The Finger of Yahuah

The Finger at Sinai Has a Name

The Old Testament never leaves the owner of the finger unnamed. Moses says it in a single sentence: “Yahuah delivered unto me two tables of stone written with the finger of Elohim” (Deuteronomy 9:10). Yahuah and the finger stand in the same verse, and the finger is His. English readers miss the connection because the KJV hides the Name behind “the LORD,” but the Hebrew reads Yahuah, and the finger is etsba (H676) of Elohim.

The surrounding record says the same thing in Yahuah’s own voice. “I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written” (Exodus 24:12). For the second set: “I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first” (Exodus 34:1; Deuteronomy 10:2), and “he wrote on the tables… and Yahuah gave them unto me” (Deuteronomy 10:4). The writing was “the writing of God, graven upon the tables” (Exodus 32:16), done “with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18). The one who says “I have written” is the one whose finger did the writing.

The phrase first appears in Egypt, and there too the Name sits in the same verse. The magicians told Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God: and Pharaoh’s heart was hardened… as Yahuah had said” (Exodus 8:19). David opens and closes Psalm 8 with “O Yahuah our Lord” (8:1, 9) and in between calls the heavens “the work of thy fingers” (8:3). In every Old Testament occurrence the finger belongs to Yahuah.

The Same Finger in the Gospels

Matthew and Luke record one saying about one deliverance. Matthew has Yahushua casting out devils “by the Spirit of God” (Matthew 12:28); Luke has Him doing it “with the finger of God” (Luke 11:20). Two witnesses describe one act and define one term by the other: the Spirit of God is the finger of God. The Greek pneuma (G4151) is explained by daktylos (G1147).

Matthew names whose Spirit it is ten verses earlier. He quotes Isaiah 42:1 over Yahushua: “Behold my servant… I will put my spirit upon him” (Matthew 12:18). In Isaiah the speaker declares, “I am Yahuah: that is my name” (Isaiah 42:8). The Spirit that casts out demons in Matthew 12:28 is the Spirit Yahuah called “my spirit” in Matthew 12:18.

Luke supplies the second witness, so the matter is established at the mouth of two (Deuteronomy 19:15). At Nazareth Yahushua opened the scroll of Isaiah and read, “The Spirit of Adonai Yahuah is upon me” (Isaiah 61:1; Luke 4:18), then declared, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:21). The Spirit resting on Him is named by its owner, Yahuah, and the same Gospel writer later calls that Spirit “the finger of God” (Luke 11:20).

The chain closes from both ends: the Spirit of Yahuah is the Spirit of God, the Spirit of God is the finger of God, and the finger of God is the finger with which Yahuah wrote at Sinai.

What This Does to the Trinity

Yahuah is the Father: “Thou, O Yahuah, art our father, our redeemer” (Isaiah 63:16); “have we not all one father?” (Malachi 2:10). Paul fixes the meaning of the word itself: “to us there is but one God, the Father” (1 Corinthians 8:6). The finger is therefore the Father’s finger, and Luke places the Father giving the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13) only seven verses before naming that Spirit His finger.

A finger is part of the one whose hand it is. It has no name, will, or throne of its own, and a man who writes with his finger has not brought a second person into the room. Paul states the principle without metaphor: as “the spirit of man which is in him” knows the things of a man, so “the Spirit of God” knows the things of God (1 Corinthians 2:11). No one counts a man’s spirit as a second person. The question that ends the matter is simple: is the Father’s finger a different person from the Father? If not, the third person is gone; if so, a finger must be given personhood that no passage gives it.

The Same Finger, the Same Law

This finger has one recurring work: writing the Law. At Sinai it wrote on stone. Through Jeremiah, Yahuah promised to write the same Law within: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33; Hebrews 8:10; 10:16). Ezekiel names the means: “I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:27). Paul then calls believers a letter “written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3).

The writer never changes and the text never changes; only the surface does. The Spirit given after deliverance through the Messiah does not abolish the Law. It is the same finger returning to write the same commandments on the heart, so the believer walks in them. A Spirit that leads away from the commandments is not the finger that wrote them.

Closing

One God, the Father, wrote with His own finger at Sinai, cast out demons by that finger through His Son, and writes the Law by that same finger on the hearts of His people. Revelation shows where the writing ends: the saints are those who “keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Yahushua” (Revelation 14:12), and in the city to come “his name shall be in their foreheads” (Revelation 22:4), one Name, written by one hand.