Mitra on Faith: Handing over life into His hands
The Bible frequently uses anthropomorphic images to describe God and His activities, while at the same time insisting on the transcendent spiritual nature of God.
One such passage in the Old Testament is found in Psalm 139, verse 10: “Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”
Hands have their story to tell.
They have always fascinated me.
Often I sense the heartthrob of people while shaking hands.
Salesmen who study the matter of approaching people effectively say the person who offers you his hand with his own palm parallel to his body, meets you as an equal, as a friend, a touch to which many respond.
Hands have played a large part in the writing of Scripture because hands are simply thoughts in action.
Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son.
Isaac, in his blindness, distinguished his sons by feeling their hands.
A man with withered hands came to Christ and was cured.
The Son of Man is pictured as seated “on the right hand of power.”
After the resurrection, Jesus showed his hands to the disciples and they were glad.
The very crux of the gospel is that God with His right hand offers sinners grace, forgiveness and reconciliation.
It means we need not groan and struggle and fall beneath the weight of sin.
This is another way of saying we can surrender all to Christ and begin life now as a new creature in Him.
A basic truth of the gospel is that God the Father heals the wounds left in the lives of people by sin.
God wants every person to accept the offer of His right hand — the friendly hand.
But, when we refuse that, with His left hand He carries out the work of judgment.
It was Robert Louis Stevenson who put his finger on a basic moral truth when he said, “Sooner or later, we all sit down to the banquet of consequences.”
The ancient Scripture has it that we reap what we sow.
It is true in the agricultural realm, but also in the moral realm.
If we sow immorality, we will reap immorality.
If purity, we will reap a harvest of purity.
Here is one of God’s immutable laws and it cannot be changed.
If we refuse the offer of God’s right hand leading to grace, forgiveness and reconciliation, we automatically take hold of God’s left hand with its consequence of penalty.
Whether God is a loving Father or an austere Judge is entirely up to us.
There are the two sides to His character and the side we see and meet is determined by which hand of His we choose.
It is easy to see the hands of God in history as they shaped nations for the first coming of Christ.
His hands influenced the Greek, the Roman and the Jew.
The Greek contributed the spirit of inquiry and a universal language which immeasurably helped the early evangelists of Jesus.
The Roman brought all the world under the Roman insignia and thus the world were at peace when the first Christian preachers set out to tell the glad news over military roads built by the Romans.
The Jew contributed an expectancy of a coming One, belief in monotheism, religious literature, faith and prayer.
It is not difficult to see the sovereign hands of God as they prepared the way and made crooked paths straight for the coming of the Son of Man.
The sovereign hands of God gave new meaning to that little sentence in the New Testament: “In the fullness of time God sent forth his Son into the world.”
It is only in God’s hands that we find guidance, security and peace.
Put your hand into the hand of God in 2013.
That shall be to us better than a light and safer than a known way.
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