What Is Man That You Are Mindful of Him

There is a line in an old scientific journal from 1937 that has stayed with me. A group of chemists set out to calculate what a human body is worth, broken down to its raw materials. Enough fat to make a few bars of soap. Enough iron for a single medium-sized nail. Enough sugar to fill a shaker, enough lime to whitewash a small shed, enough phosphorus for a couple thousand match heads, a little potassium, a trace of sulphur. Add it all up at the market rates of the day, they concluded, and the whole of a human being came to about ninety-eight cents.

That is what we are made of. That is what all our great poets and musicians, our prophets and leaders, have been made of — about ninety-eight cents of chemicals. Which is more or less what the psalmist felt when he looked up at the sheer scale of the universe and wondered aloud:

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained, what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him?

Psalm 8:3-4

Against the backdrop of an endless cosmos, we are small. Almost nothing. So is that really all we are — ninety-eight cents of physical material, briefly arranged and then swept away?

More Than the Sum of Our Chemicals

No. We are far more than that. Man is ninety-eight cents of chemical material given the astonishing ability to fellowship with God. Of everything in all the universe, the human being is the only created thing with the capacity for an ongoing relationship with its Maker. That capacity is what Scripture calls the image of God in us.

You were not created to feed and please ninety-eight cents of chemicals. You were created to know and please the God who breathed His own Spirit into you, so that you became a living soul. That is why the psalm does not stop at how small we are. It rises:

You have crowned him with glory and honor. You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet.

Psalm 8:5-6

Crowned. Honored. Given dominion. That is the dignity God stamped on you from the beginning. But because of sin — our own turning away, which fractured that fellowship — many of us have forgotten this. We do not fully grasp how much God is mindful of us. As the theologian Francis Schaeffer once put it, man is a glorious ruin. Glorious, because of the image God placed in us. A ruin, because sin has broken what we were meant to be. And so we forget who we are.

God Has Not Forgotten You

Yet God has not forgotten. His mind is filled with you. And this being mindful of you did not begin today. It did not begin the day you were born. You might be fifty years old, but His mind was filled with you long before you drew your first breath. It was because He was mindful of you that you came to be at all.

This is the part that steadies the soul. God's mindfulness of His people is not a passing mood that started yesterday and might fade tomorrow. Scripture says His mercy is from everlasting to everlasting upon those who fear Him. There was never a time when He did not have our good at heart. His attention toward us is as old as He is — eternal, unchanging, unconditional, and impossible to destroy. He has been mindful of us, He is mindful of us, and He will forever be mindful of us, to do us good. "I will not turn away from them," He says, "to do them good."

The Small Problem, and the Great Solution

But there was a problem — a real one. How could a holy God bless a sinful people? How could a God whose eyes cannot even look upon sin come near to people who lie and cheat and fail and fall? Sin had ruined us, made us those glorious ruins. Yes, His mind was full of us. But if He simply drew near, the fire of His purity would consume everything unholy in us.

And that is precisely where Jesus comes into the picture. Paul writes to Timothy that God saved us and called us to a holy life — not because of anything we had done, but because of His own purpose and grace, given to us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time. Before we were ever born, before the world itself began, God took all the sin of the world and everything that would keep Him from blessing us, and He placed it on Jesus. Then He took all the goodness and holiness and righteousness of Jesus and placed it on us.

Why would He do such a thing? Because He was mindful of us, and He wanted to bless us. On the cross, the fire of His holiness fell — and it fell on Jesus in our place. And now the very holiness of Jesus, credited to us, draws down the blessing instead of the judgment. Peace. Joy. Life. This is grace: not that we cleaned ourselves up enough to be blessed, but that God made a way to bless us while we were still ruins.

So What Are You Mindful Of?

Jesus is the evidence — the proof — that you have been on God's mind all along. He is proof that you are worth infinitely more than ninety-eight cents of chemical material. The Bible says, "The Lord hath been mindful of us: he will bless us." Not because we prayed enough or were good enough or fasted enough, but simply because He loves us and desires relationship with us.

This is why the letter of Jude opens the way it does — written, he says, to those who are sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, and called. Preserved. Kept. Held. Think about your own life for a moment, all the times you lived for yourself and went your own way. Why are you still here? Why were you kept and carried through seasons that could have undone you? Not because you had it all together, but because God had been mindful of you the whole way. Even in the years you were not thinking of Him, He never stopped thinking of you.

Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ... to them that are sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, and called.

Jude 1:1

So the question turns back to us: what are you mindful of? If you are mindful mostly of your own sin and your own mistakes, then come to Jesus and let Him carry them, for that is exactly what He offered to do. If you are mindful of the many times you have fallen and failed, come to Jesus — for the psalm says that though you fall, you shall not be utterly cast down, because the Lord upholds you with His hand. Why? Because He is mindful of you.

If you are mindful of your troubles — the bills you are behind on, the health concern, the family situation — then come to Jesus, because He is mindful of you in all of it. Why stay fixed on the very things the Lord Himself has already taken up on your behalf? Instead, place your mind on His love for you. Place your mind on His grace toward you. Place your mind on His desire for you.

You are not ninety-eight cents of chemicals briefly holding together. You are dust that God chose to fill with His own breath, dust He has thought about since before time began, dust He loved enough to send His Son for. Whatever season you are walking through, let this be the thing that gives you strength going forward: God has been mindful of you, and He always will be.