1 O Lord our Lord,
     how exalted is your Name in all the world!
2 Out of the mouths of infants and children
     your majesty is praised above the heavens.
3 You have set up a stronghold against your adversaries,
     to quell the enemy and the avenger.

These verses have been difficult for translators to sort out, and so we see “Out of the mouths of infants and children” attached in various ways from version to version. The Book of Common Prayer translation, quoted here, at least has the advantage of making some sense. So babies give praise to God, and the next time one of you so blessed hears a little screamer under your responsibility, remember that and join in, giving words to the loud praises!
     Psalm 8 is a psalm of creation, and God’s setting the universe in order is often portrayed in the Bible as his fight against and triumph over his enemies, which are the forces of chaos and disorder. Check Job 26:12–13; Psalms 74:13–14 and 89:9–10; and Isaiah 51:9, for instance. Or just “consider the heavens”:

4 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
     the moon and the stars you have set in their courses,
5 What is man that you should be mindful of him?
     the son of man that you should seek him out?
6 You have made him but little lower than the angels;
     you adorn him with glory and honor;
7 You give him mastery over the works of your hands;
     you put all things under his feet:
8 All sheep and oxen,
     even the wild beasts of the field,
9 The birds of the air, the fish of the sea,
     and whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea.

The heavens have either grown or shrunk in the last few hundred years, depending on your perspective. The vastness of the night sky has been reduced by our assertive lighting up of the dark, except in a few out-of-the-way areas like the Sahara or set-aside places like the sky park west of Mackinaw City. But our understanding of the distances between this star and that and between us and all of them has changed so that we can barely find ourselves in the vastness.
     Who and where we are has been settled for some people by speculations based supposedly on science but really on the spirit of our times, which, having lost God, is now losing us. But the Bible’s claim that we are made in God’s image and have been given dominion over other creatures still stands, even while our understanding of of that “mastery” is learning much from our looking on at environmental degradation. We are still “but little lower than the angels” or, in translations that follow the Hebrew rather than the Greek Old Testament, “a little lower than God (or ‘the gods’),” at any rate something rather special. That specialness is seen best in that which most obviously connects us to God and separates us from sheep, oxen, wild animals, birds, and fish is language, words like those God used to create (Genesis 1:3, etc.; John 1:1–3). By the way, “whatsoever (or, as we say in L.A., ‘wad-ĔV-uh’) walks in the paths of the sea” is doubly appropriate for a non-seagoing people like Israel living in a time when even sailors knew only that there were some kind of big strange things down in the depths.

10 O Lord our Lord,
     how exalted is your Name in all the world!

• Psalm 5 is quoted here from the Psalter in the 2016 American (Episcopal) Book of Common Prayer. I have put “Lord” in place of “Governor” in the first and last verses.
• These posts on the Psalms are in aid of the reading of the Psalms—one a day through the first five months of 2022—by members, attenders, friends, et al. of Together Church, Wyoming, MI.