Somebody Else’s Mail (18)

The sovereign God delights in delegating his own infinite power. We find the earliest scriptural instance of such delegation in Genesis 1:16-18 when the Lord makes the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night, then casually throws in the stars as a bonus. The Hebrew word translated “rule” in that passage is elsewhere translated “dominion”, “power” and “government”. The OT writers use it to describe God’s own sovereign power and authority.

Delegated authority is the principle on which God’s creation operates.

Authority in Nature

Natural laws are a form of delegation. They do not require trillions of individual acts of God’s will; rather, the merest powerful word of his Son upholds them. Thus when I drop my pen I know that, all things being equal, it will fall down and not rise up. I know that absent a willful act from some created being, the things in my environment that are presently organized will tend toward disorganization over time, and not the other way around. I know that snow will be cold and water will be wet. Good thing too!

My own self-awareness is a form of delegation. I am conscious of a “me” that can choose X and reject Y, and thus I exercise a measure of delegated authority over my own body and mind, in theory the more the better.

Authority in the Heavens

Further, God has been granting to some of his created beings power over other creatures ever since he began creating. Heavenly authorities existed long before humanity arrived on the scene. Some theologians will disagree, but I believe these principalities and powers operated (and continue to operate) without God leaning over their shoulders 100% of the time.

Psalm 8 is all about delegated authority. It starts with “the heavens, the work of your fingers”, as we contemplated last Saturday, the very moon and stars which received their authority and purpose in Genesis 1. Now we move on to human authority. Last week we asked the question, “What is man that you are mindful of him?” Today, David answers that question.

Naturally, the right answer heavily involves Christ. It always does.

Psalm 8:5-8 — Crowned with Glory and Honor

“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, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.”

Authority in the World

I don’t think there’s any question that when David wrote these words, he was thinking of these same early chapters in Genesis. After granting authority to the heavenly bodies in Genesis 1, God goes on to grant authority to humanity. In verse 26, God says, “Let us make man.” Before he even gets to the end of the verse, he is adding, “and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” The first federal head of mankind was Adam, and David restates for us the claims made about man in the earliest pages of scripture.

This is where a robust Christian faith requires we believe in a literal creation just as Genesis describes. If the human race is no more than the product of the same evolutionary process by which all species came into being, where is that solitary distinction that makes man the head of creation? From where do we get the image of God that Genesis insists on? If Darwin had it right, man is not the image of God but the image of a gorilla or chimpanzee with a few extra beneficial mutations tacked on at the end. That’s a theological problem, to be sure. If that is the case, where did humanity get its delegated authority? We just got one more fortunate roll of the dice than some other species.

The serious Christian discards that possibility and takes scripture at its word. God granted the human race a very high position indeed. David could enthuse about it, but perhaps he did not see clearly how God intended to fulfill his purposes through humanity. That had to come from the apostle Paul.

Death Made Subject

One day soon, even death will be made subject … to a real, living human being. That’s not a conclusion most would draw from taking Psalm 8:6 at face value. It’s possible nobody did for hundreds of years. Nevertheless, that verse forms the basis for the teaching of 1 Corinthians 15. There, Paul is writing about the difference between being “in Adam” and “in Christ”, the two federal heads of humanity. In Adam all die. In Christ all (potentially at least) are made alive, because Christ conquered death at the cross and demonstrated he had made it subject to him by rising from the dead and ascending into glory. In that context, the apostle writes this:

“Then comes the end, when he [Christ] delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For ‘God has put all things in subjection under his feet.’ ”

Paul’s scriptural authority for Christ’s destruction of death is Psalm 8:6. “All things”, he writes, includes not only sheep, oxen, birds and fish but also death itself. He will go on to describe the subjection of all other delegated authorities to Christ. Some will submit willingly, others will be conquered, but Christ is up to the task regardless of the authority or its level of enmity toward God. So then, in the end, we will see all things under the authority of man, as God originally intended.

Authority in the Church

Nobody would claim Psalm 8 says anything about the Church. Yet Paul also echoes these same words from verse 6 in the first chapter of Ephesians. There, he writes, “He [the Father of glory] put all things under his [Christ’s] feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” Here, the authority the Father granted Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him head a new creation also extends to his rule over his Church, a mystery entirely uncontemplated in the OT.

As it turns out, there are many greater implications to the authority God gave mankind than Psalm 8 is able to explicitly reveal. Under Adam, that rule was quickly forfeited and became unprofitable. Adam brought us only death. Christ brings us not only life, hope and immortality, but he also took the authority of redeemed humanity into the cosmos and seated it at the right hand of God, from which he exercises his headship and rule on earth through his body, the Church. As my father used to say from the platform with great enthusiasm, “Brothers and sisters, there’s a MAN in the glory!”, an astonishing truth of which he never tired.

We do not yet see man glorified on earth, but we see Jesus, crowned with glory and honor, seated in the heavenly places and awaiting his return to this world to rule over a redeemed creation.

Psalm 8:9 — How Majestic

“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

The psalm closes as it starts, with a declaration of God’s majesty and glory. For the devout Israelites who sang it first, it spoke primarily or exclusively of the battered glory of humanity, fallen yet still distinct from the animals and uniquely imaging God, man’s place in creation still worthy of appreciation despite its sad diminution. How majestic indeed!

However, the Church Age believer, looking back with the insights granted him by applying these verses to the new Head of Creation in the post-resurrection era, sees truths and glories in Christ that even an OT prophet could never expect to discern. All authority belongs to Jesus now, yet he continues to delegate it to all those willing to ask and act in his name.