Transcript

In 1996, the Copenhagen Zoo added a new exhibit to its primate section.

They did it by displaying a caged pair of Homo sapiens.

And the purpose of the exhibit, according to the zoo officials, was, quote, to force visitors to confront their origins and accept that we are all primates.

Well, while other primates in the zoo were swinging from branches and were marking their territory and staring up at the ceiling, the caged homo sapiens named Henrik Lehmann and Malin Bockhoff were working on a motorcycle, adjusting the air conditioning, checking their email.

They were sending and receiving faxes and even read some books.

Well, that exhibit was short-lived because it turned out that Denmark has labor laws and has human rights laws that didn't quite fit in with keeping the couple Hermann and Marlene caged up.

So the other primates were left behind, but despite 200 years of Darwinian evolutionary theorizing, the Homo sapiens were not content to stay living a caged life, and they left the zoo.

Well, in the 25 years since that zoo experiment, technological advances have empowered postmodern ideologies to contend that humanity is not merely another kind of primate, but is a sociologically, or perhaps more accurately, a psychologically constructed being that is the result of the desires and the will of the individual.

This has already become commonplace in our day.

Through the transgender movement where a man trapped in a woman's body or a woman trapped in a man's body can transition into their true self.

And through chemical, surgical, and technological treatments attempt to bring their bodies into alignment with their desires.

The result of all this is that certain sectors of the medical community now recognize dozens of genders.

including gender fluid, gender apathetic, and agender.

In addition to this, there are 13 states in the United States today that offer non-binary birth certificates.

And there are people walking among us that are beginning to identify themselves as AFABs and AMABs, which are acrostics for assigned female at birth, assigned male at birth.

All of this makes many people very hesitant to refer to someone they meet as a man or a woman.

As we saw last year during the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for President Biden's nominee to the Supreme Court, Katonji Jackson, when she was asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn, can you provide a definition for the word woman?

And the Harvard-educated judge replied, Can I provide a definition?

No, I can't. And the senator, incredulous, said, You can't? Jackson responded, Not in this context.

I'm not a biologist.

If it weren't so serious, it would be incredibly comical.

But with what's coming down the pike in AGI, Artificial general intelligence, which is far more severe than mere artificial intelligence.

What's coming with cybernetic organisms and transhumanism?

In years, we might hear the question being deflected with this.

No, I can't tell you what a human is because I'm not a computer scientist.

I don't understand science fiction.

Well, all of this highlights what Carl Truman has referred to as the anthropological crisis of our age.

We can no longer assume that the people of our generation know what we mean when we talk about men and women.

Which brings us to a most pertinent question that the Bible asks and answers for us that frames the Theme of my message and the theme of this conference.

What is man?

King David asked that question rhetorically in Psalm number 8, and it's that Psalm that I want us to turn to now as we begin to direct our thinking to the Word of God on this vital issue, this vital subject of what constitutes humanity.

So look at Psalm number 8. I want to focus specifically on verses 3 through 8, but we'll read all of the Psalms so that we can hear what it is that the Lord inspired King David to write as he contemplated this question.

So hear the word of the Lord from Psalm number 8. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens, out of the mouth of babes and infants.

You have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon, the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you're mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands.

You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea.

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

David bookends this psalm with that expression of praise and adoration and wonder at the glory of God, His majesty that is revealed in all creation.

And though God's enemies and His foes refuse to give to Him the glory that He is due, God has ordained that even babies and infants will declare His greatness.

A point that our Lord and Savior Jesus underscored when he quoted this psalm in Matthew chapter 21 verses 15 and 16 as children were shouting hosannas in his presence.

But it is God's crowning work of creation that David particularly has in view in this psalm.

It's mankind and our place in God's creation that leads David to praise and worship.

The question that he rhetorically asks in verse 4 is one of the most important questions that we can ask in our day.

In fact, it is a question that begs to be asked and answered in the midst of so much cultural confusion and ethical dishonesty about the nature of reality.

What is man?

What is mankind?

What's humanity?

The answer that we see in this psalm and the rest of the Bible is that man is a creature designed by God to serve him as a steward in his world.

John Calvin famously opens his Institutes of the Christian Religion with this sentence, Nearly all the wisdom that we possess, that is to say true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts, the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

To really know ourselves, We must know God.

And to really know God, we must know ourselves.

Well, this psalm reveals to us that David had some sense of that as he contemplated himself and God and was brought to a place of praise and worship and adoration in the process.

As a young shepherd, he would have spent many nights gazing at the moon and stars, having his imagination stretched by the vastness of creation.

And in this Psalm, he pauses to reflect upon such a scene and to give voice to the insights that he gained about both God and himself, these insights that come from the glories of creation.

The deepest response that such contemplation evokes A proper consideration of creation and God's creative activity and our place in His created world will always lead to worship and to honor our majestic God.

What I want to do is to consider the substance of David's contemplation this afternoon.

As he gives us insight about humanity in verses 3 through 8. I want to do this so that we might come to see what he saw and learn what he learned so that we might worship and live as he worshiped and lived.

As people created by God and assigned the responsibility to be stewards in his world.

We see this in two key ways.

First, in verses 3 and 4, we see that man is a creature that is dwarfed by creation.

There's something about the insignificance of humanity that captured David's thoughts as he looked up into the nighttime sky.

As a shepherd, he would have spent many nights on the hillsides outside of Bethlehem.

He would have had hours of opportunity to just look into the starry night and to think about the God who created that.

He recognized, as we all should recognize, that creation inevitably points to the Creator.

Look at verse 3. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, David couldn't conceive of the idea that all this just happened, that it just came about by chance.

But he knew that creation declares the glory of the Creator.

And so he turns his contemplation into a prayer.

The backdrop against which David asks about the nature and significance of humanity is one of those nights of contemplation looking up into the heavens.

Much of what is wrong today with our modern thinking about humanity is that we tend to start off thinking about ourselves with too much emphasis on self-importance.

We think about our preeminence.

I mean, children come into the world basically wired to think that way.

And in some sense, it's understandable, isn't it?

Because all the big people around them focus on them as if they are the center of the world.

When they get wet, somebody changes them.

When they get hungry, somebody feeds them.

When they get disturbed, somebody comforts them.

When they're lonely, somebody picks them up.

I mean, in a sense, as far as they know, they are the center of the universe.

A careful consideration of nature, of creation, Would go a long way in helping both children and adults overcome their misguided sense of self-importance.

Go stand on the beach and just gaze at the horizon for half an hour and contemplate your existence in creation.

Or hike up a mountain and just contemplate the significance of that A majestic feature in God's created world.

Stand on the edge of a canyon.

Let your mind just pause and contemplate creation and your place in it.

Doing that has a way of helping us to right-size our existence in God's created world.

That's what David was doing when he laid on his back at night, staring up into the Galilean sky.

Taking in creation caused him to pause and to think deeply about the smallness, the insignificance of his own life and of the human race in general.

The famous outdoorsman and explorer William Beebe was a good friend of Teddy Roosevelt.

And he tells of a ritual that they would enact whenever he went to visit President Roosevelt.

He writes, After an evening of talk, we would go out on the lawn and search the heavens until we found the faint spot of light amidst the constellation of Pegasus.

And one of us would recite out loud, That is the spiral galaxy of Andromeda.

It is as large as our Milky Way.

It's one of a hundred million galaxies.

It is 750,000 light years away.

It consists of a hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.

And he said, and after a moment, President Roosevelt would grin, look at Beebe and say, now I think we're small enough, let's go to bed.

There's real wisdom in taking time in God's creation to just stop And look around and consider the fact that the God who created these vast, immeasurable displays in creation is the same God who has created us.

It was in that sense of smallness in the face of the vastness of creation that caused David to reverently ask the question in verse 4, What is man that you're mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?

He was stunned by the fact that That creation is massive and masterful.

But he was also stunned by the reality that man in this creation is insignificant and unworthy of God's attention.

How could a God who has created all of this be mindful of me?

Why would God take note of mankind?

Why would he remember us?

Why would He acknowledge us at all?

How is it possible that the God who has done all of this also cares for me?

Why would God visit mankind?

Why would He have any interest in us?

David appropriately reasoned from creation to his own life.

And he realized his own insignificance in the created order.

That realization led him to a sense of wonder that God would take any note of him, that God would have any regard for humanity.

And I would argue that when we think rightly about God and when we do pause and consider his greatness and his glory, even as it is revealed in creation, that those are appropriate thoughts for us to have, questions.

Why would God care about the likes of us?

John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, describes a period of his religious experience when he was deeply distressed.

And he said his distress was not a result of fear.

He wasn't afraid of being punished for his sin so much as he was apprehensive that God would entirely overlook him.

Well, such thoughts seem to be foreign to modern men because we have failed to see accurately ourselves in the light of God's amazing creative power displayed in the world.

We pride ourselves with so many advances that we've made in science and medicine and technology and education.

that words like small and insignificant are the last words we would choose to describe the human race.

Rather than following the wisdom of David, our age seems to have more in common with the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, his dictum that man is the measure of all things.

The truth is we're slow learners, or maybe more accurately I could say we're quick forgetters.

How easy it is to forget our frailty.

But how easy it is for God simply and quickly to remind us of our frailty.

That happens to all of us individually, doesn't it?

When you find yourself laid low by sickness or by accident or disease.

It happens as you age, sometimes almost imperceptibly, until that morning you try to get out of bed and you realize that something's not quite right You wonder how you got there, but you're faced with your frailties.

But God also can remind us on much larger scales as when it pleases him to unleash a virus that shuts down most of the world or to send a massive and destructive hurricane across a proud state.

In those moments, if we're thinking right, we Need to be confronted with the reality of our weakness, our inability, our dependence upon this great God.

You can't help but feel your smallness in such moments.

And were we to think rightly about the world and our place in it, we would remember that, we would meditate on that, just as David did.

But in this Psalm, not only does David see man as a creature dwarfed by creation, He also recognizes and confesses that man is God's creature crowned with glory and honor.

Insignificant on the one hand, and yet made by God, for God, with honor and glory.

He shifts from the smallness of mankind in comparison to the greatness of creation to the significance of humanity by virtue of God's sovereign, compassionate arrangement.

God has established mankind in a place of importance in his creation.

It's verse 5. Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings.

Yet.

Despite our weakness.

Despite our smallness, our insignificance, God has not left man to be overlooked or without purpose in the world.

He created man to live in a mediating relationship, a mediating role, a position in creation above the beasts and below the heavenly being.

Thomas Aquinas made this point by explaining that man is a creature with both spirit and body.

While angels have spirits but no bodies, and animals have bodies with no spirits.

Heavenly beings, that's the Hebrew word Elohim, which is the plural word for God.

It does sometimes mean spirit beings.

We see this in places like 1 Samuel 28, 13 and the Witch of Endor and Psalm 82, verses 1 and 6. The Greek translators of the Old Testament Hebrew used the Greek word for angels to translate Elohim in this psalm.

And so we see in Hebrews chapter 2, when the author is talking about Jesus Christ and cites this psalm, that he cites that Greek translation of it and renders that statement about the Lord Jesus that he was made for a little while lower than the angels.

However, many translators, including John Calvin and the New American Standard Bible render this, you have made him a little lower than God.

I think that rendering fits better with what we see in the Psalm because there's every evidence that David here is thinking back, not only to his life as a shepherd looking up at the sky, but he's thinking back to those words of Moses in Genesis 1. And what God did in creating image bearers.

You have made him a little lower than God.

That's what man is.

In Genesis 1.26 we read, Knowing this creation account, and Having it in mind, as he's trying to take in and contemplate the heavens there on that nighttime sky as a shepherd, David recognizes that the stars, the moon, they are God's handiwork.

And he's also struck by the fact that he too is God's handiwork and that God has exalted him and the human race To a status that, despite our smallness in comparison with creation, is a status of honor and glory.

He's given to mankind a place of importance, crowned him with glory and honor.

Though in himself, mankind is no match for creation, doesn't even tip the scales in comparison to what God has done in the wonders of his creation.

But because God created man and created man in his own image, people, men and women, are indeed crowned with significance and given a place of esteem in God's order.

Sin has so ravaged the human race that it points depravity seems to have increased so rapidly and extensively that we're tempted to regard people as monsters.

I think sometimes psychologically we wish that they were, because it would separate us from what we see in the worst of humanity.

But brothers and sisters, something we must never forget is that every person has been created in the image of God.

The vilest man you ever meet, the most wicked woman you ever hear about, This is what C.S. Lewis meant when he wrote, There are no ordinary people.

You've never talked to a mere mortal.

The glory and honor that crowns humanity is manifested clearly in the responsibility that God has entrusted to the human race.

He's commissioned mankind as a steward over the rest of creation.

You see this in verse 6. David says to the Lord, you've given him, mankind, dominion over the works of your hands.

He's given to His image-bearers authority to control and guide and cultivate the rest of creation.

This is demonstrated with every new discovery and secret that is uncovered in the universe.

Aerodynamics testifies to this, as does air conditioning, as do computer chips.

All of this and more testifies to the dominion that God has given to His image-bearers in His world.

But specifically, according to verses 7 and 8, God has given to man dominion over all of the earth's animal life.

And though people are animate creatures, men and women are not mere animals.

We're image bearers of our Creator.

We are stewards who've been commissioned by Him to exercise dominion over His world.

And ultimately, as the Psalm goes on, God has put all things under His feet.

All things under His feet.

Paul quotes this part of the Psalm in reference to Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15, where he writes, Now this gives us a wonderfully important clue about understanding further not only the nature of our humanity, but also our destiny.

That it will be fulfilled in the person and the work of Jesus Christ our Lord.

We have failed to carry out the commission that God gave to men and women as His image bearers.

He made us upright, yet in our father Adam, and now following in his footsteps, we have fallen away from God.

And sin has so thoroughly corrupted human nature that we no longer can naturally have fellowship with God.

Yet God did not abandon the crown of His creation, nor did He deliver us over to our just deserts.

He sent His Son to rescue us, to save us from our sin.

To do this, the Son of God became man.

Our Creator took on human nature.

As a man, He lived a life of complete obedience to God's commandments.

The only righteous man who's ever walked the earth And yet he voluntarily laid down his life on the cross in the place of sinners as if he himself were a sinner.

Having, by that act of his crucifixion, made a perfect sacrifice for our sins, God raised him from the dead as the God-man, never to die again.

Humanity has been taken into deity.

And by turning from sin and entrusting yourself to this Savior, you too can experience the restoring grace of God in recreating you to be what you originally were designed to be that sin has corrupted.

You can become a true human.

You can become one who, in union with the God-man, the epitome of man, comes to know God through Him, in Him, and to live as God has called us to live.

Jesus Christ lives forever as the true man.

All who trust in Him will, because of Him and forever with Him, live as redeemed, glorified humanity.

And the day is coming.

When everything will be brought into subjection to Jesus Christ as Lord.

Indeed, the certainty of that coming day is so clear in Paul's mind that he just quotes what David says as it being already a settled fact.

For God has put all things in subjection under His feet.

And on that day, when history is wrapped up, when Christ is seen as He truly is, So man is a creature designed by God to serve Him as His steward in His world.

You know, for years we've told our children that they can be whatever they want to be.

And now we have a generation of adults who actually believe that.

And they're convinced that self-determination is the greatest expression of authenticity.

We're facing societal and legal pressures to treat men who have determined they are women as if they really are.

And to treat women who've determined that they're men as if they really are.

Our public libraries perpetuate this rebellion against reality by inviting sexual deviants and those suffering from gender dysphoria to come in and groom little children into this distorted way of thinking and living with drag queen story hours.

When the very purpose as stated by those who established drag queen story hours is to disrupt the binary between womanhood and manhood.

Even worse, We live in a day when it is now commonplace for medical professionals and medical facilities to chemically alter and surgically mutilate boys and girls in pursuit of such delusions.

Why?

Because we have failed to stand firm on such basic teachings of God's Word.

And in the process, we have allowed A generation to deny reality itself.

In the beginning, God created heavens and earth.

So God created man in His own image.

In the image of God, He created him.

Male and female, He created them.

Every human being is an image-bearer of God.

And there are only two ways To bear God's image as a man or a woman, according to God's determination.

How do we know this?

Because God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, He created us by Himself, for Himself, And he is the only one who gets to define what a man is.

So what is man?

Man is exactly what God says he is.

Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else.

Let's pray.

Our Father, we thank you for your word.

We thank you that you've not left us in the dark in this world.

You've not left us without a witness, a clear testimony to the truth that we need to live well in this world and to be prepared for the world to come.

We thank you that with all of the distorted notions about humanity around us today, that you have given to us in your Son, Jesus Christ, The Picture of Perfect Humanity.

And I ask that you would help those of us who know him to revel in that knowledge, to be filled with the kind of wonder that we see in David, that you would think of us, care for us, acknowledge us, provide for us, and through the sacrifice of your Son, redeem us.

Oh Lord, help us then, as those who have been purchased by the blood of the Lord Jesus, To live with full confidence knowing that you are our God, we are your people, your image bearers whom you've designed to represent you in this world.

Oh, grant us your spirit that we might be your stewards faithfully.

For Jesus' sake.

Amen.