Saturn close enough to be clearly visible with the naked eye. I can picture that Christmas night, standing with my Dad in a foot of Pennsylvania snow, as we peered at the craters of a winter moon.
Even at that tender age, I felt the pull of that ancient invitation: “Consider.” Who was I, compared to the immensity of the starry universe?
I recall an article, published in National Geographic years ago about the universe. It included statistics that were so impressive to me that I committed them to memory. Imagine the distance from the earth to the sun (93 million miles) as the thickness of the page you are reading now. Using this unit of measurement, the distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be represented by a stack of paper 81 feet high. And that is our nearest neighbor outside of our own solar system, the little cul-de-sac where we live.
Then there is the Milky Way, the spiral web of stars that forms the galaxy into which our sun is set as a rather unremarkable resident, out toward the wispy edge. The distance from one end to the other would be a formidable pile of paper 310 miles high. The distance to the farthest known object in the universe — about 13 billion light-years from earth — would now be a stack of paper that would reach one-third of the distance from the earth to the sun. This is a very, very big universe!
“Consider.” Who are we, that the creator of heaven and earth should care for us? That’s the invitation of the night sky. It’s an invitation to consider a proper sense of perspective.
Then add to that the saying attributed to St. Augustine, who must have spent some nights under the stars too: “God loves you as if you were the only one here.”
Consider that. Think about it. Then you might turn around and love that God back. You might say, as did the Psalmist, “…how majestic is your name upon the earth.”
Consider.
Blair Monie is senior pastor of the Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church (phpc.org). The Worship section is a regular feature underwritten by Advocate Publishing and the churches listed on these pages. For information about helping support the Worship section, call 214.560.4202.
