This is a psalm of the strong-armed Mediator concerning the perfection of the church in this world, where it wages war within time against the devil.

The title is mindful of the completion of the temple. The completion of the temple is the end of the world, in which children of God bring to God the offspring of rams. The offspring of rams are the lambs who are placed on the right so that, offering glory and honor and the glory of his name in righteous works which they do, they may worship the Lord, no longer a building made by hands but his holy courts, that is in Christ Jesus, in whom dwells the fullness of divinity.^[1]

Everyone who discusses divine matters in an orderly way so as always to hold the correct opinion concerning the Father, the Godhead of the Only-begotten and the glory of the Holy Spirit, brings glory and honor to the Lord. And, because his providence penetrates even to the smallest things, he increases the glory who is able to give the reasons for which all things were created and for which they are preserved, and also for which, after this present stewardship, they will be brought to judgment. He who is able himself to contemplate each individual creature with clear and unconfused thoughts and, after having contemplated them himself, is able to present to others also the facts concerning the goodness of God and his just judgment, he is the one who brings glory and honor to the Lord and who lives a life in harmony with this contemplation. For, the light of such a person shines before others, since by word and work and through mighty deeds of every kind the Father in heaven is glorified.

You who are entrusted with the divine message, he is saying, and are called children of God, bear the divine message everywhere with all enthusiasm, transform those reared on nonsense into rational people and offer them first to God; then through them present the worship and the hymns, celebrating the benefactor in the divine dwellings. This resembles what was said by the Savior to the sacred apostles, Go, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.^[1]

Surely the holy teachers are often understood by the word rams, since they are the leaders of flocks that follow the Lord. Hence the psalmist says in a pleasing manner: Bring to the Lord, O children of God, bring to the Lord the offspring of rams, which is clearly to say, Bring to the Lord, O angels of God to whom the responsibility for this task has been delegated, bring to the Lord in heaven the spirits of the faithful who, through imitation of the blessed apostles’ life and faith, have proved worthy to become their offspring.

He commands us to worship the Lord in his holy court, teaching that it is not allowed to worship outside the church which holds the orthodox faith.

Worship the Lord in your heart, a heart widened and sanctified; for you are his regal and holy habitation.

Many assume an attitude of prayer, but they are not in the court because of the wandering of their mind and the distraction of their thoughts coming from vain solicitude. . . . He who makes his belly a god, or glory, or money, or anything else that he honors more than all things neither adores the Lord nor is in the holy court, even though he seems to be worthy of the visible assemblies.

When Jesus was baptized, after the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit came down as a dove, the Father spoke over the waters saying, You are my Son.^[1] The God of majesty thundered, that is, he spoke profoundly over the waters, that is, over the nations so that they would be made complete in virtue and in the magnificence of Christ Jesus. And each one stood apart from the rebellious and rejoiced.

The Lord’s voice over the waters: this means the voice of Christ over the nations. . . . From the cloud of his flesh the God of majesty has struck fear by his preaching of repentance. The Lord is over many waters, for this same Lord Jesus, having made his pronouncement over the peoples and greatly terrified them, converted them to himself and made them his dwelling.

Now, the verse forecasts the voice emanating from heaven at the Jordan, This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.^[1] He called it thunder as coursing to the whole world through the sacred Gospels.

The waters are also the saints, because rivers flow from within them, that is, spiritual teaching that refreshes the souls of the hearers. Again, they receive water that springs up to eternal life, wherefore it becomes in those who receive it rightly a fountain of water, springing up unto life everlasting.^[1] On such waters, then, is the Lord.

From this he prophesies the power imparted to the apostles. . . . The narrative of the Acts also teaches us things in harmony with this: we learn from there how at his ascension Christ the Lord addressed his holy disciples in the words, Stay in this city until you have been clothed with power from on high.^[1] Ten days later on the feast of Pentecost, there came a sound from heaven like that of a violent wind blowing.^[2] . . . Now, he gives the name voice to the grace of the Spirit filling the apostles with power and might and rendering puny people magnificent.

The voice of the Lord is not in the weak and dissolute soul but in that which vigorously and powerfully achieves the good. . . . Magnificence is virtue extraordinarily great. One who performs great actions becomingly . . . hears himself called magnificent. When the soul is not enslaved by the pride of the flesh but assumes a greatness and dignity proper to it because of its awareness of its attributes received from God, in this soul is the voice of the Lord. Therefore, they who entertain noble thoughts of God, contemplating sublimely the reasons for creation, and being able to comprehend to a certain extent at least the goodness of God’s providence, and who besides are unsparing in their expenditures and are munificent in supplying the needs of their brothers, these are the magnificent people in whom the voice of the Lord dwells. . . . No difficult conditions will grieve the magnificent person; nor, in short, will any suffering greatly trouble him, nor will the sins of paltry and contemptible little people move him, nor the impurity of the flesh humble him. He is almost inaccessible to the humiliating passions, which cannot even look on him because of the loftiness of his mind. . . . Those, then who give great glory to God, elevate his magnificence.

He signals through these words the overthrow of the idols: since the idols’ precincts in ancient times were on high places, providing no fruit to their worshipers, he likened them to the cedars of Lebanon, which though lofty do not naturally bear edible fruit.

The cedar is at times praised by Scripture as a stable tree, free from decay, fragrant,and adequate for supplying shelter, but at times it is attacked as unfruitful and hard to bend, so that it offers a representation of impiety. . . . The Lord is said to break those vainly puffed up and magnifying themselves in the things of this world that are considered exalting, wealth, glory, power, beauty of body, influence or strength. . . . Just as the cedars, which are lofty in themselves, because they are produced on a high mountain become more conspicuous through the added height of the mountain, so also those leaning on the perishable things of the world are cedars indeed through their false glory and vanity of mind; and they are called cedars of Libanus because they are glorying in the elevation that belongs to another and are raised up to their false glory by the earth and earthly circumstance, as if by the summit of Libanus.

The Lord will grind down in repentance those who lift themselves high in the brilliant distinction of earthly rank, since to their confusion he has chosen to reveal his godhead to the most insignificant of this world.

The people who believe, freed from that error [idolatry] and called beloved for that reason, will be invincible and unconquerable in being rid of polytheism and worshiping one Godhead.

This is the voice of the Lord who passed through the fiercely burning hatred of those who jostled him, without any harm to himself, or cut through the raging anger of his persecutors, some of whom said, Perhaps this really is the Messiah? while others said, No, it couldn’t possibly be. He is leading the people astray;^[1] in this way he cut through their mad uproar, so as to bring some over within the reach of his love and leave others in their malice.

The voice of the Lord extinguishes the burning arrows of evil. That voice is the spiritual teaching that calls the ones believing in Christ grounded in wisdom.

Although fire seems to human intelligence to be incapable of being cut or divided, yet by the command of the Lord it is cut through and divided. I believe that the fire prepared in punishment for the devil and his angels is divided by the voice of the Lord, in order that, since there are two capacities in fire, the burning and the illuminating, the fierce and punitive part of the fire may wait for those who deserve to burn, while its illuminating and radiant part may be allotted for the enjoyment of those who are rejoicing. Therefore, the voice of the Lord divides the fire and allots it, so that the fire of punishment is dark, but the light of the state of rest remains unkindled.

The thick woods, the woody souls in which, like some wild beasts, the varied passions of sins lurk, are cleared out by that word, which is keener than any two-edged sword.^[1]

This is the voice that stirred to faith the peoples who were once without hope and without God in the world, where no prophet, no preacher of the word of God was to be found, so that it was as though no humans lived there.

The souls that were in the desert by yielding to faults are moved to words of repentance, so that leaving those faults they become the habitation of God.

The desert was the church that, at first, had no children. By the preaching of Christ, this wilderness was shaken and came to labor and gave birth, and there was born in a single day an entire nation. She who before was called the wilderness of Cades, the desert of holiness—inasmuch as she had been barren of virtues—begins to bring forth stags and send out in throngs holy people who kill the serpents on earth, contemptuous of their poisons. While they are running throughout the world proclaiming the gospel of Christ, in his temple all say ‘Glory’ to God!

Now, he called woods the idols’ precincts as being utterly fruitless; these are the kinds of woods or coppices that the best woodcutters are accustomed to chop down, leaving the earth bare of them, and they plant fruitbearing trees and sow seeds of edible crops. The cultivators of the world did this, too: pulling up idols’ precincts by the roots, they planted the divine churches in their place.

One who is in the temple of God does not speak out abuse or folly or words full of shameful matters, but in his temple all shall speak his glory. . . . This one duty, referring glory to the Creator, belongs to every army of heavenly creatures. Every creature, whether silent or uttering sound, whether celestial or terrestrial, gives glory to the Creator. But wretched people who leave their homes and run to the temple, as if to enrich themselves somewhat, do not lend their ears to the words of God; they do not possess a knowledge of their nature; they are not distressed, although they have previously committed sin; they do not grieve at remembering their sins, nor do they fear the judgment; but, smiling and shaking hands with one another, they make the house of prayer a place of lengthy conversation, pretending not to hear the psalm that solemnly protests and says, In the temple of God all shall speak his glory. You not only do not speak his glory, but you even become a hindrance to the other, turning his attention to yourself and drowning out the teaching of the spirit by your own clamor. See to it that you do not at some time leave condemned along with those blaspheming the name of God instead of receiving a reward for glorifying him. You have a psalm; you have a prophecy, the evangelical precepts, the preachings of the apostles. Let the tongue sing, let the mind interpret the meaning of what has been said, that you may sing with your spirit, that you may sing likewise with your mind. Not at all is God in need of glory, but he wishes you to be worthy of winning glory. Therefore, what a person sows, he will also reap.^[1] Sow glorification, that you may reap crowns and honors and praises in the kingdom of heaven. This statement, In his temple all shall speak his glory, was made not unfittingly in a digression, because some in the temple of God talk endlessly until their tongue aches; and these enter without profit.

In his church every one born again to an eternal hope praises God for the gift that he or she has received from the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, God dwells in each one singly as in his temples, and in all of them gathered together as in his temple. As long as this temple, like the ark of Noah, is tempest-tossed in this world, the words of the psalm are verified: The Lord dwells in the flood, although, if we consider the many people of the faithful of all races whom the Apocalypse describes under the name of waters, they can also be appropriately meant by the Lord dwells in the flood.^[1] But the psalm goes on: And the Lord shall sit as king forever, doubtless in that very temple of his, established in eternal life after the tempest of this world. Thus, God, who is everywhere present and everywhere wholly present, does not dwell everywhere but only in his temple, to which, by his grace, he is kind and gracious, but in his indwelling he is received more fully by some, less by others.

The Lord lives in the flood, that is, in water that washes away faults, and in that same water, the King sits forever. There he gives strength to the people, the ones believing him. He blesses his people in peace.

He will build a world that is inundated with the torrent of iniquity, will restore it and will make it a new creation. Hence blessed Paul also cries aloud, If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.^[1]

God sits in the soul that shines from its washing, as if he were making it a throne for himself.

God dwells in the flood, that is, in the multitude of those who believed in Christ, who [as it says in the next verse] gives power to his people and blesses it in peace. For we are strengthened in Christ, who also gave us his peace.