"Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!" ....Psalm 8:1 & 9
(This year starts a new venture for Christian Life Frankston. You may have noticed a link to the Bible School website. We are aiming at a February start. It's been quite an adventure getting to this point. We rejoice in God's faithfulness in bringing us through what seemed insurmountable obstacles. Nothing is too hard for our God!)
At the start of this New Year and in an hour when men are blaspheming the Lord's name all around the world, the psalmist can only exclaim its greatness. Though himself a poet, he is at a loss to express its value and worth. All he can do is cry, "How excellent!" And this unspeakable excellence is "in all of the earth." Here, surely, is an echo of Genesis 1, where God beheld all and that it "was very good." But having begun in this manner, the writer concludes his psalm with an identical tribute to that excellent name, and this without so much as a mention of the terrible fall of man. Had we been writing this, we would have felt bound to bring in the sin factor and the failure of man.
But God is unchanging; and to the Psalmist, even Adam's sin could not reverse God's intention that in the end man should "have dominion over all the earth." It is at this point that the Lord Jesus comes on the scene. It is Hebrews 2 that illuminates Psalm 8: "But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man" ...Heb.2:9 The Lord Jesus is now the new man that represents all humanity in all of the earth, and He has already dealt with every sin problem by dying to pay the price of all the sins of all humanity forever! In Jesus Christ, all of God's desire is fully realised and Jesus is now related to all of us in all of this earth, even though there are many that have not as yet accepted Him. There is no deviation in the ways of God: they go straight ahead. "Oh Lord Jesus, our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth!"
