Psalms 110:1: Jesus is Deity? Jesus is Man?: A Prophetic Think Tank
Psalms 110:1 and Christology
I was reading an online debate yesterday between Trinitarians and those who deny the Deity of Christ1, represented mostly by Jehovah’s Witnesses, mainstream Judaism, and Unitarians. The whole discussion was centered on Psalms 110:1.
In the 4th century, this controversy was the one that jump-started the doctrinal codification of a Church that had been through Hell with persecution, recently blessed as the state religion by Constantine. A Christological war broke out at that time between the Athanasian and Arian bands. It’s amazing that after all these centuries it still rages on with the same intensity that it had before. But it might surprise you, particularly since I identify as orthodox, that I do not share their passion for this issue or their presumption of its ultimate importance.
“How can I say this and call yourself orthodox, knowing that Jesus can’t atone for sacrifice without being God?” How true. Jesus could never have been the object of substitutionary atonement without being God. I’m not saying this is not true, I am just not conflating orthodoxy with an overarching affirmation of that truth. I put it on another one. In other words, I say that orthodoxy represents and places the greatest conceivable value in biblical truths that are non-conceptually informed, informed by that which in the mind concepts represent. That Jesus is God is true, but that truth, to true orthodoxy, is but a representation of a certain kind of biblical knowledge and Divine demonstration which is first. When that is first then there is at least one other truth that is superior to that of the deity of Christ, and when that is the first deity of Christ becomes a distant second. We then affirm the divinity of Christ, sure, but there are much more important Christological issues that, if we don’t promote, it won’t matter if Christ is deity or not because there will not be any Christ to talk about.
Well, you know that I don’t exactly track on a predictable flight path on anything. The statement I just made may by itself no reason for confidence because we are so conditioned to the pat questions and answers. But don’t look with a jaundiced eye so early. I do contend that, given the whole unexpectedness of Jesus as Messiah in his time, and the parabolic hermeneutic to which he was dedicated, it would certainly not be unexpected that unexpectedness, not those issues in which most of the Christian world obsesses itself, would still be the starting point for pondering them, rather than from a place where the obvious reigns.
If you don’t know anything about this Psalms 110:1 argument, it’s about whether or not the verse in question proves Jesus is God:
Psalms 110:1 A Psalm of David. The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
David says his Lord says something to his Lord, which is an oath to guarantee of his enemies’ destruction. The first Lord and the second Lord are David’s superiors who can make and fulfill such a guarantee. This verse is the most quoted OT verse in the NT. 20 times are verbatim quotes or allusions. See Mat 22:44; Matthew 26:64; Mark 12:36; Mark 14:62; Mark 16:19; Luke 20:42; Luke 20:43; Luke 22:69; Acts 2:34; Acts 2:35; 1 Corinthians 15:25; Ephesians 1:20; Ephesians 1:22; Colossians 3:1; Hebrews 1:3; Hebrews 1:13; Hebrews 8:1; Hebrews 10:12; Hebrews 10:13; Hebrews 12:2. The first Lord is the Father, the second Lord is the Messiah. Since they are both his Lord’s, is this not a proof text for the deity of Christ?
Not so fast, say the Arians. The Masoretic text renders the second Lord as “adoni,” not adonai. Adoni is always used for persons who are not Divine.
The Trinitarians counter with the fact that the MT added vowel pointing to the text. The first Lord is YEHOVAH (hwhy), the second is adoni (ynda). This second Lord, adoni, is pointed, and simply means “Lord, master, owner,” the human version of Divine adonai. This pointing was not in the Hebrew prior to around 600 AD and the MT is well known to have used this pointing as a weapon in the Jewish arsenal against Christian claims. All that was needed was to add pointing to a word and you could completely change its meaning.
Pointing essentially is a commentary on the text. A good example is the word “pierced” in Psalms 22:16: “they pierced my hands and feet.” The MT (most, not all) has ka’ ari, “like a lion” for “pierced,” as opposed to karu, “they pierced,” that is claimed in the original Hebrew. The Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls both have karu at this point. This is nearly identical to the situation in Psalms 110:1, except for the DSS. The Septuagint has the second Lord as Adonai (kurios) as well as the first. Moreover, verse 5 of Psalms 110 uses adonai to refer to the same Lord as spoken of in verse 1.
Furthermore, there is Isaiah 9, which is pretty darn powerful:
Isaiah 9:6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
Of course, this is just a very cursory outline of all the issues involved. I don’t mean to purposely shortchange the Arians here. I gave more words to the Trinitarians only because they have a lot more to say, in my opinion. But, in fact, I think that the Arians and the Trinitarians are both making a big mistake. The Arians are making two mistakes. One, the more frontal mistake of being in denial that all the relevant biblical passages must be harmonized into one conclusion. The orthodox and the Arians are making a mistake by thinking that the faith survives or dies on this issue.
The Real Question: Who is He?
The real question is not whether Jesus is God or a man. Not that it’s not an important question to be answered, but the superior question is whether or not this issue is the defining one across all Christian claims, which is assumed, and whether the use of Psalms 110:1 in the NT was for the apostles for the demonstration this classic Christological question or for something else. So, let me get right to the point.
Matthew 22:44; Mark 12:36; Luke 20:42, 43; Acts 2:34, 35; Hebrews 1:13. Matthew 26:64; Mark 14:62; 16:19; Luke 22:69; 1 Corinthians 15:25;Ephesians 1:20; Colossians 3:1; Hebrews 1:3, 13; 8:1; 10:12, 13;12:2; 1
Here we see that one verse, Psalms 110:1, is most quoted OT verse in the New Testament. Most are allusions, referring to Jesus sitting on the right hand of God, indicating his power and authority.
Hebrews uses it the most. In the first instance, the writer uses it to establish that Messiah is not an angel and not a man, heir of all things, by whom were made the worlds, who is worshiped by the angels.
Peter uses it in Acts saying that David is not the subject of the verse and that Jesus is now deserving the title “Lord and Christ.
But when Jesus quotes Psalms 110, in all cases he uses it in parabolic fashion to ask a simple question: “whose son is he, just the Son of David?”
What is interesting about the context in which he uses it is that it’s asked in the middle of confrontation by the religious leaders pressing him to show himself approved in their circle of theological priorities.
In Mat 22:44, the context is a dispute over the greatest commandment of the Law, offered as a red herring that will show Jesus a neophyte in the Law. Jesus says it is to love God with all heart, soul, and mind, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. After telling them that Law-keeping is quintessentially in the heart and around the greatest conceivable love, Jesus then asks the question: “whose son is he?”
In Mark, its the same, and Jesus in reply asks, “whose son is he?”
In Luke 20 the issue at hand is the relatively worthless theological musings that occupied the Pharisees, such as who in the resurrection would obtain the wife of a relative, which kind of question Jesus again effectively repudiates against the real question of “whose son is he?”
It’s not that Jesus thinks answers are not the end of moral thought over divine information, only that when your priorities are this screwed up you need to go back and take up original scriptural questions about the divine. And it’s not one particular question that he concerned about as much as the original question of what the heart should love the most: your wife in the resurrection, the theological science of the Law, or a certain kind of Revelation of a certain person.
The Premise is the Answer
Sounds a little like what I describe is the relatively minor issue of the deity of Christ over another?
There is a premise of the kind of faith we expect from a revelatory document before we even begin to contest for any particular truth that is claimed within it. The kind of state of faith you accept as satisfactorily illuminated by the entire Revelation is not the kind that begins with putting as a priori a presumption of interpretational opacity, difficulty, and equivocation, that is guaranteed to struggle with the crucial questions with no sure conclusion ever to be found. With its result being a theology of many calculated options in which we are obliged morally to accept one. The real kind of faith we expect of a true revelatory document is a faith that assumes that the truth is empirically inspectable and available, and not hard to know. A faith founded a priori on the presumption that for this available truth there is to be expected one interpretational rule for it which is not one that is found justifying man’s obsession with logically insoluble problems as its religion.
The idea of difficulty and opacity coming from revelation is not supposed to be a New Testament expectation. Splitting hairs is not freedom and disclosure of previously hidden truths. “Revelation,” while admitting that debate and disagreement and their legitimate potential exists for its finer points, is not to be denied it if it has proven itself to have been given. Partying every night and calling yourself a Christian, or being a Christian and being in the business of philosophy, or spending most of your time as a Christian preoccupied with questions about scripture that cant use scripture to arrive at some definitive “ah-ha” moment of real clarity, is not the kind of work that is supposed to essentially define us or define “revelation.” If these kinds do define us and make up most of our time, there is something screwed up in how we think about the nature of what should come without effort from the revelation and which is something transcendent in its own right that comes from revelation.
Ideas or Truth?
Look at it this way. The question of Jesus as Man vs. God is autonomously an idea, one of the human dialectical and rational world only.
When I say “autonomously” I mean that when taken alone, without a positive, objective association with something from the outside of ideas, and that is not strictly within the human psychological sphere. “God,” “Jesus,” “Sarasvati,” “Allah,” Jesus is God” and “Jesus is only a man” are alone only concepts. So is “sacramental grace,” “sola scriptura,” and “God does not exist,” “Khali will destroy the world and Brahman will remake it,” or “Allah is the only God and Mohammed is his prophet.” These are concepts that real truth seekers examine in a search for peace, for satisfaction, fulfillment, proof in information coming from history, religious documents, and moral thought about them. They know that they can’t be used as talismans and they can’t be thought Deity in themselves and produce miracles, such that when carried they automatically transmit such demonstration and produce such moral thought. Only to the extent that a factual demonstration is found for them, they can then be considered worthy or unworthy of faith. This is not hard to accept.
But do you think it not a little dysfunctional that these concepts, as Christians and even more so in the other religions, are our lifeblood when they do not necessarily demand an equal transcendent informational premise? Yes, because if you have a religious concept that implies the supernatural, you had better have some really good supernatural facts to support it. Believing Firestone tires are better than Copper tires because Sylvester Stallone uses them is pairing a conclusion about a fact paired with a premise that is an opinion. Opinions don’t support opinions, only facts, unless you are comfortable in devoting your life to an idea about the supernatural when everything we know about it shows it is only the product of the imagination.
The information which may or may not force a theological conclusion, I remind you, is not a concept.
A phenomenon is not a concept. A table and chairs is not a concept. They are matter in a certain configuration. “The Lord said unto my Lord, sit at my right hand…” is not categorically a concept, it is categorical data. They become concepts in the process of gathering all their like information to form a thought about them. The table becomes the symbol of “support” or “provision,” words in the Bible describing a relationship between divine beings become “Jesus is Lord, Son of God,” spraying an insect becomes “debugging the house of the mind,” or some such thing, which are tropes and statements about the nature of reality.
Those thoughts are like symbolic representations over their information. And as you well know, symbols can easily be used and have been used ubiquitously for millennia as objects of worship. It’s called idolatry. But the information, especially Holy information, remains just a dial on a compass pointing to these the conceptual objects of a divine person on a mental horizon, without which instrumentality they will not be found.
But is not that concept mentioned in Psalms 110 about Jesus being Messiah the Son of God, if it is true over its supporting demonstrative data, of greater importance, and Holy, against the conclusion of his diety? OF course, but even if you don’t think so, and you think the truth that Jesus is deity is greater, it should be only Holy to you when you know why it’s Holy. Separate the Holy thing from its Holy credentials and you have nothing Holy to you, no matter how much you say you believe in it. Our problem is that we can hold to a true conclusion falsely, having not the slightest regard for why it’s true because it’s so compact, handy, personable, and gives off a kind of glow that feels like its rubbing off on us.
Ideas are capable of construction entirely within the material box of the corporeal world, and none of them for that reason can be objects or worship and our direct devotion. They are products in the mind. This is not to say they are not important. Without them it abstract thought would be impossible. Without them, faith would be impossible, because androids can’t be saved because androids only know an index number for a dataset. Ides with humans are like that index number, but they are a number which is also a creative and emotional point of contact with knowledge. Without it, the knowledge is not accessed or capable of deep and consequential penetration into the affective organ of man. But the problem is that they can take on a life of their own.
Is Jesus a Human Creation or Lord?
The unique mission of Christ and the whole of the Old Testament revelation of sin and redemption could have been a wholly creative product of man. What makes them justified as theological concepts and Holy is that there is data, predictive information, which demonstrates that they are Holy, and from the mind and will of the God of the Bible long before they were fulfilled. You can’t believe anything in a way and in any sense that makes you justified if you don’t care or know that information. Holy ideas are our means of contact with an understanding of God and are a language that allows us to know him, have a relationship with him, talk to him, and, in the end, be with him in communion. But you might as well think you are Captain Ahab in Moby Dick if you think your focus on an autonomous concept like “Jesus Christ” will cause him to say he knows you. Concepts are not for worship, only a Person through the testimony of his proven reality is worthy of worship, with the entertainment of these ideas only giving expression to such worship.
The idea that Jesus was God or was not God are ideas that may be true or false, and at some point to be thought crucial, but to be alive and pressing an overarching influence on a kind theology that involves itself with their like, they don’t need anything to substantiate them as overarching but what that a cultural theology uses to make all its subjects important. Like systems, philosophy, statements of faith, a creative spirit and logic. This is not the case with “Jesus is Messiah.”
Jesus is the conclusion, “Messiah” is a simple but infinitely powerful revelation of disclosed information and its a demonstration of God’s supernatural omniscience through time. “Jesus” does not need our traditional theology and its favorite tools to establish his messiahship, only the Old Testament and its corresponding historical realization by Jesus, Not that you don’t need systems of organization, philosophy, a creative spirit, and logic. I’m saying that only that exposure to a supernatural phenomenon of seeing with your own eyes God vindicating his claims by knowing what no human could ever know can give you anything like sure knowledge. Far surer than what your little hands and brain can muster about that knowledge in its absence.
The thing about the whole idea of the Transcendent being real and true is that you need an example of it at your fingertips in order to talk about it, and not a huge amount of talk is necessary to simply tell people that what their eyes are looking at is coming outside of the world. If you have it, you don’t really have a huge intellectual industry built up around it giving benefits more than what comes effortlessly from what it obviously is. It pretty much speaks for itself.
This is not to say that there would not be a lot of people denying that it really did come from outside of the world. What I mean is that any discussions in which we immerse ourselves pertaining to these supernatural facts are not going to be much more than a discussion of the issue of determining what makes up human epistemic failure or success if we assume that we have something so impressive on its face before us and it alone should drive all our ideas about transcendent intelligence. This is even more so if this factual, supernatural phenomenon appears as an intentional planting of a transcendent artifact within our sphere for the purposes of eliciting a certain response by the one who planted it.
UFO or Christ?
If we find a UFO parked in the woods, something that is obviously transcendent, to say that we should be discussing whether the Roswell Incident was a true UFO crash or not (the purported crash in Texas in 1947) instead of focusing only on the origin of the UFO by intense examination would be kind of weird. But in the world or religion, people who are otherwise quite rational are pretty weird, and in Christianity simply because they expect God’s revelation to be like all other religions, and so ineffable from the outset that they have trouble accepting that the alien artifact of Him really exits.
The UFO analogy is irresistible only because it is something that is supposed to have come found outside our mundane sphere. The difference between God and a UFO in the aspect of their reality is that we have abundant evidence for God, but not UFO’s. Not to overuse it, but it’s much like insisting upon the question of the reality of the Washington D.C. UFO flap of 1952 as our ultimate question about UFO’s when an empirical example of that ultimate UFO is touchable now, right now. Guess what, we have it of God, and we have it in spades. The transcendent conclusion of Jesus of Nazareth, Savior, the alien object, is not appropriate for the entertained transcendent premise made up and available for inspection only by dreams, wishes, desires, speculation, and physical and conceptual talismans. If that title for Jesus is true, not just a wish, the premise is that it can be confirmed reasonably by the use of non-hypocritical thought over an examination of the history and a historical document about Him, claimed to have come from another dimension and its Person. If not, you might as well believe in Jesus like you would UFOs.
Neither a real UFO is available for inspection, nor is God, such that we can travel to Mexico City and talk to Him. All we have of the transcendent object is what its planter has left behind, who was once here, that is available for examination. If you neither have the object nor much proof, you’re really in la-la land. But if you have such proof it’s all you need.
But That’s Debatable Too!
Now, I realize that the issue of the truth of Messianic Prophecy, as the informational premise readily available for inspection, is neither accepted as the defining faith motivation by all or by most Christians. The UFO analogy is certainly not perfect, and I am sure most atheists would delight in me using the comparison because they have an a priori faith that Jesus Christ and this messianic prophecy is but a delusion to a lower intellectual class that delights in being deluded. What I am saying is that whether or not you believe it is true or not, or whether or not you as a Christian are using it as your ultimate doctrine, without it any search for transcendent meaning is illusory, whether the holding to your beliefs in “equality,” “fairness,” “inclusion,” “truth,” or a faith holding to “Jesus is God” or “sola scriptura.” This is because none of these have objective connectivity if there is no divine demonstration of them, and there is no rational compulsion to entertain them. There is no way to empirically demonstrate God or Christ (without which there is no valid reason to believe in any absolute) if not either through him showing up in person or that of a record of intelligence outside of space/time saying what will happen 500, 1000, 3000 years hence.
Trust me, atheists firmly believe this, but atheists, like Christians, don’t think that record is there. Driven are atheists, like Christians, 100% by emotion in their decision. Any discussion with an atheist on the reality of the proof from messianic prophecy and this will become unavoidably apparent. I have yet to meet one that has a sufficient grasp of the subject and can stand toe-to-toe with someone like Michael Brown without ad homonym, circularity, bandwagoning, appeals to authority and shouting. Any discussion with a Christian and you will soon find an effective emotional objection by apathy or an attachment to other, secondary priorities.
Indeed, Christians must accept that “God is dead” or “God does not exist” is a reasonable certainty if messianic prophecy is not a priority and true. Atheists must accept that if messianic prophecy makes a good case for Jesus Messiah then Jesus of Nazareth should be believed without reasonable doubt, and the magistrate over every value he has or has ever had. Whether we want it that way or not, the transcendent conclusion must be equal to its premise, and to the extent that we throttle that is the extent to which we are engaging in a kind of voluntary soft insanity. and sophistry, even if unintentionally. You can’t have any “values” in that state that are not of flesh and bone or mineral or anything of greater substance than your potting soil under your flowers.
What Drives Importance Here?
As for Psalms 110:1 and the answer to the question of Jesus as God, as much as I might like the challenge and are inclined to take the issue as crucial, that issue is not going to drive the importance of the prophecy. What comes from this scripture, especially when harmonized with all other oracles like it, is that Jesus is Messiah, the supernatural Son of God who has been ordained to rule over the souls of humanity. The question of Jesus being God or not is not an example of a proposition that is the most consequential for faith over the transcendent artifact that we were given. This is not a good example of what should preoccupy and define our work over the inspection of the transcendent document that is supposed to produce and define our doctrine.
There are various levels of quality and clarity in messianic prophecy, mostly because of the historical time in which they are given and that their composition is designed in a way to assure that it fits into the epistemic needs of all future cultures (without disestablishing its eternal ground in God’s will for us in accepting his epistemic value), and this one in 110:1 is nowhere near the best we have overall in that sense. But it certainly has a vital function like no other in arguing for a righteous kind of faith against another that we should not want or need to rule our idea of the importance of the prophetic category in general.
I’m a Trinitarian. I believe Jesus is God. I pray to Him as Steven did in Acts 7:59 (I beg you to read carefully Steven’s speech noting its subject context, and especially that of 7:52: “Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers”), and by His name.
I Beleive What I Don’t Understand, But it’s Not the Master of My First Kind of Belief
But having said this, I believe Jesus is God in a way that I do not understand. My opinion is that the evidence is better than good that Masoretic pointing was used, and the original had the two Lord’s as adonai. Evidence from the Septuagint adds to this confidence. But even if not, it does not destroy what the Psalms are about and what God expected us to get from it. The Psalm is messianic not only because it is openly predictive of Messiah but because it is an example of God secretly hiding that same thing as what is most important, which was the parabolic strategy of Jesus. Truth is not just a fact. Because of the liars, we are to ourselves and others it is also a fact which has trans-dimensional penetration by having implications as big as its visceral aversions. It is meant to both separate (Mat 10:34) and bring together (Rom 10:15) in peace, and nothing in human history has ever come near to this as Jesus of Nazareth did and does. Messianic prophecy is a test, not just a laundry list of proven messianic credentials. A test for us to exercise an honest and moral spirit by its unhypocritical engagement.
At minimum, Messiah is a Person who is the Son of God, who is not just a man and not an angel (Hebrews 1:5), who is set to exercise authority equal to that of God over man (John 10:30, John 14:6), creator of worlds (Col 1:6), and, elsewhere, to be regarded in faith as the same as God. To these conclusions, we are ordained to deal with. “But is not the further conclusion that Jesus is God intended to be more compelling to us than this?” No, that is strongly suggestive instead of an obligatory result. Because Jesus as the God/Man is a proposition that is incapable of establishing a faith built on the clarity of “Jesus is Messiah, Son of God,” or the “God of truth,” which is the God that corresponds to reality by a historical document of promise-fulfillment. The God who is not in need of anything insular, like the emotions or tradition or a subject in a theological system, to be True.
How this is possible, or how can a person who was a man in this way be God or not be God, is not clarified, and this is because it’s not intended to be because it’s way too hard for us. No argument exists in the New Testament of an attempt to make it clear how this can be. But this much is established and clarified in a parabolic fashion as is all Jesus’ parables: “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.”
It clarifies through parabola when the alternative is one of two choices. Are “babes” little toddlers? Many think so. Or does it mean a new believer? There are intended and unintended consequences to theology no matter how you choose, but if you make this kind of question an example of a defining one over what is most important about theology then you have been defeated by that parabolic covering and missed Jesus main intention in letting you know most importantly not the age or maturity of the believer, but the identification of “these things” that are revealed to them (Mat 11:25, Luke 10:21). “These things” are not so that you will know if babies are or can be saved or only those that can know and understand. “These things” are the prophesied messianic miracles and visions of the foreordained future. The context proves this. All one needs to know is what kinds of declarative statements Jesus utters before and after this invitation to choose what is really on God’s heart here.
If you want to say Jesus is God and is a crucial Christian doctrine since you don’t have the slightest idea of how such a thing is possible you need to admit you’re not 100% certain about it either. What you should be 100% certain about is that Jesus of Nazareth is the judge of the world, the owner and power of Creation, not a creature and certainly not a limited creature, judge of the quick and the dead, and your only door to salvation because he is proven so by in his messianic credentials given by the prophets. That makes this evidence for the claim first in importance over any conclusions about him.
The Beginning and the End of Faith
“Jesus is God” or “Jesus is not God” are not the beginning but the end of a process of revelation, not starting them, not as far as we can go with the most assurance we can have, and not because you just want to believe them, but only because of messianic prophecy, which is prophetic conclusion in fulfillment supported be prophetic premise in future promises. To the extent to which you are honest about it from the start, not to a conclusion directly, even those I listed, will determine your fate. You can’t go around and say you love math by spouting off the answer you have memorized to 2343 X 3332/4.3 but have no idea how to multiply. But if you have figured it out how to do this multiplication in your head or can do it effortlessly on paper, there is a good chance you love math, and then the answer you supply is one that can be used to morally show your love. We love Christ not because we hold the right conclusions, but that we know and believe with complete devotion the only means in getting to them: a devotion first to studying the work God historically promised and performed, and use our conclusions only as reminders of what it must imply, not replacements for it. Have this devotion to Jesus Christ and you will get most of the hard questions right, and be excused for the times you don’t.
What Psalms 110 is Really About
Now, rabbinic thought, such as Rashi, but particularly in the Targum, thought that this was David applying the story of Abraham to himself. There is a lot in here that seems to parallel Abraham in Genesis 14, where Abraham sought God’s assistance in defeating the four kings.
- Psalms 110:1 is related to the making of David enemies his footstool (Gen 15:15).
- Psalms 110:2 refers to his success in this.
- Psalms 110:3 is related to Genesis 14:14, 24.
- Psalms 110:4 is related to Genesis 14:18-20.2
Particularly the reference to Melchizedek, I think that Abraham is what David had in mind, but he was not necessarily what God had in mind, as God had in mind a symbolic life for both Abraham and David in representing the Messiah.
Ps 110:1 A Psalm of David. The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
Ps 110:2 The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.
Ps 110:3 Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth.
Ps 110:4 The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.
Ps 110:5 The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath.
Ps 110:6 He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the places with the dead bodies; he shall wound the heads over many countries.
Ps 110:7 He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head.
- Psalms 110.1 speaks of two Lord’s, one who gives power to the other. This cannot be David nor can it be Abraham.
- Never in Genesis is Abraham referred to as a priest as Melchizedek. Neither was David.
- Psalms 110:5 clearly refers to someone other than David at God’s right hand. This Lord is called adonai,.ynda, who is still set to destroy his enemies.
- V. 3 fits the prophetic/poetic imagery for resurrection. Compare to Isa 26:19.
- The Psalm is a prophecy whether we apply it to David, to Abraham, or to a Divine Messiah or a natural Messiah.
This applies to Abraham, to David, but most perfectly to Messiah, for another time. It is a prophecy for another historical period, another place, another person. Long before we become entrenched in fighting about whether Jesus was God or man, it is the faith issue of the truth of messianic prophecy ruling our doctrine, without which there is no Jesus as God and no Jesus as a man that will be in any position of heavenly authority at all. Without it, it’s all for naught.
Now, I’m not giving an argument of why you should disassociate yourself from the belief that Jesus is God. Far, far from it. Look, if you think the idea of a man being God is hard, you should read the people who are sure, and I mean doubly sure, that Jesus is not God. Now that is hard to swallow. There are way too many obstacles for these people to overcome after all the evidence is harmonized to make landfall at “Jesus is just a man-made equal in authority to God.” If you want anything like theological peace, you may not find it in “Jesus is God,” but you darn sure won’t find it in “Jesus is not God.”
“Jesus is God” is my faith, but “Jesus is the Son of God, Messiah” is superior to it. That last one is not my only Christological doctrine, like with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have codified “Jesus is not God” as talismanically as the Orthodox do “Jesus is God.”
Conclusion
Do you want to spend time on exactly what God sent you into the world to do? Find Jesus of Nazareth in the Old Testament, establishing him as the supernatural savior of the world by that revelation and demonstration alone. “Jesus is God” is meant only for those that have already been converted by and has intensely and honestly studied the prophetic revelation, and who are interested in it as a first priority in defending and explaining Jesus Messiah from the prophets. It’s not something that is determinate of your final fate, and it’s not for pulling our little red wagons of anterior doctrinal agendas around that may happily exist and thrive as having a life of their own, supported and maintained only from unregenerate faculties, completely outside of that one transcendent artifact of historical promise and fulfillment.
Look, it’s not that the ontology of Jesus is not important. It is extremely important. But it’s not an issue by its formative power in the direction of faith, it’s an issue to be thought about, discussed and speculated on, preferably among themselves, by those how have already dealt with and accepted the main one: the ultimate gravity of the truth of Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah as demonstrated positively and reasonably through the words of the prophets. You want paradox to lead your faith, or do you want an article of faith which is something that is shown to be the same as the proof of its declaration?
In short, what Jesus I’m saying is to “get back to what its all about, and not to what you want it to be. I own the universe, I raise the dead, I give truth, I give life, and to you, nothing is more important than that, and what the prophets said should come” (Acts 26:22).
Please see these articles:
Amen Jesus, Amen, and his Prophetic Worship: Passing by Nehushtan
Daily Reflection: John 14:1-12: Having Jesus In Your Heart But Not In Your Head
Bride Chambers, New Cloth, and Jesus
