Made in God's Image

In verses 1-2 of Psalm 8 we saw God’s Glory. In verses 3-4 we saw God’s Creation. In verses 5-8, we find God’s Image.

“Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.”

Here we find God given dignity…not man earned, or man supplied dignity, but God given dignity. It is beyond what we might expect…the word for “heavenly beings” is actually Elohim…David says, “Yet you have made him a little lower than God.” He looks up to God’s glory in verses 1-2, then he looks to God’s creation and back to the Fallin verses 3-4, but here he will take us beyond the Fall and back to Genesis 1 where God created us in His image.

Our dignity is wrapped up in this—we were created as image bearers of God…we were created in His image. God has given man a dignity that is second only to His own glory. Angels are ministering spirits with no earthly bodies, animals have bodies but no spirit, but man has both spirit and body. We are the crown jewelof God’s creation—the apex of all that He made—look at what David said, “and crowned him with glory and honor.” These are words used of God and yet God shares that with us.

Now you must see Jesus here…in Hebrews 2:6-8 the writer quotes Psalm 8:4-6 and applies it to Jesus and then says at the end of verse 8 and verse 9, “At present, we do not see everything in subjection to Him. But we see Him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone.” These verses in our Psalm apply to us before the Fall, but they are fulfilled in Jesus in the Incarnation.

Plummer said, “There is no greater gulf than that which separates the created and the uncreated, the finite and the infinite, man and God,” but this verse shows us how fallen man is restored—Jesus suffered in our place so we could be declared righteous. That’s the dignity we were given, but notice verses 6-8 and you’ll also see God given dominion. We should never worship the creation—the Creator gave us dominion over it.

Let’s look at the dominion tomorrow.