What a lot of word pictures this psalm paints! In verses 1, 3 and 4, I picture an insignificant person gazing up at a vast sky, perhaps looking at a sunset, a rainbow, the stars, or Northern Lights. God’s glory set in the heavens.

Verse 5 evokes a picture of heaven, with God stooping to crown humans with glory and honour, with hordes of angels spectating. It is a puzzle – why does God care for humans so much? Verses 7 and 8 remind me of Genesis 1 and 2, when God brought the living creatures to Adam to name, and charged humans with the responsibility of ruling over everything.

In the middle of all this splendour, verse 2 seems almost incongruous. And yet it is the praise of the babies and little children which leaves God’s enemies totally stumped, with nothing to say. Perhaps this is what Paul was referring to in 1 Corinthians 1:27 when he said, ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.’ 

‘Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest, / sun, moon and stars in their courses above, / join with all nature in manifold witness / to thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.’¹

This psalm was the first Scripture portion to reach the moon, the Vatican’s contribution to 73 messages from world leaders left on the moon’s surface. An inspired choice, its ancient words proclaimed the cosmic sovereignty of God and affirmed the role of humankind. The repeated refrain ‘Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth’ frames the psalm at its beginning and end. Before turning to humankind, the psalmist extends the reach of God’s sovereignty over ‘all the earth’ to ‘in the heavens’ (v 1). The psalmist knew nothing of space, but no astronaut reaching even the remotest planet in the most distant galaxy can move beyond God’s reach. In such a universe, the psalmist asks, what are human beings that God should care about them? They have a status almost equal to heavenly beings, but this status is entirely derived from their relationship to their Creator.

This relationship confers great responsibility. We are to manage the earth, its creatures and their habitats, on behalf of the Creator. God has made us ‘rulers’ of creation (v 6); perhaps the NRSV puts it better: ‘You have given them dominion over the works of your hands’. Christians need to affirm this sacred responsibility, putting us at the forefront of protecting the environment. Christians who claim we need not concern ourselves about the environment, because Jesus will return and restore everything, are fooling themselves and misleading others – indeed they are taking up a position against the will of their Creator. We have dominion but, without recognising God’s claim on us as caretakers of the earth, dominion becomes domination, and selfish, unbridled domination leads to ecological disaster. 

‘For the beauty of the earth, / for the beauty of the skies …  Lord of all to thee we raise / this our joyful hymn of praise.’²

¹ Obadiah Chisholm, 1866–1960, ‘Great is thy faithfulness’  ² Folliott Sandford Pierpoint, 1835–1917