Ps. 74.11 (resurrect yourself)

Why / do you draw back / your hand / even your right hand?
Draw it / from the midst / of the earth. 

There is an interesting geography-of-the-hand in these lines. The first line seems to imply a type of ‘drawing back’ into heaven of the power of God’s “right hand”. The second line, however, implores God to “draw it from the midst of the earth”, as if it had been buried. This dynamic embodies what we have already observed in the psalm at large—the sense that God willingly withdraws his hand (into heaven) and yet, at the same time, that he has been subjected to shame and humiliation by his foes (in the earth). The first line emphasizes the perfectly free and sovereign mastery of God over his acts (he is not forced to withdraw his hand but does it of himself). The second line focuses on the fact that God has been subjected to humiliation; the ‘hand’ is not only in heaven, but it, with the Temple, has been “defiled to the ground” (vs. 7). Furthermore, the second line is very instructive in its wording of “draw it forth”. This language has been deployed in many other psalms but always in reference to a psalmist who is either overcome with sickness or enemies. It is a ‘resurrection plea’—that God bring forth the psalmist from the Pit and Sheol. Here, that image is now applied to God’s hand, as if his own hand was now in Sheol subjected to the powers and forces of death, shame and humiliation. The psalmist, in using this imagery, affirms the very clear reality that, in spite of the hand being ‘withdrawn into heaven’ it is also, clearly, a hand that has been shamed and humiliated to the grave. God’s hand, itself, now needs to be “drawn forth” in resurrection power.  This is a rather profound point, because in nearly every other psalm when the psalmist prays for God’s delivering power he asks that it be sent from heaven, the abode of God’s presence and authority. Here, by contrast, that power is to come up from “the midst of the earth”. What could this mean? What would God ‘resurrecting himself’ look like? One thing we could say is something deeply moving in the context of this psalm. We have seen how the psalmist has been introduced into the impossible place of wondering whether the God of the covenant is the same as the God in the covenant. We asked previously, did God reserve some of himself when he covenanted with Israel such that he could take back his presence?  In this verse, we begin to see that the answer is no—that the Temple’s destruction (the concrete covenant) was not simply God’s ‘withdrawal’, but was, in fact, the ‘burying of his own hand in the earth’. That said, God can, rather astonishingly, ‘resurrect himself’. God can ‘draw forth’ his own (buried) hand. In a sense, within every shameful act perpetrated against God is a more primal power of resurrection. And, more importantly perhaps, this ‘more primal power’ is the power of the covenant God—in other words, when the covenant God acts by this primal power of his, it simultaneously resurrects his own glory and honor and those with whom he has covenanted. This is the important part—that there is no distinction between the God of the covenant and the God in the covenant. By identifying his own hand with the fall of Temple then its resurrection will, likewise, entail the ‘resurrection of the covenant’. If God is going to go down with the covenant he will come up with it as well.