Incomparable: 7 Days With Jesusናሙና

Day 6: Into His Hands; The Word of Confidence, Luke 23:46

Return with me to Gethsemane—less than twenty-four hours before Jesus’ final moments on the cross.

Jesus is praying. His disciples sleep. Beads of blood form on His brow even as the footsteps of Judas draw closer, surrounded by a detachment of temple police. With a determined sigh Jesus rouses His drowsy disciples: “Are you still sleeping and resting? See, the time is near. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners” (Matt. 26:45).

And, oh, what the hands of those sinners will do to Him. Flail and torture Him. Craft crude symbols of royalty and use them for mockery. Drive nails through His bare flesh.

Stage His baseless, public execution.

And though Jesus could easily summon “more than twelve legions of angels” (Matt. 26:53) to disarm His opponents, He voluntarily submits Himself to those people.

To those plans.
To those hands.

No doubt you, too, have suffered losses and injustices at the hands of others. We all have. Those people and their perverse plans have caused us significant pain. And our reflexive response is to focus our anger and resentment on those who have wounded us, to build a case for how they’ve ruined the trajectories of our lives, bringing harm and misery to us, stealing opportunities that could’ve been ours if not for what they did to us. Out of such selfish motives and actions.

But Jesus knew, and we can know, that our lives belong to no one but God. Now and forever, they rest in the Father’s safe, secure, and protective hands.

And so Jesus in His final moments, after crying “My God, my God” with such agonizing passion, shifted His heavenward focus once more. No longer appealing to “God,” as if from a distance, He now addressed His “Father,” whose smile and presence were once again palpably real to Him:

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

The raw weather conditions that since noon had shrouded the cross in darkness continued unabated. The agony of the cross—the scorching pain from lacerated sinews in His wrists and feet, the strain on his lungs from trying to breathe while hanging there—was no less acute, no more bearable. But with His remaining breaths reduced now to single digits, Jesus knew His ordeal was coming to an end.

“The time is near,” He’d said to His disciples in Gethsemane when Judas approached Him in the garden with treachery in his heart and his greeting.

Now on Golgotha’s hill, the time was finally, mercifully here. The time for those same hands of God that had wounded His Son on the cross to widen into a welcoming embrace.

Those hands—they held Him.
God’s hands—they hold us.

Now flash back with me again to a brighter moment on the kingdom calendar, to a sunny day before Jesus felt the whip and the thorns—a beautiful red-letter page in our Bibles that tells of a good Shepherd who has come to give us abundant life.

Jesus is in Jerusalem, walking freely in the temple not far from the place where His cross will eventually be erected. Members of the Jewish leadership class approach and ask Him sarcastically if He’s the Messiah: “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

Jesus doesn’t take the bait. “I did tell you,” He replies, referencing “the works that I do in my Father’s name.” Then He added, “You don’t believe because you are not of my sheep” (John 10:26). But those who do believe, those who are His sheep (as we are) can rest in the following promise: “My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand” (vv. 27–28).

Out of Jesus' hand. The Son’s hand.
We are eternally safe in His hands. He is forever in the Father’s hands:

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

And because the Son is with the Father, we are safe in the Father’s hands as well. As Jesus went on to say during that John 10 day, “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all. No one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand” (v. 29).

Think about it: Our lives are in the hands of the Son, which means they are in the hands of the Father. The hands into which Jesus committed Himself after others had done their worst to Him.

Lift your eyes, as He lifted His weary eyes, above the people and circumstances that have caused such real and lasting pain. And commit yourself by faith into your Father’s hands, where you are assured of always being received with love and handled with care.

Your Father’s hands, which hold you and will never let you go.

Father, thank You that my life is not in the hands of fate or chance, of circumstances or difficult people, but in Your loving and capable hands. There is no safer place I could be. Thank You for being utterly trustworthy, fully powerful, and eternally faithful. Make me a testimony of Your grace and glory.
AMEN.