⁶ But one has testified somewhere, saying, “What is man, that You remember him? Or the son of man, that You are concerned about him?”

God is concerned about each one of us. And one day we will no longer be subject to the fallen world, but we shall reign. That is the fresh wind that enables us to endure. So the writer to the Hebrews quotes Psalm 8:4-6. Today we focus on the amazing thought that the infinite God of the universes would give serious consideration to me.

Characteristic of the book of Hebrews is the very frequent reference to Old Testament scripture; sometimes even quoting the same verses repeatedly. The Bible had not yet be tagged with chapters and verses numbers yet (we don’t know precisely when that took place, but they seem to have first occurred around 1100 A.D. in the Latin Vulgate). But there is no doubt as to which OT passage it refers.

The Lord is majestic (Psalm 8:1), the psalmist lets his spiritual vision wander through the created order of the heavenly skies. Which of us has not been overcome with awe laying on the grass on a summer night, looking up at the brilliant, starry sky. The Milky Way galaxie, and the moon and the gazillion stars that adorn the nightscape. The vastness of what we see reveals to us the vastness of our God who made it all.  The sheer magnitude renders us humbled and tempted to insignificance. Isaiah reflects similar thought about God, “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and marked off the heavens by the span, and calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, and weighed the mountains in a balance and the hills in a pair of scales?” (Isaiah 40:5).

Who are we? Who am I, a speck of dust on a planet that is a spec of dust in a galaxy that is a spec of dust in a universe, that God simply spoke into existence, Who can hold in the palm of His hand all the physical matter that exists in the entire creation?

Yet, God is concerned about each of us, we matter to Him. That seems utterly impossible. Is that not just as unlikely as the thought that human life evolved by chance in a godless universe?  No, because God does exists and if he is bigger than all else, then He has no limitations, and He not only has the capacity to know us, but to be concerned about us.

Now, the Psalm 8, which the writer of Hebrews has in mind, is about more than God’s care about us (“man”). He is also speaking about the “son of man.” In context, up to this point, Jesus has been refered to a as “the Son.”  The ultimately fulfillment of God’s concern for humans is found in His Son.