How Can God Care for Us When We Are So Small?

Psalm 8 is about God. But it is also about humanity. While the psalm begins and ends with God’s majesty, the majority of its verses speak of mankind. Looking back to the Genesis account, David discusses humanity in relation to God and then in relation to his creation. As he sings of God and his works, David sets out two paradoxes that are central to the story of the Bible and to Christian experience: How can God care for us when we are so small (Ps 8:1–4)? How are we both so small and so great over the rest of creation (Ps 8:5–9)? Or to put it another way, why does God’s love come to us when we are so unworthy of it, and why does his love make us so great? 

Big God, Small Humans

Psalm 8:1–4: 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.
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?

David begins with the majesty of God as Creator. The majesty — the greatness — of the name of God is evident in all the world. Even above the heavens, in the heights of the expanse and beyond, God’s glory is manifest. No heavenly sphere, no angelic host can compare. All are under the greatness of the Lord. And even in the small and weak, God’s greatness and power are displayed. Humanity first enters the picture in Psalm 8 in the form of “babies and infants” — that is, humanity at its weakest and smallest (Ps 8:2). Babies cannot even lift their own heads, but in them the strength of God is seen. Infants cannot speak, yet from their mouths the Lord’s praise comes. How can this be? And who are “the enemy and the avenger” that this praise stills? 

While we find in the New Testament additional ways in which this passage is fulfilled (such as when small children recognize Jesus as Lord in Matthew 21:16 and, more broadly, Jesus’ teaching that the kingdom of God belongs to such little ones in Matthew 18:1–10), here the primary way in which infants declare the praise of the Lord must be parallel to how the heavens show God’s glory. In God’s intricate crafting of every human child, in his sustaining power that upholds those who cannot uphold themselves, in the wisdom of his plan that children should come into existence at all, God’s power and glory are made known. To see a child is to see the wonderful creative power of God on display. To hold an infant is to hold a work of God no less wondrous than a star. 

And the enemies? They are unlikely the enemies of the infants but rather God’s enemies. To call them “avengers” likely means something more like the “vindictive,” those who suppose themselves to have been wronged by God. They see the wonderful power of God in creation and despise it. They contend that the world should not be as God made it, that he does not know what he is doing. Such people are like those who would throw off God’s rule in Psalm 2. These enemies are stilled by the strength of God evident in the coos of an infant. One honest look at the wonders around us, one clear glimpse at what an unimaginably splendid thing a human child really is, and any mouth speaking against God’s work in creation must be stopped.

In all this, God shines great. Even the heavens, the moon and stars in their courses, are “the work of [God’s] fingers” (Ps 8:3). The words the psalmist uses matter. To speak of the heavenly bodies as the work of God’s fingers is to imagine the grandest galaxy or the largest star as a small work of his artistry. They are not great exertions for God. They are not big to him. They are details of his finesse. It is in this light, when the expanse of the heavens is shown to be no great tapestry but a small embroidery of God, that we get a sense of our own human scale. David looks up at the innumerable stars, senses the immensity of God, and exclaims:

What is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him? 

The wonder of it all, though, is that God does care for us. There is a modern impulse that sees the vastness of space, the near endless cold expanse between errant rocks and smoldering stars, and treats this as an argument against God’s love for us. We think of space as empty and largely pointless, and thus it stands as a mute witness against the possibility of a loving God. How, we think, in the face of such enormous waste and confusion, could the God who made it even notice us? How could that God of endless black and countless galaxies love you? 

Psalm 8 reads reality in the entirely opposite way. The expanse of the heavens is not idle; it declares God’s glory. Precisely in its greatness and its mind-boggling testimony to the infinite greatness of God, it bears witness to this fact: God’s love for you is bigger than this. He made the heavens as grand as they are to give us a hint of how much he cares for us. Exactly in our smallness, he is mindful of us. If you still find yourself too small in the face of all that God is and has made, know that this only makes you fit more firmly in his hands. The universe is not a vast, silent void in which God must find us; it is the chorus that God assigned to sing to us the theme of his greatness and love. If our sense of space is bigger than David’s was, if we can speak of lightyears and billions of galaxies, how much more powerfully can we speak the testimony of Psalm 8? God made all this, and he cares for us.

Small Humans Over a Big Creation 

Psalm 8:5–9 says:

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

God’s care for us is not vague. Psalm 8 describes his attention to us in terms of exaltation. From the beginning.

Content taken from Songs of the Son: Reading the Psalms with the Author of Hebrews by Daniel Stevens ©2025. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.