What is man that you are
mindful of him,
the son of man that you care
for him?
You made him a little lower
than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory
and honor.
(Psalm 8:4-5)
In this lovely poem, King David opens the door to some intriguing questions. Why do you suppose God acts as he does? He doesn’t have to be mindful of us, but he is. He doesn’t have to care for us, but he does. He didn’t even have to make us, but he did. And he could have made us just a little higher than the chimpanzees, but instead he made us just a little lower than the holy angels.
Why did he choose to crown us with glory and honor? In the Bible, these terms are usually reserved for God himself, yet he has placed them upon our heads as crowns for us to wear, as though we were royal persons.
Measured by our own virtues, most of us could hardly be well described as either glorious or deserving of high honor. I have an idea that if we could place some numerical value on the self-generated glory and honor of each person on earth, then total up the number and divide it by the earth’s population, we’d come out with an embarrassingly low average score.
Who can explain God’s behavior toward us except to say that he is God? One of our hymns declares him to be “God of grace and God of glory,” and this is true. From the radiant splendor of his glory he reaches out to fill our needs. He has chosen to make up our deficit.
Those of us who have turned to the Lord “reflect his glory,”
and “are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which
comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (1 Corinthians
We are flesh and blood, creatures of the earth, and sinful. But we have been touched by the glory of God, and someday our