Psalm 2:4
the best revenge is mockery
He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them: and the Lord shall deride them. (Psalm 2:4 DR)
When evil seems to prevail in this world and the righteous suffer, it can be difficult to see God’s hand at work behind history, let alone to imagine that he is ordering the universe according to His wisdom. For in any particular moment things can seem so upside down that any notions of justice or goodness can feel like fantasies.
The Psalmist continues to contemplate the wicked who devise vain things, for they fight against God and His purposes. Yet the Psalmist is not so naive as to think that this life will be a pleasant walk. After all, the kings and princes have their forces and marshal them against the Lord and against His Christ, which entails that battle is inevitable.
Yet his prophetic vision looks past the present, for he sees the coming of the Anointed One and understands the purposes of God within that light. The nations rage and the kings of the earth assert their power, but God’s designs will not be frustrated in their fulfillment; in fact, those very machinations becomes the means by which God accomplishes His will. His enemies thus become unwitting instruments of the Divine Will that they strive so stoutly agaisnt.
With this in view the Psalmist poetically refers to the Most High as mocking them, for all their power and scheming and wisdom is shown to be foolishness and in vain. Even more so, the saints who cleave to God and bear the wrath of man are thusly exalted by means of overcoming their rage; God confounds the “wisdom” of His enemies by the very “foolishness” of his beloved saints:
For the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For see your vocation, brethren, that there are not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble: But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong. And the base things of the world, and the things that are contemptible, hath God chosen, and things that are not, that he might bring to nought things that are. (1 Corinthians 1:25-28 DR)
This inversion of the wisdom and the power of this world is the ultimate rebuke to those who set themselves against God, for their utmost efforts are undone by that which they despise as weak and foolish. When they see all the things that they valued most in this present world brought to nothing, their humiliation is complete as God brings to fruition his purposes in His saints:
“Shall laugh at and deride them,” means that God in his wisdom, by means of signs and wonders, through the patience of the martyrs, through the conversion of nations and peoples, and through other means known to himself alone, will so confound them that they shall be an object of laughter and ridicule to every one. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 2, 4.)
This animation was prompted mostly by my stumbling across this striking image from one of the Beatus apocalypse manuscripts. I thought the style was extremely interesting and would work well for this.
I cut out the figures and the backdrop in Photoshop and then spent some time tediously separating out all the pieces, including using Generative Fill to fill back in some of the missing pixels in the backdrop.
I After Effects I rigged up the Christ figure with the Puppet Tool and applied a little looping animation. I precomped this and then precomped all the hovering angels into their own precomps and animated the wings and such.
In the main composition I parented all these precomps to the middle backdrop and animated that up and down to match somewhat the fluttering of the angel wings.
Enjoy.
He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them: and the Lord shall deride them.
(Psalm 2:4 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: