Psalm 18:7

nowhere to hide

His going out is from the end of heaven, And his circuit even to the end thereof: and there is no one that can hide himself from his heat. (Psalm 18:7 DR)

The Psalmist continues his enconium of the sun, considering its constant movement in the heavens and the warmth that it provides to all the earth. This daily traversal is a wonder to behold and a mercy to back in the rays thereof, for not only does the sun give light but also heat upon a world that would otherwise be locked in eternal darkness.

This is, however, a double-edged sword here. On the one hand the sun is a fitting analogy for God’s mercy and grace which he bestows upon all indiscriminately, as our Lord says:

That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust. (Matthew 5:45 DR)

On the other hand one cannot hide from it, and one’s deeds will eventually be brought to light, the good in a radiant manner which can be praised by all because of virtue and the evil in a begrudging way that ends in shame.

Understood in this light, out experience of God and his mercy or judgment is predicated on our relation to him, whether of love and submission to his will or of hate and stiffness of neck. For while we can only perceive attributes like mercy or judgment as separate categories because of the limited nature of our intellect, in God these are not in essence distinct but are one and the same act, since God by nature is simple.

Thus the nature of the sun as both a source of life and light and as a consuming fire from which there is no escape is analogously our relation to God in terms of our moral and spiritual orientation to him. There is a common grace bestowed upon humankind, but also a common judgment due to original sin; these are not in God distinct acts. We do, however, experience those distinctly in terms of their effects. St. Thomas note:

Now God's love, considered on the part of the Divine act, is eternal and unchangeable; whereas, as regards the effect it imprints on us, it is sometimes interrupted, inasmuch as we sometimes fall short of it and once more require it. Now the effect of the Divine love in us, which is taken away by sin, is grace, whereby a man is made worthy of eternal life, from which sin shuts him out. Hence we could not conceive the remission of guilt, without the infusion of grace. (ST, 2:1, Q 113, A 2.)

God uses these forms of prevenient grace to move us towards justifying grace in which we cooperate, this grace being the means by which we come into his friendship. St. Thomas remarks:

The justification of the ungodly is brought about by God moving man to justice. For He it is “that justifieth the ungodly” according to Romans 4:5. Now God moves everything in its own manner, just as we see that in natural things, what is heavy and what is light are moved differently, on account of their diverse natures. Hence He moves man to justice according to the condition of his human nature. But it is man's proper nature to have free-will. Hence in him who has the use of reason, God's motion to justice does not take place without a movement of the free-will; but He so infuses the gift of justifying grace that at the same time He moves the free-will to accept the gift of grace, in such as are capable of being moved thus.
(ST, 2:1, Q 113, A 3.)

---

In this animation I wanted to go with the idea of the sun constantly and indiscriminately bestowing its benefits, and so I created a simple ellipse with a texture to be the sun, adding a bit of Turbulent Displace to the texture to give a bit of a heat distortion effect.

I then created a smaller ellipse and added a Repeater to it and adjusted the Scale of the Repeater to have the duplicates start small and grow larger. I animated the scale and rotation of the Shape layer and then duplicated and offset the layers in time to achieve the loop.

Enjoy.

---

View a higher quality version of this gif here: