May 31, 2026
Psalm 8
Dear friends in Christ,
We all spend our time thinking of something. I would like to think that, right here at this moment, you are thinking about how wonderful it is to enter God’s presence with thanksgiving, to be here with your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, being served by the almighty Trinity.
Maybe on this day, you are wondering how this mystery can be — how there can be one God yet three Persons? Well, don’t spend too much time on it, because you will never work it out. Belief in the Triune God is the greatest mystery of the Christian faith. Unless one has faith, he cannot comprehend, let alone believe in this mystery. Besides, if you spend any time pondering spiritual stuff, you aren’t spending nearly as much time as God spends thinking about you. That’s what David, the writer of Psalm 8, says, “what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You care for him?” God is thinking about you.
After the Triune God finished creating the universe and everything in it, it was, in His own words, “very good.” Everything was perfect, and the jewel of His creation, mankind, lived in a perfect relationship with Him. When God created Adam, and then Eve, and brought her to him, He said to them, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food” (Gen. 1:28-29). God showed He was thinking about His creation and caring for it when He provided food for Adam and Eve.
But we know what happened soon after creation. Sin entered the world, and the original perfection was lost. It must have truly grieved God to see this happen. Nevertheless, God was still mindful, and although mankind would now have to work by the sweat of his brow for his food, God would continue to provide.
We see that today. We live in tough times, yet God still takes care of all our needs. God is thinking about us all the time. As we confess, “(God) gives me clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all I have. He richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life” (Explanation to the First Article).
While this ought to be comforting, for some, they still feel uncomfortable. How so?
Some like to think, “God is out to get me and has a bone to pick with me. Why else don’t things go as I planned in life? Maybe the bad karma I seem to experience is the work of a vengeful God.” Such people are convinced that God is more like an angry general than a loving Father, that He’s like Santa Claus, knowing when we’ve been good or bad and punishing us accordingly. Completely forgetting that Christ bore our punishment on the cross, when we examine ourselves according to the Law, we all have long lists of things of which we’re ashamed and think there is no way we can hide our sinful lives from God.
Again, some think, “God’s disappointed with me. My life isn’t what I’d dreamed it would be. Maybe God isn’t punishing me, but instead He’s just not bothering to spend much time trying to help me. He’s got better Christians with whom to be concerned. He sees the lust, covetousness, shame, disobedience, and ingratitude in my heart. The blessings I’ve missed out on are really not His fault but mine. So I don’t blame Him for my problems and for not caring.” Even though the Apostle Paul says in Acts 17, “Yet He is actually not far from each one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being” (17:27), such people still envision God as being distant, who’s only intimately involved in the lives of the really outstanding “super-spiritual” believers, and that God may be thinking about how little one matters to Him and His greater plan.
One more. Maybe some like to think, “Why wouldn’t He be thinking about me? I’m worth thinking about! Everybody tells me so. I’m good at what I do. I’m a hard worker, a faithful husband, and an obedient wife. I pay my taxes and am very generous in my church giving. I’m an outstanding Christian whom God can always count on. I’m one of the Lord’s best allies!” Maybe such a person doesn’t have the courage to say that out loud, but I think that deep down, we are all self-righteous, as shown by the fact that we get angry at God when things don’t go our way, along with other sinful and prideful attitudes.
We sure think a lot about ourselves, don’t we? At different times and to various degrees during our lives of faith, we obsess over our questions about who we are and “What does God think about me?”—instead of thinking about God and others. That unveils deep egoism, even under the guise of self-pity, despair, or humility. As unregenerate sinners, we are spiritually hardwired to turn inward upon ourselves for meaning, hope, and purpose through introspection—a tendency of the old Adam that the new Adam is compelled to resist. We look inside ourselves for the ultimate word and final authority, the message and feelings of our hearts and emotions. But these arise from a non-Christian interpretation of life experiences instead of from the external Word of God.
We essentially set ourselves up as God, usurping the place of the real God, making the same error as Adam and Eve and our enemy, Satan. We end up being the source of our own falls into depression, anxiety, and the like. Even the most pious among us may slip away from meditating upon God in selfless adoration to thinking that such Christian devotion merits points with God, upon which His treatment of us is contingent. We effectively behave as if we are God’s judge, observing our Creator through a microscope, as opposed to the other way around.
Contrast this with God, who directs His attention outside of Himself, such as in creating the world, and not even doing it for His sake but for ours. The psalm here and elsewhere emphasises the intimate description of the great care He took in designing creation and concerning Himself with all the details, for you and including you: “I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers.” He cares about all the details in your life, as His very fingers are active in forming your heart and soul. Indeed, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jer. 1:5). Even before our conception or birth, God knew us and would provide for us.
And the ultimate act of creation is the sending of Christ, the King of creation (Col 1:15), for us. David writes, “Yet You have made Him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned Him with glory and honor.”
This is a messianic passage that speaks of Christ. Both the writer to the Hebrews and the Apostle Paul quote Psalm 8 and apply its words to Jesus.[1] The divine Creator is greater than all of us put together, yet, as Paul reminds us, “who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:6). Jesus, the only Son of the Father, unhesitatingly and unabashedly assumes created human flesh as He is conceived by the Holy Spirit yet born of the virgin Mary. So David asks the profound question as to why God would bother with any of this, suspending His status in heaven, to be associated with us in His state of humiliation, and even unto death on the cross for our sake.
But therein is the answer to the question. The real reason God is thinking about us is that He loves us and is crazy about us.
Yes, God does have a bone to pick, but one that Christ, who is “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh” (cf Gen 2:23), settled by His atoning sacrifice. Forgiving our sins cost Him His life on the cross. When the Father sent His only-begotten Son to earth, He became lower than the heavenly beings, not by nature but by status, through His state of humiliation (Heb 2:7). Because He who knew no sin became sin on the cross (2 Cor 5:21), the Father and Holy Spirit abandoned Him for a moment, one of the most profound and greatest wonders of history, and an experience more bitterly painful for God than any bodily torture imaginable. And He did it all for us, to put us on God’s mind for eternity, and in a happy way.
David ponders in Psalm 8 how strange it is that our majestic, self-sufficient God would be concerned about little old us. After all, He made the whole of creation for us to enjoy, knowing full well that we would mess it up! And then He took all the needed steps to redeem us from that failure. Saving us insignificant rebellious little sinners may be even a greater mystery than the orthodox understanding of the Holy Trinity that we celebrate this day and articulate in our Creeds. Though we still bear the consequences of our sins through the various sufferings and trials that we endure in life, in God’s mind, we are held as His beloved children, and He remains obsessed with our personal welfare. Someday we shall know this to be true when we enter heaven, but for now, we live by faith.
Dear friends, your value in God’s eyes surpasses any disappointment you have caused Him. You are His child and the crown of His creation. God was eager to create the world in a week so that He could get to the best part: making you and giving it all to you! God thinks about you because He created you. Like an artist who paints a masterpiece to hang in His own house as a private collection to enjoy, you don’t just pass by His thoughts like an occasional memory; rather, you are always on His mind. Perhaps we could even say that the reason He created you is to think about you. The Holy Trinity, whom we honour today, went through all the trouble to save you, knowing ahead of time the whole outlandish cost. That is how much He values you, as you are wonderfully and beautifully made by Him and for Him.
God thinks about you because you are in Christ. God thinks about you because God thinks about Christ, who is obviously worth thinking about. Because you have been put in Christ through Holy Baptism, God treats you as if you are Christ. What the psalmist says about Christ, God says about you: “4what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You care for him? 5Yet You have made Him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned Him with glory and honor. 6You have given him dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet.” When you pray, it is as if Christ is making the appeal for Himself. When the Father looks at you, He sees His perfectly good and holy Son. You have the authority to trample all evil under your feet as if they were Christ’s feet.
This mystery is radical, but radically good! We in Australia have become so accustomed to thinking casually of God, and with such an arrogant high view of self, that we have a hard time seeing how incredible the incarnation is. In contrast, the Jews were uncomfortable even uttering the name of God since it was too holy. And yet this immortal God became flesh and incorporated you into His flesh and blood, His Body, the church, via your saving new birth of Holy Baptism, when He inscribed you with His holy and personal name. Every time you remember your baptism or take to heart the words of the pastor’s absolution, the finger of God retraces that name on your heart and head, purifying your thoughts, words, and deeds. And whenever we hear those words, “Do this in remembrance of me,” it offers a chance to remember that God has not forgotten you but is really present for you, in, with, and under bread and wine for your forgiveness. You are always on His mind, not as a memory but as an ever-present reality.
Just as God thinks of others, so you, in Him, do the same. Our Gospel announces the mandate of the church to “go… and make disciples of all nations” in the name of the Holy Trinity (Matt. 28:19). God thinks about you not only because of your value to Him but also for your value to His mission. David prophesied that “out of the mouth of babes and infants” the Gospel would be preached. You are those babes. Although appearing weak and powerless, in Christ you are strong and mighty, proclaiming the works of God to everyone in your life so they can become His children. God turns you from thinking of yourself to thinking about others, just as He has done for you.
God is thinking about you all the time! God is obsessed with you. He couldn’t wait to create the world and even die for the world! That is the joy of the Holy Trinity that we celebrate today. What a truly wonderful, loving and caring God we worship! “This is the true Christian faith, that we worship one God in three persons and three persons in one God without confusing the persons or dividing the divine substance. For the Father is one person, the Son is another, and the Holy Spirit is still another, but there is one Godhead of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, equal in glory and coequal in majesty,” who for our sake, out of divine love for us, has prepared a place in His kingdom, for us to dwell with Him forever. “They will be My people, and I shall be their God” (Jer. 32:28). Thus says the Lord. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your heart and mind in Christ Jesus. Amen.
[1] Hebrews 2:6-8; 1 Corinthians 15:25-27