A Commentary on the Book of Psalms: Psalm 103 — God Is to Be Praised for His Mighty Works; and Wonderful Providence
Psalm 103
God Is to Be Praised for His Mighty Works; and Wonderful Providence
Explanation Of The Psalm
1 The prophet stirs up his soul to bless, that is, to praise God, and at once his soul, so excited, bursts forth into admiration and praise, saying, “O Lord my God, thou art exceedingly great.” Your works have made you exceedingly great in the eyes of all those who got a glimpse of them. God being infinite and immense, cannot increase in any way, but he can increase in the opinion of men and Angels by their coming to a greater knowledge of the power, wisdom, and goodness that shines forth in his works. “Thou hast put on praise and beauty,” an explanation of how God is so exceeding great. As we recognize a king or a judge, or anyone in authority, from the beauty and costliness of their dress, so we perceive God’s wisdom and power from the glory in which he is enveloped. Now, “God is light, and in him there is no darkness,” still “he inhabits light inaccessible, which no man hath seen, nor can see.” But, independent of that light, there is another light of glory, a certain splendor that shines forth from God’s works, of which the prophet speaks when he says, “Thou hast put on praise and beauty.”
2 As nothing is more beautiful than light or glory, you have assumed both as a robe, being clothed with that light of glory that shines forth in all your works. Here we must remind our readers how strange it is that, though we cannot look upon the sun, yet, from the light that surrounds it, we readily form an idea of its presence and its beauty; and still we find such a difficulty in raising the eyes of our interior to God that we form but a very faint idea of his boundless beauty, however surrounded he may be by the splendid and extraordinary light that shines in all his works, himself being the light “that enlightens every man coming into this world.” The only reason that can be assigned for it is, that our hearts are blinded by the dust of carnal thoughts and affections; for “blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.” For certainly, if we had a clean heart we would readily behold God in all his works, and his glory filling everything, and, with Abraham, Elias, and Eliseus, we would exclaim, “God, in whose sight I stand,”—“Who stretchest out the heaven like a pavilion.” He now begins to draw our attention to the light of the power and wisdom of God, as visible in the creation of the firmament or the heavens, and proposes two points for our consideration, as being worthy of great admiration in them. The first is, that God so dexterously spread out the immense mass of the firmament, and enveloped all created things with it, with as much ease as men will erect and spread out a tent usually made of skins to protect themselves.
3 The second point for our consideration is God’s wonderful skill in placing the waters above the heavens, as if he put them on so much fire without the fire being quenched by the waters, or the waters being dried up by the fire. Without entering into the various theories propounded to explain this passage, let it suffice to say, that the general opinion of the holy fathers is, that there is water above the ethereal sky called the firmament, and they are the waters alluded to, and not the water in the clouds. “Who makest the clouds thy chariot.” Descending from the ethereal sky to the clouds, he chants forth the admirable wisdom of God in their construction, endowing them with such velocity that when impelled by the wind they travel with marvelous celerity from one part of the world to the other. At one time we behold the sky all serene, and in the twinkling of an eye, on the change of the wind, we behold it veiled with clouds; and, on the other hand, we behold it now murky and gloomy, and in a moment, on another change of wind, away with the clouds, and all becomes bright and cheerful again. This is all described in a most poetical manner, making God, as it were, to sit on the clouds as he would on a chariot, with the winds for so many winged horses; the meaning of the whole being, that God is the primary author of all things, and that the winds and the clouds are moved, and directed, and governed at his pleasure.
4 Only for St. Paul this verse could be easily explained by applying it to the storms and lightnings, and the meaning would be, You who use the storms as your messengers to admonish mankind, and the lightning to punish them: but as the Apostle, in the epistle to the Hebrews, quotes this passage in allusion to the Angels, and argues from it in favor of the divinity of Christ, and his superiority to the Angels, we must say that the prophet speaks here of them, telling us, that God has not only the winds and the clouds at his command, but also far superior and more exalted messengers, the Angels, to send to mankind when he chooses to admonish or to punish them. The meaning, then, of the passage is, When you employ your Angels on any mission, you endow them with the velocity of the wind to execute your commands, with as little delay as possible; and you give them the force of burning fire, so that nothing can resist them.
5 From the air the prophet now comes to the earth; and, from the fact of its being inhabited by us, and consequently, better known to us than the other parts of the world, he devotes more time to description of, and reflection on, the wonderful works of God to be found there. He begins with the creation, and proposes for consideration God’s wonderful power, that could produce such an enormous and ponderous mass, and place it aloft without any support or foundation, having nothing but itself to rest on. “Who hast formed the earth upon its own bases;” you have built the earth on no foundation whatever, but on itself, without anything to support it. “It shall not be moved forever and ever;” your command is surer than any foundation, and such being your orders, the earth, dependent on its own gravity, will remain undisturbed forever.
6–9 He now comes to the consideration of the state of the earth at the creation, being then enveloped, as if by a robe, with water; and yet, by the mere expression of his will, God shut up the water in the lower parts of the earth; by his power and wisdom made the land to rise up, and made it fit for producing grass and grain for the support and nourishment of animal life. That was effected by condensing the water, which hardly deserved the name of water at the time, being rather a sort of watery vapor that upon condensation fell down to the hollows of the earth, to which, possibly, allusion is made in Ecclesiasticus, chap. 24, where he says, “And as a cloud I covered all the earth;” which David describes more poetically when he says, “The deep like a garment is its clothing;” that is, in the beginning of creation, the earth was all surrounded with water, as if with a garment, that completely envelopes one. He calls the depth of waters an abyss, as it is styled in Genesis, where we read that, darkness was over the face of the abyss; and then, “above the mountains shall the waters stand;” that is to say, that the vapors of water, or that very deep cloud that was all but water, covered the very mountains. He uses the future shall, for the preterimperfect tense, a thing not uncommon with the Hebrews when they spoke or wrote of anything in actual progress. By the same rule the expression, “at thy rebuke they shall flee;” that is, they did flee, for at the voice of God’s thunder the waters that previously covered the whole earth, on being condensed at God’s nod alone, descended to the hollows; for the divine intimation was something terrible, having the effect of thunder on thinking beings. “The mountains ascend, and the plains descend, into the place which thou hast formed for them.” The mountains then began to appear aloft, as if they had ascended, and the fields in the low grounds, as if they had descended; but they all rested “in the place which thou hast founded for them,” being over awed by God’s reprimands and thunder. “Thou hast set a bound which they shall not pass over; neither shall they return to cover the earth.” When the waters did recede and were shut up in the caverns of the earth, you put bounds to them they can never transgress, nor can they come back again of themselves by their own power to cover the earth again.