Psalms 89:5

"O Lord, the very Heavens shall praise Thy wondrous works" [Psalm 89:5]. The Heavens will not praise their own merits, but Thy wondrous works, O Lord. For in every act of mercy on the lost, of justification of the unrighteous, what do we praise but the wondrous works of God? Thou praisest Him, because the dead have risen: praise Him yet more, because the lost are redeemed. What grace, what mercy of God! Thou seest a man yesterday a whirlpool of drunkenness, to-day an ornament of sobriety: a man yesterday the sink of luxury, to-day the beauty of temperance: yesterday a blasphemer of God, to-day His praiser: yesterday the slave of the creature, to-day the worshipper of the Creator. From all these desperate states men are thus converted: let them not look at their own merits: let them become Heavens, and praise the wondrous works of Him by whom they were made Heavens...

And the heavens shall confess your wonders, O Lord. This is what is said in the eighteenth psalm: "The heavens declare the glory of God." According to the mystical understanding, he calls the apostles "heavens." For if it is said to the sinner, "Earth you are, and to earth you shall go," why should it not be said to the holy or righteous man, "Heaven you are, and to heaven you shall go"? For of the saints, according to the apostle, "the conversation is in the heavens." And when he says, The heavens shall confess your wonders, it is a sign of the repentance to be preached, which we have received, at the apostles' proclamation, in the confession of the Lord Jesus Christ; and if we follow their admonitions and examples, we too can be called heavens, when we imitate those whose conversation is in the heavens. For the prophet says in another place: "I am a sojourner on earth and a pilgrim, like all my fathers." And this he was saying in Judea, that is, in his own homeland: and how does he say he is a pilgrim? But it is because the saints in the present age are pilgrims on earth, desiring to possess nothing earthly, whose whole possession is in heaven, where one has dwellings, where one has "the city whose maker and founder is God." And therefore the prophet too, who is not of this world, says he is a pilgrim here, and by the will of his mind he hastens to his homeland, that is, to paradise, to the kingdoms of the heavens. Do not say, O heretic, because I have said that paradise is the homeland of the saints, that I am asserting that souls existed before they came here into bodies. Nor do I say this, but I say it according to the apostle, who affirms that we were all, in the transgression of Adam, cast down from paradise through sin. This the apostle says, that Adam fell even in us, who were afterward to be. Therefore now in Christ, that is, the heavenly Adam, we believe, so that we who through the sin of the first Adam fell from paradise, may now through the righteousness of the second Adam return to paradise. The heavens shall confess your wonders, O Lord. What wonders? That you made heaven? Or that you founded the earth? Or that you gathered the seas into one? For what is this that is great in God, for whom to have spoken all things is to have made them? These, then, are the great things in God, the wonders in God, that God became man, that he lay hidden in…