It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. 6 But there is a place where someone has testified:

‘What is mankind that you are mindful of them,

    a son of man that you care for him?

7 You made them a little lower than the angels;

    you crowned them with glory and honour

8     and put everything under their feet.’

Jilly and I are enjoying a book by Tyler Staton: ‘Praying like monks, living like fools.’ In one of the early chapters he writes about how stillness and silence help us to recognise our smallness before an infinite God. In a telling paragraph he says:

‘I spent twelve years in New York City. I grieved the loss of the stars, but I relished the view of the skyline. My favourite view of the Manhattan skyline was always the angle from Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. I was always strangely comforted when I looked across all those tombstones at the city spires behind them. Every one of those stones represents someone who was living fast, making plans, and dodging every obstacle in the way of their preferred future. In other words, someone with a will who did their best to bring their will to bear on the present moment. Now they’re a memory and the city is filled with new people living even faster and making more plans’ (pp.44,45).

It is good for us to be aware of how small and fragile and temporary we actually are.

But although we are little people we are deeply loved by God. The measure of His love, as we will see, is that He lowered Himself to rescue us.

Warren Wiersbe, writing about Psalm 8 – which is quoted in Hebrews 2 – says:

‘The universe is vast and full of grandeur, so why should God pay any attention to weak and insignificant men and women? But He does!’ (‘With the Word’, p.312).

Prayer: Lord I thank you that your eye is on the sparrow; that ‘Thou Lord seest me’.