What Hebrews 2 Reveals About Psalm 8
Reading Hebrews
According to Hebrews, the pattern of Jesus’s incarnation, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension is the key to understanding an interpretive tension in the Psalms. In Hebrews 2, the author turns from his argument that Jesus is superior to the angels to the fact that Jesus helps humans, not angels. In this context, he says,
For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere,
“What is man, that you are mindful of him,
or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned him with glory and honor,
putting everything in subjection under his feet.”Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. (Heb. 2:5–8)
Songs of the Son
Daniel Stevens
Songs of the Son examines 9 psalms highlighted in Hebrews to reveal the preincarnate glory of Christ in the Old Testament.
The author reads Psalm 8 carefully. He is committed to understanding the psalm as written. The author refuses to let David be imprecise. If David says “everything” is placed in subjection to man, then it must mean everything in creation, no exceptions. And yet, this is not what we see. Since Scripture must be entirely true, the author says, we have a problem. Everything is supposed to be under our control, but it is not. We suffer. Our own bodies revolt against us. We die. We face myriad dangers: natural disaster, disease, accidents, enemies. Everything is very much not in subjection to us.
Not yet, the author says.
By now you know that in some way Jesus is the solution to this interpretive difficulty, but there is a false trail I do not want us to follow. We might be tempted to read “son of man” in Psalm 8 in light of how Jesus refers to himself with this expression in the Gospels. We might conclude that the psalm was never actually about us but about Jesus the whole time. That would resolve the tension, but it would be wrong.
Hebrews does not let us read the psalm this way. Instead the author clarifies the problem: “We do not yet see everything in subjection to him” (Heb. 2:8). In subjection to whom? To man, to the son of man, to the one discussed in Psalm 8. This is precisely the problem. God subjected everything to humanity, but we do not see everything subject to us. God’s word and our world seem to be in conflict. How is Jesus the solution to this dilemma? How does Jesus’s work solve the problem of humanity’s position in the world? Jesus’s work must enable humanity to occupy the role God intended. And this, precisely, is where Hebrews goes: “But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb. 2:9).
The author’s argument is compact. Jesus, like mankind in Psalm 8, is crowned with glory and honor. Jesus, like mankind, was made for a little while lower than the angels. Jesus’s road to glory, however, first was a descent. He descended to a humble human life and even went down through death itself. In the author’s discussion of Jesus in Hebrews 2, two facts from the psalm—“You made him lower” and “You crowned him” (Ps. 8:5)—are made into a sequence: Jesus was crowned because he was lowered. How does this work? And how does this affect the way we read the psalm?
Reading Psalm 8
The interpretation of Psalm 8 in Hebrews only works if we realize two important theological truths. First, Jesus’s incarnation matters. As Christians who glory in the cross of Christ and his death for us, it is easy to think that the only point of Jesus’s incarnation was so that he could experience a bodily death. But that is not the biblical picture. Instead, when the Son of God took on human flesh, he united himself to humanity as such. He took on human nature to heal human nature. All of it.
In Hebrews 2:14–18, the author emphasizes that Jesus needed to be like us in every way. Why? So that he could heal every part of us. Gregory of Nazianzus, a fourth century theologian, put it in this pithy way: “For what is not assumed is not healed, but what is united to God is saved.”1 That is, only if Jesus is fully human can he fully heal humanity. When Adam fell, everything about what it means to be human became fallen. By becoming fully human— body, soul, and spirit—Jesus laid hold of all of human nature to redeem all of it. Or to put it another way, everything Jesus does as a human is something Jesus does for humans. The whole of the incarnation is for us and for our salvation.
By becoming fully human— body, soul, and spirit—Jesus laid hold of all of human nature to redeem all of it.
The second theological truth is that Jesus’s incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension reenact humanity’s history. Humanity, made by God lower than the angels, was crowned by God with dominion over his creation. But we fell; we sinned. And because of our sin, we do not currently see everything in subjection to us. Because of the curse of sin that reverberates throughout the cosmos, some of the praise of Psalm 8 falls flat. We have left our position, and the world is not as it should be. But Jesus took up our ragged humanity and became lower than the angels for a little while. His descent did not stop at merely becoming a human, but he lowered himself to the point of death. Jesus took upon himself the very thing that breaks mankind’s dominion over this world: the curse of sin, which is death. But Jesus did not remain dead. He rose from the grave and was lifted to God’s right hand, where he sits now enthroned and crowned with glory and honor, waiting until the fullness of the kingdom.
To quote Hebrews, “We see him” (Heb. 2:9). Jesus, as a man, sits where humanity is supposed to sit, in dominion over all creation with all things subjected to him. And everything he does as a human he does for humans. Because we see him sitting where Psalm 8 says we should sit—in dominion over God’s creation—we know that we will sit there with him. A day is coming when Psalm 8 will be true of all redeemed humanity in Christ. The exalted position God intended for mankind as his image bearers, as his representatives and regents, was not abandoned at the fall. We see it in Jesus now. We will see it in ourselves in the new creation. Hebrews talks about Jesus as a “forerunner” (Heb. 6:20) and as “founder” of our salvation and faith (Heb. 2:10; 12:2). This means that he goes where we need to go, and then he brings us with him. Jesus reclaims the position God gave us that we lost through sin. And since he reclaimed it, we know that it will be ours in him.
We are not left with the tension between what Psalm 8 says about us and our own experience. Instead, because of Jesus’s fulfilment of Psalm 8, we find ourselves living between God’s exaltation of humanity in creation and his greater exaltation of humanity in the new creation. We see Jesus, our great forerunner, ensuring us that we will have what he now has, because he took on what we now have. What more can we do than say with the psalmist,
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth! (Ps. 8:1, 9)
Notes:
- Gregory of Nazianzus, “Epistle 101 to Cledonius,” in Christ: Through the Nestorian Controversy, vol. 3 in The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, ed. Mark DelCogliano, trans. Bradley K. Storin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 392.
This article is adapted from Songs of the Son: Reading the Psalms with the Author of Hebrews by Daniel Stevens.
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