God's Mighty Right Hand (part II)

Yesterday I spent some timing discussing God’s Mighty Right Hand; this is the conclusion of that discussion.

In the 16th Psalm, we are told that, at God’s Right Hand are pleasures forevermore. The 48th Psalm says that God’s Right Hand is full of righteousness. . In the 78th Psalm, the writer talks about a mountain that God’s Right Hand has purchased. In the 80th Psalm, the writer talks about a vineyard that God’s Right Hand has planted. In Ecclesiastes, it says that a wise man’s heart is at his right hand, but a fool’s is at his left.

In First Kings, King Solomon had a placed prepared for his mother to sit on his right hand. In First Chronicles, there is a mention of a man named Asaph who was a Levite and stood at his brother’s right hand. Clearly, in these usages, the right hand is a place of honor. In Matthew 20, the mother of James and John tried to persuade Jesus into granting her sons the right to sit at His right hand and His left hand, again, clearly places of honor.

In Judges 5, the Prophetess Deborah is singing a song of praise about a victory that God has just given Israel, but she isn’t singing about God’s right hand, she is singing about Jael’s. It seems that Sisera, an enemy of Israel, seeing his forces getting obliterated by Israel’s, went and hid himself in the home of a friend. His friend’s wife, Jael, though, was sympathetic to the Jews. She didn’t tell him her feelings, though. He asked her for some water, and she gave him milk. I doubt if she knew that milk contains tryptophan, which is an amino acid, but has been known to act as a mild sedative, but I suspect that it was fairly common knowledge that drinking milk makes one sleepy. He drank the milk, not suspecting anything, and was soon fast asleep. Jael managed to get to a tentstake and a hammer without waking him up, and removed a potential threat from Israel in a very permanent (although somewhat gruesome) manner. Clearly, this was a strong woman, both emotionally and physically. I don’t know too many women who could find it their hearts to kill a man in his sleep unless they were afraid that he was going to kill him when he woke up, and, as far as that goes, there have been a few women that honestly thought that their significant other was eventually going to kill them and still couldn’t bring themselves to do anything about it. Here we have a woman who, although not threatened by Sisera directly, found it within her heart to take him out. I have to believe that God laid that on her heart. She also had to have been physically strong, too, though, because of the way she killed him. She must have given it all she had, and maybe God gave her a little bit more, besides. My point is that the power was in her right hand that held the hammer.

I am given to understand that the British tradition of driving on the left side of the road has to do with the fact that, in medieval times, riders preferred to keep approaching enemies on their right, so that their right hand—the one that held their weapon—was free to deal with said enemy. To be honest, I find that mildly amusing, because in every movie jousting match I’ve ever seen the jousters both rode to their right, keeping their enemy on the left, and forcing them to hold their lances over their horses’ necks. I suspect that has to do with the fact that the movies I’ve seen were filmed in the United States, where people drive on the right, although, there may be some advantage to resting the lance on the horse’s neck (but I’m leaning towards Hollywood got the details wrong).

In any case, the Old Testament references certainly qualify as Messianic prophecy, but, in most cases, it is also clear that they are talking about God’s power, or honor. Generally, there is no indication that the writers were at all aware that they were writing prophecy—they were writing about God’s power in present tense; they wrote about God’s power in their own lives. We sometimes call on the power of Christ in our prayers; is that not because the power of Christ IS the power of God?