Somebody Else’s Mail (17)

Long before the Lord Jesus ever used the title “Son of Man” to describe himself, the concept had a history with which devout Jews looking for their Messiah were well acquainted. Ezekiel not only had the title before the Lord Jesus, he had it used to describe him many more times than the Lord Jesus, 93 in total. In fact, God himself chose to address his servant that way, as he did Daniel.

What can we learn from that? Not much, probably, except that the hermeneutical “Law of First Mention” is nowhere near as reliable as the law of gravity.

In any case, David’s reference to the “son of man” in Psalm 8 is an important part of the term’s history.

Psalm 8:1-2 — The Majestic Name

To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith. A Psalm of David.

“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 babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.”

The Gittith

To our growing list of superscription indecipherables we may now add “The Gittith”, which, as my ESV says, is “probably a musical or liturgical term”. It joins Selah, Sheminith and Shiggaion, all of which are similarly obscure.

O YHWH Our Master

The psalm begins and ends by addressing the “Lord, our Lord”, which in Hebrew is two different words [yᵊhōvâ 'āḏôn], the first being the personal name of God and the second being the standard word translated “Master” in the OT. So it is literally “O YHWH, Master”. This is a unique construction in scripture, and I’m not sure what to make of it. In the six other instances when the two appear together, the word order is reversed in Hebrew. Perhaps the intent is to contrast the majesty of the Almighty with the insignificance of man, his servant.

In Psalm 19, David will begin with the statement that the heavens declare the glory of God. The thought here is similar: the Lord’s name is majestic throughout the earth. His glory is above the heavens. It’s so obvious that anyone can see it. In fact, even little children know it when they come across it, which brings us to verse 2.

Babies and Infants

Translation complexities in this third sentence result in a plethora of interpretive options. Everyone agrees that it concerns what small children say. The question is what that amounts to. A significant number of translators do as the ESV has and simply go with “established strength”, but no small number have variations of “built a fortress”. I’m not sure much turns on it. The fortress is not literal in any case. The sense is likely similar to what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:27, that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” The Lord’s glory is so glaringly obvious that it needs no argument or defense; he lets small children herald it rather than the religious elite.

Then there is the final clause, in which it is unclear whether the enemy and the avenger are being obliterated (NASB), stopped in their tracks (Good News), or simply rendered speechless (many). I tend to think it’s the last of these, not least because of how Jesus fulfilled it. When little children in the temple cried out, “Hosanna to the Son of David!”, the chief priests and scribes knew they were whipped. Rather than silencing the children, they tried to persuade Jesus to do it for them, whereupon our Lord quoted Psalm 8 to them. That finished the argument right there. “The whole world has gone after him,” they grumbled.

Psalm 8:3-4 — Big Universe, Small World

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

What is Man?

After remarking that God’s glory is even praised in the mouths of children, David goes back to the heavens to marvel at the fact that a God so majestic should take the slightest notice of mankind. It’s notable that when he asks the rhetorical question here, the point he is making is that this should not be. Our race is not worthy of the honor bestowed on us. When we look at the glory of the heavens and the sheer size of the universe, we ought to be vanishingly insignificant. And yet God has treated us so much better than we deserve.

When the writer to the Hebrews quotes this psalm rather offhandedly (“It has been testified somewhere”), his point is not to dwell on our insignificance as a species, but to emphasize the vast importance humanity has acquired when the Word was made flesh and became one of us. “It was not to angels that God subjected the world to come.” It is in Christ that humanity has been raised up. By being made in every way like his brothers, sin apart, Christ brings many sons to glory, lifting up fallen humanity and exalting it in his own person, then sharing that glory with us.

The Son of Man

Verse 4 is a typical Hebrew parallelism in which an idea is twice stated to reinforce a concept: “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” The word “man” in the first clause has its counterpart in “the son of man” in the second, just as “mindful of him” is echoed by “care for him”. But that’s not all that is going on here. “Son of man” is no mere synonym for “man”. It has a special emphasis.

A Contrast with Divine Perfections

What might that be? Well, one reference that might be familiar is in the book of Numbers, where the term is actually an insult. Out of the mouth of the prophet Balaam came the words “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.” In other words, God is not afflicted with the foibles and moral limitations of human beings. If he makes a promise, you can count on it. The obvious implication is that men are not generally so dependable. Sons of Adam are subject to variability. God is not. (Herein may lie the importance of Jesus Christ being “the same” yesterday, today and forever. It is evidence not only of his deity, but also of his ability to take that deity and inhabit human form without compromising his essential nature in any way at all.)

This is not the first reference to the term that is less than complimentary, usually because the “son of man” is contrasted with the perfections of deity. For example, Bildad the Shuhite told Job that the son of man is a worm and a maggot. Bildad asks this perfectly reasonable question: “How can he who is born of woman be pure?” He would get his answer eventually in the person of Christ, but not for a few thousand years. Later in Job, Elihu uses the same contrast when he points out that the righteousness or wickedness of the average “son of man” cannot affect God in any meaningful way; a man’s actions only really impact the man himself. Again, Elihu would find out otherwise, when the real Son of Man was declared by God himself to be “beloved” and “well pleasing”. Apparently the impossible was quite possible for Jesus.

This is what I think David has in mind when he contrasts the “son of man” and the greatness and perfection of God in this psalm. What brings out this worshipful thought? Why, it is the creatorial splendor of the Almighty. The heavens are the work of his fingers. He set the moon and stars in place. What can man do to match that? Why would God even give the son of man a moment’s consideration? Again, Jesus will provide the answer to that question: Christ, without whom was not any thing made that was made.

A later Psalm also stresses man’s inadequacy: “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.” Can you sense a theme emerging here? Man is really not up to much. The son of man cannot save himself, let alone save you. We are going to find out that Christ is the exception to all these statements.

The Glories to Come

Still, there are hints of the glories of what God was about to do in another psalm. Asaph pleads with God this way: “But let your hand be on the man of your right hand, the son of man whom you have made strong for yourself!” Trust good old Asaph to nail it. If Israel is to be restored, God is going to have to do it. How will he do it? Through a “son of man”, the man of God’s right hand. No prizes for guessing at this point: we should know what’s coming — or rather, who.

There there is Daniel. What can we say about that? Daniel had a vision of “one like a son of man” being presented to the Ancient of Days. He writes, “To him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”

Imagine that from a mere son of man! So then, Christ took a name notable for its insignificance and its emphasis on the feebleness of man, and raised it up to signify something glorious, just as he has done with the race itself.

We’ll tackle the last half of Psalm 8 next week, looking at a couple more New Testament quotations from it.