Psalm 83:10
like a flowing river
Behold, O God our protector: and look on the face of thy Christ. (Psalm 83:10 DR)
The Psalmist once again prophetically looks to the coming of the Messiah, the Anointed One, here rendered Christ. The expansion of the thought by means of the parallelism is fascinating, for in the opening thought the Psalmist invokes God as protector, but then elaborates on that to implore God to look on the face of His Christ. Thus the protection that God affords is established in His Christ and found therein.
But there is a oddity here, for while the king is God’s anointed one in the temporal sense, this cry is not on behalf of the king but is looking forward to the king, the King of Kings, the Messiah. St. Bellarmine sees this statement as unambiguously prophetic:
In the previous verse he said, “Give ear, O God of Jacob;” for which he now says, “Look on the face of thy Christ,” look on the true Prince of your people, the Messias, the Lamb without spot, who taketh away the sins of the world, and, for his sake, protect us. How could David thus refer to Christ, who was not then incarnate? He had not then, as “Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, given himself a redemption for all,” [1 Tim. 2.] Christ’s merits were before God from eternity, hence he is called in the Apocalypse, “The Lamb slain from the beginning of the world,” because, from the very beginning of the world, God granted many favors, especially spiritual ones, to his servants, through the previous merits of the passion of Christ. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 83, 9.)
His point is that while the Incarnation and Redemption happened in time and space— and thus in a particular time and in a particular place—since the subject of the Incarnation is the Second Person of the Trinity, the merits of the passion are therefore not bound by time but eternally in the mind of God, as it were, part and parcel of His will from all eternity. When the Psalmist speaks here he thus prophetically glimpses the passion and death and merits of the Messiah, foreshadowing and foreseeing what would be accomplished. St. Augustine understands this in the sense of the Gospel going forth into all the world:
For when does God not look upon the face of His Christ? What is this, “Look on the face of Your Christ?” By the face we are known. What is it then, Look on the face of Your Christ? Cause Your Christ to become known to all. Look on the face of Your Christ: let Christ become known to all, that we may be able to go from strength to strength, that grace may abound, since sin has abounded. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 83, 13.)
As the mystical Body of Christ, the Church throughout the world shows forth the face of Christ, making Him known where He was not known before. The body of Christ thus carries His face as our own bodies carry our own faces to wherever we go. And while it is through the face that we know another, without the body there is no face to behold. In this manner God looks upon the face of His Christ when he pours out His blessings and grace upon the Church and gives her success in the mission He gave her. And since the Church carries the face of Christ to the world, it is through her administration of the sacraments that God chooses to apply graces in this world wherever she celebrates them.
This animation began with taking some textures and matting them to some simple shapes to create the cross, rock and waters. For the flowing water I used loopFlow, which is a very handy script.
Enjoy.
Behold, O God our protector: and look on the face of thy Christ.
(Psalm 83:10 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: