Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons

by William Gray Elmslie

"When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet."—Psalm viii. 3-6.

"But now we see not yet all things put under Him."—Heb. ii. 8.

THE Eighth Psalm is a very striking one. It lifts the mind of the reader to a lofty height where he seems to have soared above sin and sorrow. It exults in man's greatness and Nature's grandeur. It is not Hebrew and theocratic, but human and universal. What it says is said of man as man; of man as he ought to be, was meant to be, may be. The subject is Humanity.

The New Testament writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews takes what is said in this psalm to be true of Christ, and he thinks that he has a right to find in the words a prophecy of Christ's coming. If you read the psalm without thinking of what is said in the Epistle you would not immediately apply it to Christ. How, then, is there a real connection between this old Hebrew utterance and the coming of our Lord?

It is a fact that the patriarchs expected the coming of some great and wonderful blessing in the future, and it is a fact that in the coming of Christ a gift came to men in the lines of anticipated blessing; but far greater than they ever dreamed of.

Reflecting on those predictions and anticipations of future blessing, might there not be in the very structure of the world, of the material universe itself, in the course of events as they have fallen out in history, something to lead men to expect the advent of their Christ? God makes His plans looking, as a wise man looks, to the end. We should expect, then, in all the foundation-laying, that that was provided for and expected which should be the crown of all.

Is there not in creation an aspect of things which makes men think that there is something great and grand in store for their race? The writer of this psalm conceived his poem as he stood in the open fields and looked up into the solemn sky, and watched the unhasting and untiring motion of the shining stars—worlds upon worlds burning and throbbing in the abyss of space. Away from the hum and tumult of men, no one can look at those hosts of silent stars without a subdued and awed sense of the mystery of being, of the infinite possibilities that the universe discloses. The star-studded heaven at night makes a man irresistibly think of God. It makes a man think, too, of himself. The silence, the shining, the mystery and the solemnity of the starry heavens make a man's beating, living life, as it were, become heard. A man is intensely conscious of himself. That is exactly what passed through the heart of this writer. It was not he who chose to have these thoughts, no more than it is our wish to have these thoughts. God was playing upon the strings of this man's heart—more directly, more rigorously in him, but just as He plays upon the strings of your own when you have had great solemn thoughts of God on a dark night, beneath the burning stars. The man's thoughts went up, and then they went down into himself, when he looked up into heaven, when he saw the moon and the stars, when he realised all their wondrous being, the regularity, the order, the vastness, the distance; then he thought of God, and God became great and grand and majestic, and then he burst out, "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth!" That is what he said. Then he looked into himself, his own conscious life, met its failure, and his first thought was of his own terrible pettiness. In the face of these countless worlds revolving in the far heaven, "what is man?" And then there came another thought to him: "And yet how great is man!" That mighty moon, millions of times vaster than man, does not know its own shining, its lustre, its own motions, its majesty. It is blind, and deaf, and dumb, and insensate, and man sees it and wonders at it, measures and weighs it, and understands its nature; and so man in all his meanness, in all his smallness, in all his weakness, in all the fragility of his life, is greater far than sun and moon and stars, and all revolving worlds. How little is man—and yet how great, O God! Here down below on earth man watches the stars, and up in heaven God watches them too. Man thinks, God thinks; man creates, God creates; man loves, God loves; so little, so great, and yet so like; Father and child, the One so grand, the other so insignificant.

Then he turned to the earth on which he stood, and with a grandeur of soul he recognised man's position on earth sharing the likeness of God, gifted with God's power of thought and of plan, of will and of love; man stands lord of all lower things that have been made, king and ruler with power to control, with mastery to move them, he is lord and master over all their ways, uncontrolled by aught, undismayed by aught, king, god of earth: "Thou hast made him ruler over all the works of Thy hands."

Is it not a grand poem, that? If I could read to you the best poems written in other lands by men of other days, by men of other faiths, if I could compare the thoughts of this psalm with other thoughts of God's plan and of man's position, you would understand what I mean when I say the psalm is grand, the psalm is a revelation of man and of God.

If I had the capacity or the time to try and show you how these thoughts about God and about Nature and about man, give man all the dignity, all the elevation of character, all the powers and abilities to shape and fashion the world he is in, one could not but wonder at the grandeur of that psalm. The faith about God, and the faith about man's destiny written down in that psalm—that faith is the Magna Charta of humanity that has emancipated men from the slavery to sun, moon and stars, and all the powers of Nature.