Psalm 7:2
the third enemy
O Lord my God, in thee have I put my trust: save me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me. (Psalm 7:2 DR)
It was seen earlier that the silence of Christ in the face of His persecution, Passion and death concealed the grandeur of salvation, and as the Psalmist begins the Psalm proper he begins to apply what follows to the mystical Body of Christ.
St. Augustine sees the one who comes into the hiddenness of Christ (cf. Colossians 3:3) in this silence as the perfect soul, the one who is—like our Lord—prepared to hope in the Lord in the face of suffering from the evil one and his confreres. The strength of this perfect soul’s resolve lies not in his own ability or resilience but in a complete confidence in God’s ability to deliver him from all adversity. Importantly, this adversity is not primarily physical in nature, but rather has reference to the onslaught of temptation and sin. As the soul reaches perfection it begins to root out vice from his own heart, so that all that remains is that from the devil:
As one to whom, already perfected, all the war and enmity of vice being overcome, there remains no enemy but the envious devil, he says, “Save me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me” [Psalm 7:2]… (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 7, 2.)
And while the temptations that come from the devil are external to the soul, they can certainly become internalized if given into, as sin lies not in the temptation nor in the source of the temptation, but in the will’s assent to that temptation. Thus the soul which is tempted by the devil to sin can potentially become of the devil if it assents to that sin:
He that committeth sin is of the devil: for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose, the Son of God appeared, that he might destroy the works of the devil. Whosoever is born of God, committeth not sin: for his seed abideth in him, and he can not sin, because he is born of God. (1 John 2:8-9 DR)
It is precisely because even the perfect soul can still be tempted by the devil and still fall into sin that the perfect soul all the more cries out to God for help and deliverance, knowing that the purpose of the Incarnation was the defeat of sin (as noted above). It is thus for good reason that the prayer that our Lord taught us to pray concludes with the fulfillment of the Psalmist’s words here, in which we pray: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
In this animation I found a fantastic image of a waterfall and thought it’d make a nice illustration of this passage, albeit in perhaps a more oblique manner, hinting at the purification from sin.
I drew some simple masks on the image framing the downward motion of the waterfall and applied loopFlow to it to create the movement. I then drew some more masks on the sides flaring off to the edges so as to animate the mists coming off the waterfall.
I placed the text and applied Shadow Studio 3 to it to give it some nice depth and changed the blending mode to have it merge into the waterfall a bit.
Enjoy.
O Lord my God, in thee have I put my trust: save me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me.
(Psalm 7:2 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: