O LORD, our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth, You Who have set Your glory above the heavens! . . .
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honor. Psalms 8:1, 3
It’s no wonder that this particular psalm has been a favorite of men and women through the ages. For one thing, it expresses how we all feel
at one time or another (hopefully quite often). God has set His glory above the heavens. We peer into the sky and we know that, as majestic as
the view may be, there is something beyond—something above all that we see and feel. I believe that’s the essence of wonder—the “aha” in our
awe. That’s because God has encompassed creation with His glory. The night sky casts a divine, pensive spell over us, as people have found through the ages; God designed it to do so. David the psalmist,
who gazed out upon those stars during so many nights of watching over his sheep, must have continually marveled. And he must have realized
who was watching over him. As he considered his Lord, according to the psalm, he finally was brought to consider himself. “Who am I that I would
be worthy of even a thin moment of Your attention?” he wondered.
Do You Ever Wonder?
“I look upon the crown of Your creation, and I wonder: How is it that You could place a crown upon me?” For David, of course, a royal destiny did
beckon. But true worship has this effect upon us: It simultaneously humbles and uplifts us. In other words, worship places us exactly where we
should be, in the realization that we are small, yet a little lower than the angels; we are tiny creatures in the presence of God, but tiny creatures
whom He adores. The Bible, then, is more than a wonderful book—it’s a book full of wonder. It begins with the wonder of creation, implanted deeply within us. It ends with the wonderful culmination of God’s final judgment. And in the very center, with the psalms, are songs of praise and wonder.
His central written revelation to us is just as crammed with heaven as creation itself. But the challenge is this: We are flawed, fallen creatures,
prone to pluck at forbidden fruit rather than bask in worship as God designed us. How do we confront these limitations? If we want to worship in spirit and in truth, we need to rediscover the capacity to wonder that God placed within each of us. It has been distorted by sin, so that our perceptions have been twisted. The precise opposite of wonder is cynicism, and I doubt there has ever been a time
more characterized by cynicism than this one. If we’re not careful, we’ll all fall into that trap. After all, cynicism is in the cultural air we breathe
every day. Unless you live on a desert island, you spend more time being exposed to cynical attitudes than you do eating or exercising. Think of
our television shows. Consider the movies our young people attend and the music that pulses through their earphones. After September 11, 2001, there was much media discussion of “the death of irony,” but in fact little has changed. There is a culture of sarcasm that has for decades filtered down from our media and many of our leaders to infect all of us.
I’ve often said that I don’t see how a committed
follower of Christ can maintain a sarcastic approach to humor, but we have so few other models before us. After a while, we no longer marvel at Oz, the Great and Powerful—we’re straining our necks to find the little shrunken man behind the curtain. We’re certain there must always be one, for all seems to be sham and subterfuge. While the
preacher is telling us about God, we’re wondering how much they pay him to preach the sermon. Cynicism is a deadly infection that eats away
our childlike ability to be surprised and delighted. It corrodes our channels of worship, and that disease is a terminal one. It’s not a new problem, of course. Jesus faced the cynics at every turn.
Not only were the Pharisees incapable of partaking in the marvelous experience of His miracles and teaching, but even His own disciples
constantly fell short of the grand concept. So many of His parables invited the hearers to wonder at the greatness of the kingdom of God,
but nearly everyone missed the point. Finally, since they couldn’t see the big picture, He gave them the small one. He held up a little child. The disciples were taken aback; they felt children weren’t worthy of the rabbi’s time, and they usually pushed them aside: But Jesus called them to Him and said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God.
Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.” LUKE 18:16,17
