Psalms 111:6–8

Psalms 111:6 — "He has shown his people the power of his works"

The Hebrew verb higgîd ("has shown" or "declared") carries the force of a public, deliberate disclosure. God does not merely possess power in the abstract; He demonstrates it in historical events visible to His people. The phrase "power of his works" (kōaḥ maʿăśāyw) points concretely to the Exodus — the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, the conquest of Canaan — the defining moments by which Israel knew Yahweh as Lord of history. Crucially, this display of power is oriented toward the people ("to His people"), not performed for its own sake. The Exodus typology embedded here is central: the "giving of the heritage of the nations" (v. 6b in the fuller text) refers directly to Israel's settlement in Canaan, the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise. God's power is thus covenantal power — it serves a promise, a relationship, a people.

In the typological sense, the Church Fathers consistently read this disclosure of power as anticipating the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery. St. Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos 110) identifies "his people" as the Church, the new Israel, and "the power of his works" as supremely manifested in the Resurrection — the opus Dei par excellence, which no human force could accomplish or undo. The Greek dynamis of God revealed in Christ (cf. 1 Cor 1:24) is the ultimate fulfillment of what the Psalmist glimpsed in the Exodus.

Psalms 111:7 — "The works of his hands are truth and justice"

Here the Psalmist moves from what God does to how and why He does it. "Truth" (ʾemet) and "justice" (mišpāṭ) are not decorative attributes but descriptions of the ontological character of God's actions. ʾEmet — rendered veritas in the Vulgate — denotes faithfulness, reliability, correspondence between word and deed; it is the quality of someone who does exactly what they promise. Mišpāṭ — judicium — denotes right order, equity, the alignment of action with the moral structure of creation. Together, these two words form a pair that appears throughout the Psalter and the prophets as a summary of divine governance (cf. Ps 89:14; Is 28:17). God's "hands" — a bold anthropomorphism — evoke the intimacy and directness of divine craftsmanship: creation, covenant, redemption are not remote emanations but personal engagements.

Patristically, this verse undergirds the teaching that God's omnipotence is never raw force but always ordered by wisdom and goodness — a principle later systematized by St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 25, a. 5): God cannot act contrary to truth or justice, not because He is constrained, but because His power and His nature are identical. What God does is truth and justice, not merely consistent with them.

Psalms 111:8 — "They are established forever and ever"

The Hebrew semûkîm lāʿad leʿôlam ("supported / established for ever and ever") uses a passive participle suggesting something that has been fixed, load-bearing, immovable. The works of God — including His law, His covenant, His redemptive acts — are not temporary interventions that fade or require revision. They are constitutive of reality. The doubling of the temporal phrase (lāʿad leʿôlam, "for ever and ever") intensifies the sense of absolute permanence, reaching beyond historical time into the eternal.

The typological-eschatological dimension is decisive here: the "works" that are established forever point forward to the New Covenant, sealed in the blood of Christ, which the Letter to the Hebrews explicitly calls an "eternal covenant" (Heb 13:20). The Eucharist, as the perpetual memorial (anamnesis) of that eternal redemptive act, is precisely the liturgical instantiation of what verse 8 affirms: in the Mass, the eternal work of Christ is made present, not repeated — established, as the Psalmist says, forever and ever.