David has consecrated this hymn of triumph on the occasion of his victory over his enemies and opponents to the Author of all victories. David is called a victor, that is, he is made a victor, because he achieved victories. . . . The psalm is inscribed for the end chiefly because it is proclaimed in the last years of his life and after all his deeds that were accomplished in history; or because it announces the prophecy of things that are going to happen in the future age; or, third, because the reader is told about those things that happened in the last part of this hymn, at the end of which is the call of the Gentiles and a prophecy about Christ.

This psalm has a title consistent with the theme, as can be found also in [2 Samuel]. Blessed David uttered it in thanksgiving, in fact, toward the end of his life when reminding himself of all the favors he had been granted by God throughout his life. It is typical of pious people, you see, to keep constantly in mind God’s kindnesses done to them, and especially at the time of death it seems right to them to number them, both out of gratitude and also to teach those coming later how great is God’s providence and lovingkindness toward those hoping in him.

The phrase I shall love does not mean I shall love you from this point on since you always provided me with many things; rather, the tense has been changed, and the meaning is, my love and affection for you, my master, were always right and proper. I felt benevolence and longing for God, in fact, for he proved to be everything to me in time of need—strength in war, steadfastness in endurance, refuge in misfortune, rescuer from all the schemers. So while even the opening of the psalm sufficed as a perfect hymn of praise, anyone with love for God repeatedly adopts the same sentiments as an intense form of thanksgiving when occupied in recalling God’s graces. In a range of texts, in fact, he seems to recite and go over the same sentiments in the process of recalling every event from childhood to old age in which God provided him with help and support.

Let us ask the Lord and say, Who is he who loves you? He will respond to us through his Gospel and say, He who hears my words and does them, this is the one who loves me.^[1]

Take care not to let trust in your own strength steal on you, for you are human, and cursed be everyone who puts his hope in man.^[1] But put your trust fully and with your whole heart in God, and he will be your strength; trust him lovingly and gratefully and say to him humbly and faithfully, I will love you, O Lord, my strength, because that very charity of God, when it is perfected in us, casts out fear.^[2]

Christ is the rock. When David built his own house on the rock, he was like the wise man.^[1] . . . In such a way, he is made superior to all his enemies. He becomes faithful, not by hope or by training but by the help of God, established in all types of defenses and in the horn of salvation.

Unless one has a horn with which to rout his enemies, he is not worthy to be offered to God. That is why the Lord is described as a horn to those who believe in him; and it was with the horns of the cross that he routed his enemies. On the cross he confounded the devil and his entire army. To be sure, Christ was crucified in his body, but on the cross, it was he who was crucifying there the devils. It was not a cross; it was a symbol of triumph, a banner of victory. His whole purpose in mounting the cross was to lift us up from earth. I think the cross of the Savior was the ladder that Jacob saw. On that ladder, angels were descending and ascending; on that ladder, that is, the cross, the Jews were descending and the Gentiles ascending. . . . Others may have many horns; I have only one. But as for me, God forbid that I shall glory save in the cross of the Lord, through whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world.^[1]

Praise issuing from a pure conscience delights the Lord, and so the same psalmist exhorts us, Praise ye the Lord because a psalm is good; to our God be joyful and comely praise.^[1] With this in mind, aware of how pleasing to God is this ministry, the psalmist again declares, Seven times a day I have given praise to you.^[2] To this he adds a further promise: And my tongue shall meditate your justice, your praise all the day long.^[3] Without doubt, he had experience of the good to be derived from this work, for he reminds us [in the psalm before us]: Praising I will call on the Lord, and I shall be saved from my enemies. It was with such a shield of praise to protect him that as a boy [David] destroyed the great power of the giant Goliath, and, in many other instances, came out victorious over the invaders.

He is my refuge, he is my liberator; as I praise and call on him I will be safe from my enemies. Let me say this in the present so that I may not doubt it in the future.

There you have something you can do. Praising, call—but remember it is the Lord you praise and call on. Because if you praise yourself, you will not be saved from your enemies. Praising, call on the Lord, and you will be saved from your enemies.

Stirred by the onrush of injustices and surrounded by the rest of the evils which are recounted above, when he realizes that he is beset by danger, he flees to the gate of his deliverance. He says, therefore, In my distress I called on the Lord, and to my God I cried. Thereby he teaches that one wanders least from the path when he is full of such faith, for hope does not disappoint.^[1]

While the groans of death, the injustices, griefs, and snares, surround me, I called out to him in faith. He heard my voice from his holy temple, and my cry reached his ears.

Having made his introduction to this point, from now on he recounts more descriptively how many dangers he encountered and how God against the odds rendered him always superior to the schemers. He also recounts the dangers in a very figurative manner, as also the help of God, the greater the difficulties, the greater the lovingkindness rescuing him from such awful dangers.

When the Son of God journeyed on the earth in the time of his incarnation, whoever worshiped the natural elements of this earth were shaken and trembled, and everywhere his reputation became familiar to the ears of Greeks and barbarians; and truly those things he called the foundations of the mountains have trembled and quaked. . . . The mountains were all the lofty thoughts that were directed against the knowledge of God, namely, certain adversarial powers that through the long span of the ages had led all who dwelled on the earth into error and the worship of multiple gods. The foundations of the mountains, that is, loftier plans and thoughts, when they had realized the strength of the Lord, were disturbed and shaken because he is angry with them.

The effect of God’s hearkening and being moved to wrath was that everything together was reduced to alarm and confusion, their common master being enraged.

In this and the following verses, he posits as a sign the smoke, which in his descent from heaven he made as darkness under his feet; it indicates the incomprehensibility of his dispensation. And in his ascension, he flew on the wings of the Spirit, as on cherubim, that is, the cloud that received him. And because in his church, which is his tabernacle, he mysteriously dwells and operates, he says, He set darkness as his hiding place. Again, because the remarks about him are made obscurely in the holy prophets, he writes, Dark waters in the clouds of the airs, which he showed to be clear and obvious when he openly came to earth.

Because we are little and lowly and unable to lift ourselves up to him, the Lord stoops down to us and in his compassionate kindness deigns to hear us. In fact, because we are people and cannot become gods, God became man and inclined himself, as it is written: He inclined the heavens and came down.

With the purpose of saving the race of people and fulfilling the covenant that was made with our ancestors, Christ has once bowed the heavens and come down. And thus he shows himself to us as we are capable of receiving him, in order that we might have power to see him, and handle him and hear him when he speaks. And on this account did God the Word consider it proper to take to himself the flesh and the perfect humanity by a woman, the holy Virgin; and he was born a man, in order that he might discharge our debt and fulfill even in himself the ordinances of the covenant made with Abraham, in its rite of circumcision and all the other legal appointments connected with it.

Secretly and with mysterious reckoning he represents his incarnation through [images of] darkness and thick clouds. At last he returns to the same place from whence he had set forth: and he ascends into the heavens with the cherubim and flies, although he had not descended with those cherubim, without the cherubim he himself bowed the heavens and descended. On his return it is said, And he mounted on cherubs, and he flew, with the body he had assumed.

He was raised above the full range of knowledge, so that no one should come to him by any means other than love, for the fulfillment of the law is love. And without delay he showed those who love him that he is ultimately unknowable, to prevent them from thinking that he is to be understood by the sort of thoughts we have in our bodily state.

It is said of God in the eighteenth psalm that God made darkness his hiding place. This is a Hebrew way of showing that the ideas of God that people understand in accordance with their merits are obscure and unknowable, since God hides himself as if in darkness from those who cannot bear the radiance of the knowledge of him and who cannot see him, partly because of the defilement of the mind that is bound to a human body of humiliation,^[1] partly because of its restricted capacity to comprehend God. . . . Moreover, our Savior and Lord, the Logos of God, shows the depth of the knowledge of the Father, and that, although a derived knowledge is possessed by those whose minds are illuminated by the divine Logos himself, absolute understanding and knowledge of the Father is possessed by himself alone in accordance with his merits, when he says, No one has known the Son save the Father, and no one has known the Father save the Son, and him to whom the Son will reveal him.^[2] Neither can anyone worthily know the uncreated and firstborn of all created nature^[3] in the way that the Father who begat him knows him; nor can anyone know the Father in the same way as the living Logos who is God’s wisdom and truth. By participation in him who took away from the Father what is called darkness, which he made his hiding place, and what is called his covering, the great deep, thus revealing the Father, anyone whatever who has the capacity to know him may do so.

When God wished to appear visibly to people and desired also to teach them in person what he had first laid down in the law, he tempered the force, the power of the divine, by taking on the human and made the darkness his cover round about him, when he concealed himself in the tent of the flesh.

The reasons of the divine dispensation and providence are most obscure. For God made darkness his hiding place. Those desiring audaciously and rashly to examine this darkness and appropriating for themselves one thing from another have fallen headlong into the dense darkness of errors.

This verse suggests the ineffable dispensation of God and our inability to comprehend his wisdom. As with these eyes of ours we cannot look into an unfathomable depth, neither are we able to contemplate the majesty or the wisdom of God.

There is no doubt but that the clouds and darkness round about him were the body that the Lord Savior deigned to assume. . . . He appeared just as he willed to appear and not in accordance with his divine nature. He made darkness the cloak about him. If God is light, how is light able to dwell in darkness? In that passage, darkness represents our imperfect knowledge and our infirmity, for we cannot gaze on his majesty. If human eyes cannot, in fact, look on the rays of the sun of this world, a creature, our fellow slave, how much more are there shades and darkness round about the Sun of Justice that he may not be observed or looked on by us?

In advance of the lightning of his presence, in preparation, that is, for the brightness of his manifestation, his clouds have passed over, for the preachers of his Word are no longer confined within the borders of Judea but have crossed over to the nations. Hailstones and fiery coals: by this figure of speech we should understand reproofs, which batter hard hearts like hail. But if the well-cultivated and receptive soul of a godly mind receives reproofs, the hardness of the hail is dissolved into water, because the terror of a reproof, charged with lightning and frozen hard, is dissolved into nourishing doctrine, while hearts come back to life when kindled by the fire of love.

He came down and then ascended with the cherubim after he thundered in the heaven. . . . Against the Egyptian sorcerers the Lord who flies on the cherubim sends forth hailstones and coals of fire. I think, also, that those vengeful acts against skillful wicked powers are called hailstones and coals of fire. Those acts, therefore, appointed for punishment and revenge and directed in the secret way of the will of God against the demons who had brought the superstition of multiple gods, were driving away all those demons. Therefore, all their oracles cease, their prophecies are denied, their temples are deserted, their sacred objects are robbed by invisible and hidden forces, as the Lord does all these things after his ascension into the heavens.

He sent out his Evangelists to fly on straight courses, on wings of strength, using not their own powers but those of the one by whom they were sent; and he scattered those to whom they were sent, that to some among them the Evangelists might be the savor of life leading to life but to others the stench of death leading to death.^[1]

When we compare spiritual things with spiritual things, we flash forth lightnings, indicating the knowledge advancing from them.

He presents him as a general come to the aid of his own man, mentioning as arrows all the missiles indiscriminately—hail, coals, things that are naturally used as missiles. . . . In fear of the one appearing and the missiles and lightning flashes, the earth bared itself in all directions so as even to reveal its hidden secrets, springs, and anything else hidden in its depths. At your rebuke, Lord. The exclamatory remark emphasized nicely that creation has no one else to dread in this way except the author of creation himself.

He will deliver me because he has pleasure in me; indeed, it was not that I had repented, or had been convicted concerning my sin or had a prophet sent to me, but it was because he took pleasure to deliver me. And I know and I am absolutely persuaded that in the day of his judgment of the righteous no mention will be made of my sin and the crimes that I committed in the day of my misery.

I will be blameless with him, with that very one who, himself blameless, suffered on the cross for our iniquities.

There is a deeply hidden sense in which you are known as holy with the holy, because you make them holy.

We agree with common opinion, He will be like the one with whom he is joined. Indeed, this statement is very true, but it does not apply to the interpretation of the present verse. In this verse, if you wish to make the plain sense of the hymn, you will remember what the Lord said through the prophet to the people: If you walk upright in my sight, I will walk upright with you; if you walk turned from my ways, I will be turned from you. The psalmist speaks to this statement: With the holy, you will be holy; with the innocent, innocent, and et cetera.

Therefore, O bishop, together with your subordinate clergy, endeavor rightly to divide the Word of truth. For the Lord says, If you walk cross-grained to me, I will walk cross-grained to you. . . . Walk therefore in holiness, that you may rather appear worthy of praise from the Lord than of complaint from the adversary.

By perverse, he means he will chastise sinners. For his natural uprightness. . . and his goodness toward those who believe obediently are immovable and unshakable. . . . Therefore, he treats them severely in the hope that perhaps he might curb their impulse toward death.

Since our light does not come from ourselves, it is you, Lord who will light my lamp. . . . Of ourselves we are darkness by reason of our sin, but you, my God, will enlighten my darkness.

Examine human nature: it is born and increases, it learns these customs of people. What does [this nature] know except earth, of the earth? It speaks human things, it knows human things, it understands human things. Carnal itself, [this nature] judges carnally, it surmises carnally. Let the grace of God come, let it enlighten a person’s darkness, as [the psalmist] says. . . . Let grace take possession of the human mind and turn it to its own light; immediately it begins to say what the apostle says: Yet not I, but the grace of God with me^[1] and And it is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me.^[2]

I will bring forth a horn to David; I have prepared a lamp for my anointed.^[1] The lamp is prepared for Christ, having arisen from the seed of David, for who other could it be than the offspring who has come forth from the succession of David according to the flesh; in what way does Christ who came into the womb of David become the ray of his own excellence and the light shining brightly for all people? Why in the aforesaid words does David speak prophetically: Because you will light my lamp, Lord? He says, You yourself, Lord, who are the true light, having been united with the lamp coming forth from me in a certain mysterious way, are going to light that very lamp. Even the shadows with which I was once covered you will scatter entirely so that their memory does not enter my mind.

Just as the eye is the lamp of the body, so the lamp of the soul is the mind, in which, unless Christ has poured the oil of his grace, there will not be light within. The prophet, therefore, proclaims that his lamp is lighted by the Lord.

Let us not allow what is according to the flesh to persecute what is according to the spirit; neither let us, using the body as a pretext, quench the lamp that has been lit in us. We must therefore not contradict to the point of thinking or of speaking contrary to the faith in the holy Scriptures. But those whom he loves, God chastises;^[1] he afflicts and puts them to the test in everything to see whether they will keep his commandments or not.^[2] Yet, what God is looking for in us are the fruits of the Holy Spirit;^[3] we must not be negligent concerning them, for it is about them that we shall be questioned.

Truly I have known that I am going to cross over that heavenly wall built by your strength and power; and then situated in a safe place, I will receive salvation from you. Or, in this way: I, whom they try to close out by surrounding me in order to stop me, will cross and leap over all the fortifications of the enemies, both fence and wall.

Not by my own efforts shall I be delivered, but by you. . . . Again, it is not by my own strength but in my God that I shall leap over the wall that sins have built between humankind and the heavenly Jerusalem.

A person’s will is a brazen wall and a stone hurled between himself and God. If one puts it aside, he can say the words of the psalm: In my God I shall go over a wall and as for my God, his way is undefiled. If righteousness assists the will, then a person does good.

What, moreover, do those oracles tried in the fire of the Lord teach? That he himself is the protector of all the ones hoping in him and that there is no God except our Lord, and there is none strong except our God; and rightly is it said that he is the protector of all hoping in him since none is able to be found who is able to stand against such and so great a protector.

He builds me up with his own strength and weapons, and he affirms by his grace my mortal and human strength; just like one having his limbs undergirded by his own strength, I will stand against my enemies. But as it is said above, My God, his way is perfect, so also wishing me to be likened to his own image, he has made my way blameless by teaching, admonitions and discipline of whatever type he wishes, and he has refined and perfected my way or settled life.

He who made my feet perfect like a deer’s, who had made my love perfect, to leap over the thorny, dark entanglements of this world, he will set me on the high places. He will direct my gaze to my heavenly habitation, that I may be filled with all the fullness of God.

The same deer is swift in course as are also the righteous of God who look heavenward, not earthward, who seek the sublime; and this from a single love of the celestial kingdom. David ascribes his likeness to that of the righteous, strengthened by the grace of God, when he adds and setting me on high places. Although there are others who try to draw us into the valleys of iniquity and lead us away, our God, like an overseer of our struggles, when he has determined that we are good runners, stirs us to suitable excellence, and his grace fulfills that very thing. Not in our excellence are we established in our high places; but truly by its very nature the celestial is the abode for the soul; and those high places are not foreign but are peculiar to us.

He who sits on the right of the Father corrects us with discipline, and accordingly he teaches us. For he directs the spirit with a right foundation; true understanding leads one into fullness.

Your reproof, by not allowing me to deviate, has guided me to relate whatever I do to the goal of union with you.

You have made room for my steps under me, the steps, namely, by which I cross from iniquity to moral excellence, from things perceived by my senses to those perceived by my mind, from the present to the future age, the steps that from the beginning seemed arduous and narrow to me because I was walking in a crooked way; but having progressed beyond them, I took notice of the widened places. For one who advances with every step and attains the end, having been drawn to the wide space, will not feel that narrowness, labor and grief that he had known in his advance. . . . He who follows Jesus follows hard his footsteps because he progresses on the worn and oft traveled way from Jesus Christ.

Not only do we avoid the ones pur-suing us as we flee, but we pursue our enemies, and we seize them, and we do not turn back until they fail.

The mind must not through disbelief in the promised blessings give way to despair; and the soul once marked out for perdition must not refuse to apply remedies on the ground that its wounds are past curing. . . . Lo, I hear his promise: I will pursue mine enemies and overtake them; neither will I turn again till they are consumed, so that I, who was once your enemy and a fugitive from you, shall be laid hold of by your hand. Cease not from pursuing me till my wickedness is consumed.

This is done for me through your grace, so that my feet are not ensnared nor am I cut off by the nets of my enemies or by the offenses that they had cast.

If you pray against your passions or the demons that assail you recall to mind [this verse]. . . . You are to say this at the appropriate moment, thus arming yourself against your adversary with humility.

Tightly and strongly you have bound up the loosely flowing desires of my flesh, that I may not be hindered by them in battle.

If fighters find themselves being assailed and assailing in return, and if the demons fight against us, then they too when they assail us will be assailed by us in return. Scripture says, I will assail them, and they will not be able to stand;^[1] and again, Those who assail me and are my enemies, they have weakened and fallen.^[2]

We will see the backs of our enemies fleeing, not the faces of ones pursuing us.

He truly sees with his mind’s eye that all the peoples throughout the whole world of the human race, whether barbarians or Greek, or of whatever accent or language, carry David respectfully in their memory, and they all speak his name with honor, who lift up his words through all the churches of Christ; and does anyone not assert the truth in these very words, if he attentively considers the people gathered from the nations, known by no sign to David, as they perform their duties of service with Davidic hymns and canticles, and as they hear the song repeated and recite it, receiving the psalms entrusted by him that were written from the long ages back.

A people, he says. . . . But what is the people that was ignorant of God, but ours, who in days bygone knew not God? And who, in the hearing of the ear, gave heed to him, but we, who forsaking idols, have been converted to God?

We are not all the children of God: those only are so who believe in him and do his will. And those who do not believe and do not obey his will are sons and angels of the devil, because they do the works of the devil. And that such is the case he has declared in Isaiah: I have begotten and brought up children, but they have rebelled against me.^[1] And again, he says that these children are aliens: Strange children have lied unto me.^[2] According to nature, then, they are [his] children, because they have been so created; but with regard to their works, they are not his children.

Though they did not see me with their own eyes, by receiving my preachers they have heard me and obeyed me.

All these things will happen to us through him who placed his arms on the cross as a bow in the sky, and daily he intercedes for us.

Just as David after the advent of our Savior is able to be presented just as if he were alive and living among people, and he sings praises to the God of the universe among all the peoples through his own writings, canticles and hymns, so also he who has come from his seed, to whom these words refer that we now explain, with like reasoning when he overcomes the ones lying in wait for him, he may rightly say, You will exalt me above the ones rising against me. And he leaves them behind, and he shares his own truth and grace to all peoples; even now he himself, being present everywhere on the earth and in the midst of them resting their hope in him, is made known through his church.

Since by the Holy Spirit he understood that God’s promises were not confined to him alone but would pass also to his offspring, so he spoke in this way here with particular reference to Christ’s life. The outcome, in fact, showed that David’s offspring, blessing and sanctifying the nations, referred to no one other than the Lord of all. The blessing affected the offspring without restriction, after all, and following David, remember, there were many famous descendants of his in each generation (Christ himself thought to be the one proven to be famous and great)—first Solomon, then Uzziah, then Hezekiah, then Josiah—yet none emerged as more precisely realizing the force of the promise than Christ alone, and after him there was no one, nor is there anyone to whom the blessing of the promises would be thought to refer. After all, with Judah in captivity and the tribes intermingled, and no clarity as to who was descended from whom, it is now obvious that the fulfillment of the promise rested with Jesus himself, to whom in this case as well both the prayer and the prophecy allude, To David and his offspring forever. I mean, those of the company of Hezekiah, even if they seemed to enjoy some grace from God, did not do so forever, death befalling each one with the result that they were not the subject of blessing forever.