Exalt you the LORD our God, and worship at his footstool; for he is holy.
Read Chapter 99
Augustine of Hippo
AD 430
8. "O magnify the Lord our God" (ver. 5). Magnify Him truly, magnify Him well. Let us praise Him, let us magnify Him who hath wrought the very righteousness which we have; who wrought it in us, Himself. For who but He who justified us, wrought righteousness in us? For of Christ it is said, "who justifieth the ungodly." ..."And fall down before His footstool: for He is holy." What are we to fall down before? His footstool. What is under the feet is called a footstool, in Greek upopodion, in Latin Scabellum or Suppedaneum. But consider, brethren, what he commandeth us to fall down before. In another passage of the Scriptures it is said, "The heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool." Doth he then bid us worship the earth, since in another passage it is said, that it is God's footstool? How then shall we worship the earth, when the Scripture saith openly, "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God"? Yet here it saith, "fall down before His footstool:" and, explaining to us what His fo...
Adore his foot-stool. The ark of the covenant was called, in the Old Testament, God's foot-stool: over which he was understood to sit, on his propitiatory, or mercy-seat, as on a throne, between the wings of the Cherubim, in the sanctuary: to which the children of Israel paid a great veneration. But as this psalm evidently relates to Christ, and the New Testament, where the ark has no place, the holy Fathers understand this text of the worship paid by the Church to the body and blood of Christ in the sacred mysteries: in as much as the humanity of Christ is, as it were, the foot-stool of the divinity. So St. Ambrose, l. 3. de Spiritu Sancto, c. 12., and St. Augustine upon this psalm. (Challoner)
The last mentioned holy Doctor inculcates the obligation of adoring Jesus Christ in the blessed Eucharist, and refutes the Capharnaites, John vi. (Worthington)
The Jews adored God, shewing a relative honour, by prostrating themselves before the ark, in the same manner as Catholics do before h...
