O Lord, our Lord, how excellent

Thou hast established praise.
With overflowing hearts to Thee
Our joyful voice we raise.
Oh, soon that blessed day shall come—
All tongues these words shall peal!
But in the local churches now
We have a foretaste real.
O Lord, our Lord, how excellent
Thy name in all the earth!
Let every people, tribe, and tongue
Proclaim its boundless worth.
(Hymns, #1097)

[Psalm 8] Verse 3 says, "When I see Your heavens, the works of Your fingers,/The moon and the stars, which You have ordained." David did not say that he saw the heavens, but he saw "Your heavens." We have a hymn on this psalm in our hymnal (Hymns, #1097). In the second stanza of that hymn, the writer referred to the sun, the moon, and the stars. The writer added the word sun, but this is wrong. In Psalm 8 David saw only the moon and the stars, not the sun. We cannot see the sun, the moon, and the stars at the same time. When we see the moon and the stars, we cannot see the sun.

The moon and the stars in Psalm 8 indicate that it was in the night. In the nighttime, everything is dark. But the psalmist lifted up his eyes to look at our Father's heavens. In the night he saw the moon and the stars which God had ordained. The scientific experts can bear witness to this ordination. The divine ordination of the moon and the stars is truly a wonder.

After the psalmist turned his view from the messy earth to the bright heavens, he said, "What is man, that You remember him,/And the son of man, that You visit him?" (v. 4). He turned his view from the moon and the stars in the heavens back to man on this earth. First, God remembers man. Second, He visits man. We have to understand this in a poetic way. God in the heavens remembered man before He became incarnated. Then He came to visit man by becoming a man through His incarnation. The Triune God came to visit us. Before coming to us, He remembered us. The Triune God was very busy, yet He remembered us. Then according to His remembrance of us, He became incarnated to visit us.