But if I cast out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has already overtaken you. – Luke 11:20 (NET)
The “finger of God” is something that appears a few times throughout Scripture. It is yet another one of those things that links together the writings of the New Testament with the Hebrew Scriptures that serve as its foundation and basis for any and all understanding. The Gospels contain two references to the “finger of God.” The first is the one found in Luke, as seen above, with the other to be found in the Gospel of John. Though there we cannot actually locate the phrase “finger of God,” we are led to understand that the finger of Jesus is the finger of God because John begins with an overt declaration of the divinity of Jesus, with this proclamation rooted in an understanding of the implications of both Messiah and Resurrection. We see the finger of God when Jesus stoops to write in the dirt during the scene in which He is presented with the woman that is taken in the very act of adultery.
Here, it is necessary to acknowledge that some of the earliest and best manuscripts of John do not contain this story of the woman taken in adultery, and therefore do not contain the story that has Jesus writing on the ground with His finger. In fact, some manuscripts place the story at the end of the twenty-first chapter of Luke, thus interestingly putting both “finger of God” references in the same Gospel, which makes a great deal of sense.
When Jesus speaks about the finger of God in Luke, He hits upon a key theme of His mission, which the proclamation of the presence of the kingdom of God. He offers His statement in response to the accusation that “By the power of Beelzebul, the ruler of demons, He casts out demons” (11:15). After speaking of His own casting out of demons by the finger of God, He goes on to say “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his possessions are safe. But when a stronger man attacks and conquers him, he takes away the first man’s armor on which the man relied and divides up his plunder” (11:21-22). Clearly then, this is designed to resonate with Jesus’ hearers. Because Jesus speaks within a culture with a shared history, He is building on a foundation from which His hearers can fully understand Him and derive maximum meaning. So, rather than attempt to interpret and spiritualize the words of Jesus and treating His words as a free-floating aphorism subject to any number of flights of interpretive fancy, we can gather up the appearances of the “finger of God” that are to be found in Israel’s defining historical narrative so as to put ourselves in position to grasp what is being communicated.
Working backwards through the Scriptures, we encounter the finger of God in the book of Daniel, when “the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the royal palace wall” (5:5b), with this occurring during a great banquet being hosted by King Belshazzar of Babylon. In an era in which the book of Daniel commanded a great deal of attention, and which was quite obviously on Jesus’ mind, owing to His constant reference to Daniel’s Son of Man, this instance of usage is quite worthy of ours. Daniel is called upon to interpret what the finger has written, eventually informing the king that it pronounced his doom. Daniel informed the king that “God has numbered your kingdom’s days and brought it to an end… you are weighed on the balances and found to be lacking… your kingdom is divided and given over to the Medes and Persians” (5:26b,27b,28b).
Now, it cannot be overlooked that at this banquet “Belshazzar issued an order to bring in the gold and silver vessels---the ones that Nebuchadnezzar his father had confiscated from the Temple in Jerusalem---so that the kings and nobles, together with his wives and concubines, could drink from them… As they drank wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone” (5:2b,4). The writer reports that it was “At that very moment the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote.” We’ll notice that Belshazzar was drinking from that which had been plundered from the Temple, doing so as a strong man, fully armed, guarded in his own palace, and seemingly safe with all of his possessions. However, it was “in that very night Belshazzar, the Babylonian king, was killed. So Darius the Mede took control of the kingdom” (5:30-31a). A stronger man attacked him and conquered him, surely plundering all of Belshazzar’s once safe possessions. Might this have been on Jesus’ mind?
No comments:
Post a Comment