Open up your Bible to Psalm 8. It’s a well-known psalm, written by David, but the title gives us no information about the occasion for writing; nothing like the amount of context you get in the title of Psalm 18, for example.

We don’t know — but I imagine the young David, anointed but not yet crowned king, camping in the field with his men. He’s keeping watch while his companions sleep. No light pollution in the hill country of Judah: the earth is black, the sky black, the moon waning towards the crescent, and the stars beyond number shining above him in the expanse of the heavens.

David listens to the silence, ears attentive for the sound of approaching predators, or for soldiers of Saul attempting a night-time attack on the rival to the throne. And as he waits, he looks at the stars; he thinks of the familiar words from Moses’ book, how God placed the moon in the heavens to rule over that midnight host; he looks down at his own hands, barely visible in the moon’s light, and thinks of the host of Israel, those stars shining among the nations, a people of covenant light in a world of heathen darkness; he thinks of the crown of kingship that will rest on his head one day, the humble shepherd boy from Bethlehem; and he prays.

“When I look at the 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?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honour.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet.”

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What does Psalm 8 mean?

Is it a poem, a prayer, a song about the greatness of the heavens and the smallness of a human being? A song about the visible glory of the night sky, and the invisible spiritual glory of humanity, obscured by sin yet still bearing the image of God, and given dominion over the world? The humble prayer of a man called to a high office that is both too great a task and too great an honour for a mere ‘son of man’?

I raise the question because the author to the Hebrews presents us with a different take on the psalm:

“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 honour,
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. But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”

Hebrews 2:6-9 ESV

So what does Psalm 8 mean? Are we to see this as primarily about David, the mere son of man called to kingship? About humanity’s creation mandate, the special object of God’s providence as his regent on earth, despite his smallness? Or are we to take our cue from the author to the Hebrews, and see this primarily as a psalm about the humiliation and exaltation of the Son of Man, who was made lower than the angels by his incarnation but was crowned with glory and honour following his saving death and resurrection?

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The author of Hebrews here simply takes Jesus at his word.

“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
Luke 24:44-47 ESV

The Jewish arrangement of the Old Testament was broken up into three parts: the Torah, or the Five Books of Moses, what Christians call the Pentateuch; the Prophets, both former and latter, which Christians tend to break up into the historical books and the prophets; and the Writings, which is the rest of what makes up the Old Testament — the wisdom books, the poetry, some of the history — but the first book in that ordering was the Psalms.

The New Testament authors find Christ on every page of the Old Testament because this is what Jesus explicitly told them to do. The three divisions of the Tanakh are all witnesses to the gospel of Jesus Christ ahead of time, bearing witness to his death, resurrection, and the good news for all nations.

So if Jesus tells us to look for him on every page of the Old Testament; if the entirety of the OT Scriptures testify to him; if what he was calling them to do with the OT was not to create a new way of reading them but to actually discover what they were really saying the whole time; then what does Psalm 8 mean?

It doesn’t say it’s about Jesus; it doesn’t say it’s a messianic psalm; it doesn’t have internal clues that it’s about more than David’s prayer and meditation on Genesis 1. But when the words of the psalm are set in the light of the gospel, and when Jesus exhorts us to understand the Old Testament fundamentally as the revelation of God’s purposes for salvation finally fulfilled in Christ, then we must see the psalm as fundamentally testifying to the humiliation and exaltation of Jesus.

I’d argue that the Christological interpretation is the primary one, because Jesus tells us that this is the true purpose of the OT: to testify to him.

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life… For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.”
John 5:39-40, 46 ESV

So the full and proper interpretation of any given OT text can only be known in light of Christ, and a particular attention has to be given to the New Testament authors and how they interpret and cite the Old Testament.

You can’t understand Psalm 8 without Hebrews 2.

You can’t understand Psalm 16 without Acts 2.

You can’t understand Isaiah 53 without Acts 8.

And to assume that you can, given the appropriate historical context of the Old Testament passage and an understanding merely of David’s or Isaiah’s purpose and intention, then you make the same error the Pharisees made, proceeding on the false premise that the Old Testament scriptures can be understood without reference to Jesus Christ and the gospel proclaimed in his name.