The Right Hand · The Symbolism of Scripture
The Right Hand
The right hand is the place of power and favour — and Psalm 110:1 is the Old Testament verse the New Testament returns to more than any other. Twenty-one places say the same thing about where Jesus is now. One of them says He is standing.
What It Stands For
the strong side, and the favoured side
The Hebrew yamin (H3225) is defined in the lexicon as the right hand or side as the stronger — the symbol is built on a plain fact about most human bodies. From there it does two different jobs, and keeping them apart is most of the work of reading these passages.
Your right hand, O LORD, is majestic in power; Your right hand, O LORD, has shattered the enemy.Sense one: God's own right hand, doing something. No one is sitting anywhere.
Thy right hand - Thy omnipotence, manifested in a most extraordinary way.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Wesleyan
Exodus 15:6
The second sense is positional, and it is older than Israel’s songs: to be ata man’s right hand is to be the one he honours and trusts. Genesis has it before any temple or throne exists: Jacob crosses his arms deliberately, and Joseph tries to correct him, because everybody in the room already knows what the right hand means.
But Israel stretched out his right hand and put it on the head of Ephraim, the younger; and crossing his hands, he put his left on Manasseh’s head, although Manasseh was the firstborn.'Guiding his hands wittingly': the crossing is not a mistake, and the text says so.
One Verse, Twenty-One Places
the line the first Christians could not stop quoting
The LORD said to my Lord: “Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.”Two different words for 'Lord' in the Hebrew, and the whole argument of Matthew 22 turns on which is which.
Quoted outright
The words of Psalm 110:1 put on the page as a quotation: three of the five by Jesus Himself, about Himself.
- Matthew 22:44 — Jesus, in the temple
- Mark 12:36 — Jesus, the same exchange
- Luke 20:42 — Jesus, the same exchange
- Acts 2:34 — Peter, at Pentecost
- Hebrews 1:13 — of the Son, against the angels
Leaned on
Not quoted, but unmistakably using it: the seat, the right hand, the enemies under the feet.
- Matthew 26:64 — Jesus, under oath at His trial
- Mark 14:62 — the same answer
- Mark 16:19 — after He was received up
- Luke 22:69 — before the council
- Acts 2:33 — exalted by the right hand of God
- Acts 5:31 — a Prince and a Saviour
- Acts 7:56 — Stephen: and standing
- Romans 8:34 — who also maketh intercession
- 1 Corinthians 15:25 — till He hath put all enemies under His feet
- Ephesians 1:20 — set Him at His own right hand
- Colossians 3:1 — seek those things which are above
- Hebrews 1:3 — sat down on the right hand of the Majesty
- Hebrews 8:1 — we have such an high priest
- Hebrews 10:12 — sat down: for ever
- Hebrews 12:2 — and is set down at the right hand
- 1 Peter 3:22 — angels and authorities made subject
The Lord said unto my Lord - In the Hebrew, Spake Jehovah to my Lord. The word יהוה Yahweh is the incommunicable name of God. It is never given to a created being.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments, 1847Presbyterian
Psalm 110:1
Sit thou at my right hand - This implies the possession of the utmost confidence, power, and preeminence.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Wesleyan
Psalm 110:1
Barnes has put his finger on why the verse was useful to the first Christians. The first “LORD” is the divine name; the second is a title of authority, and David, writing it, calls that second person my Lord. Jesus put exactly that question to the scribes and got no answer. C. S. Lewis saw what the question was really doing:
When He asked how Christ could be both David's son and David's lord, He clearly identified Christ, and therefore Himself, with the 'my Lord' of Psalm 110
C. S. Lewis· Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 11, 1958Anglican: quoted briefly under fair citation
Psalm 110:1
Tertullian, in the third century, is worth adding for the detail that keeps the picture straight: “"He sitteth at the Father's right hand " -not the Father at His own.” The right hand belongs to the Father; the seat is the Son’s.
Why Sitting Down Is the Point
Hebrews 10:11-12, and a contrast of posture
Day after day every priest stands to minister and to offer again and again the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this Priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right hand of God.The writer's whole case in two verbs: every priest STANDETH daily; this man SAT DOWN.
The tabernacle was furnished in detail (ark, table, lampstand, altars, laver) and among the furniture there is no chair. A priest on duty was a man on his feet, because the work was never done. Hebrews turns that into an argument, and John Chrysostom states the logic in one line:
To stand therefore is a sign of ministering; accordingly to sit, is a sign of being ministered unto.
John Chrysostom· Homily 18 on Hebrews, 407Greek, fourth century
Hebrews 10:11-12
In the former case a multitude of priests, a multitude of victims, and no benefit, whereas in this case priest and victim are one and the same, he achieved abolition of sins and needs no further service
Theodoret of Cyrus· Interpretation of Hebrews 10, 458Antiochene
Hebrews 10:12-13
So the seat is not a picture of rest after effort. It is a verdict on the offering: a sacrifice that had to be repeated left its priest standing, and this one did not.
Raise your eyes to the Judge, see who it is that is seated, with whom he is seated, and where. Christ is sitting at the right hand of the Father.
Ambrose of Milan· Exposition of the Christian Faith 2.12, 397Latin, fourth century
Psalm 110:1
The One Time He Is Standing
Acts 7:55-56
But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked intently into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”Stephen says it twice, and the word is 'standing' both times.
It is a small thing and it is not an accident: Luke has already written “sat down” or “at the right hand” several times in his two books. The commentators noticed. JFB simply ask the question:
and Jesus standing on the right hand of God--Why "standing," and not sitting, the posture in which the glorified Saviour is elsewhere represented?
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, 1871Reformed
Acts 7:55
Gregory the Great preached on it in the sixth century, and his answer is the one most later writers have followed: not because it is proved, but because it reads the two postures the way the rest of Scripture uses them:
But you know, brothers, that sitting belongs to one who judges, while standing belongs to one who fights or helps. Therefore, because our Redeemer, having been taken up into heaven, both now judges all things and at the end comes as judge of all, Mark describes him as sitting after his assumption, because after the glory of his Ascension he will be seen as judge at the end. But Stephen, placed in the labor of struggle, saw him standing whom he had as helper, because in order that Stephen might overcome on earth the unbelief of his persecutors, his grace fought for him from heaven.
Gregory the Great· Forty Gospel Homilies, Homily 29, 591Latin, sixth century
Acts 7:55
How much weight the standing will carrythe honest limit, stated
Luke does not explain the posture. He reports what Stephen saw and moves on, and no New Testament writer builds anything on it. So the readings offered for it (that the Son stands as a witness for His witness, that He stands as a judge about to act, that He stands to receive him) are readings, and old ones, and the page names them as readings.
What is not a reading is the observation itself. Everywhere else in the New Testament the posture is seated; here, twice in two verses, it is not. That much is on the page of Scripture and any reader can check it against the twenty-one addresses above.
What Scripture says outright
- Psalm 110:1
“Sit at My right hand”: the invitation itself, spoken by the LORD to David’s Lord.
- Hebrews 10:11-12
Standing and sitting set against each other on purpose, and the reason given: one sacrifice for sins for ever.
- Matthew 26:64
Jesus applies the verse to Himself, under oath, in front of the men who will condemn Him for it.
What readers have heard in it
Readings, named as such.
- Acts 7:56
That Jesus stands to welcome, to bear witness, or to judge. Gregory the Great’s reading is quoted above; Luke says only what Stephen saw.
- Genesis 48:14
That the crossed hands are themselves a picture of the cross. A devotional reading of long standing; Genesis gives the reason as Jacob’s choice of the younger son.
- Hebrews 10:12
That the seat means Christ is now inactive. Romans 8:34 has Him interceding from exactly the same place.
The Voices
with the work named
On this symbol the most useful commentary is the oldest. Chrysostom gives the argument of Hebrews 10 in a single sentence about posture. Theodoret states what makes the one offering different: priest and victim are the same person. Ambrose tells his reader to look and see who is seated, with whom, and where; Tertullian keeps the grammar straight against a confusion that was live in his own century. Gregory the Great supplies the sixth-century answer on Stephen, and Jamieson, Fausset & Brown ask the question again in the nineteenth without pretending it is settled. Barnes does the Hebrew work on the two words for “Lord”, and C. S. Lewis says what Jesus was doing by asking about them.
Where to Go Next
Where the seat is the whole scene
Where the priesthood is the argument
Where the picture goes on
Its neighbours in the index
The Symbolism of Scripture gathers every picture the Bible thinks in. This one sits with: