Theme: All Life is in God’s Hand
Text: Job 12:10 (ESV)
When calamity strikes, it’s hard to see clearly and keep one’s bearings. Last August 1st, at about five minutes after six in the evening, the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed. Those who survived told what it was like when the pavement under their vehicles buckled and gave way and parts of roadway were seen falling into the water behind them. One word to describe their feelings occurred over and again in their reports: “Terrified!”
Job felt like that. It seemed everything in his life collapsed in a single day. He had been, the Bible tells us, “the greatest of all the people of the east” (Job 1:3). “He possessed 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 female donkeys, and very many servants.”
But his life was shaken to the core, one part after another of his livelihood taken from him or destroyed. Not only his wealth-that could be built up again—but his servants, and even his own sons and daughters, all perished. You remember the account the Scripture gives us. Not even Job’s health remains. It seems all that does remain to Job are four people. On the one hand, his wife, who in a few words counsels him to make an end of it all: “Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9). On the other hand, three friends, who in many words put the blame squarely on Job. The reason he suffers, they figure, is that Job has not “fessed up where he has messed up.” The foundations of his life are cracked and it’s up to him to repair them. Job’s integrity and character are now assaulted as well.
In the midst of all this, Job’s faith remains. There is something that cannot be shaken, a point of reference, “the still point of the turning world,” and Job has no doubt just Who that is. It’s the living God. Come what may, Job will throw in his lot with the God who holds him. In our text, he makes that plain. Our theme is Job’s confession of faith made thousands of years ago, a confession of faith that keeps us today: ALL LIFE IS IN GOD’S HAND.
Job’s life is in God’s hand. He tells his friends that in rebuff of their vain philosophy. No, my life is not simply what I make of it. Things do not happen for good or for ill but that God makes it so or allows it so. My life is in God’s hand. Nothing can befall me but that the almighty and gracious God has first inspected it and then promised me as His own that He will orchestrate it all together in some tremendously meaningful pattern whose overall figure I cannot see at present. And He knows what He’s doing!
Hear Job’s complaint to those who would say otherwise, his would-be counselors, in his own words:
In the thought of one who is at ease there is contempt for misfortune; it is ready for those whose feet slip. The tents of robbers are at peace, and those who provoke God are secure, who bring their god in their hand. But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind. (Job 12:5-10)
Job holds to the strong doctrine of creation. That sustains him. The doctrine of creation runs throughout the book of Job, as indeed it does throughout the whole of Holy Scripture. Life does not come into being by mindless chance over eons of time. It is called forth by the intelligent design of the God who holds all of it in His hand. All of it testifies in its turn to the Creator. As the apostle Paul would later write to Christians in Rome, [God’s] “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20). So ask the beasts, the birds of the heavens, the bushes of the earth, the fish of the sea. What do they all say? ”God made us! Our life is in God’s hand!” Studied as Job studies it, creation has much to teach us!
With such a God as that, Job has a sure point of reference. A God who holds our life in His hand holds also all those things that come to meet us. Nothing is too big for Him.
Some doubt it. Some do not look to that point of reference and so construct for themselves other gods, other ways by which to measure life’s challenges and who has got it all together and all that. Measured by their yardstick, Job comes up short. Their yardstick says: “Pay the gods their due, and you will get on well. Fail to do that, and you suffer. If you suffer, you have failed your part of the deal. Mr. Job, Mr. Loser.”
Job had his doubters and he knew it. They were the idolaters who went a-whoring after other gods. For all his suffering, Job is not so spent that he can’t afford to dish out a bit of satire to those who richly deserve it. The idolaters literally carry their gods in their own hands! How ironic is that? Just look at them! They go about town carrying their portable idols of wood or stone in their own hand! They “bring their god in their hand” (Job 12:6b) in contrast to the God who is there, the living God, who holds all life in His hand. What kind of god is it who is in one’s own hand?
Nor is idolatry a thing of the past. Every false hope, every makeshift foundation to human life, is but an idol if it is made to be that on which one ultimately depends—one’s own wealth, wit, or wisdom-all are less than the One alone whom we should fear, love, and trust above all else.
“To have a god,” as Martin Luther puts it in the Large Catechism, “is nothing other than trusting and believing Him with the heart.” Our “god” is whatever it is from which we expect all good and in which we are to take refuge in all distress (Part I, The First Commandment, Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, p. 359). Is that God and that expectation true and well-founded or false and collapsible? That’s the question that unavoidably catches every one of us.
False gods there are aplenty. Even medical science can become a false god, an idol. If it is put to the service of that which is contrary to the will of the God who lives and cannot die, it works ruin not healing in God’s good creation. That creation is bound by the limits the Creator has put to it, especially expressed in the Second Table of the LawTechnology used to “terminate a pregnancy” is idolatrous. It is trusted to settle affairs in accord with human calculation of what is best, instead of trusting the good and gracious God and His will. Abortion kills. It violates God’s command: “You shall not murder!” Medical science used to do away with the elderly and infirm transgresses that same limit. Capitalizing on the harvest of embryonic stem cells for whatever end does the same.
All of these things run counter to God’s fifth Commandment. A child can tell us what that means. It means we are to fear and love God so that we do not hurt our neighbor in any way but help him in all his physical needs. A child of seven knows God wants us to be helpers not hurters. Every time we hurt another, we violate that fifth Commandment. But we must realize that there are in reality no broken commandments. Only broken lives. Who ever said you can take the life of a little one within the womb of its mother without damaging the mother at the same time? That secret and hidden place, that womb, intended by God to be the safe haven in which life is protected and nourished, in the hand of the abortionist becomes a tomb, a place of death. That act of violence has both moral and metaphysical consequence-it changes who the mother is called to be.
When we hurt others, we ourselves are diminished, less than humane, less than the creatures God intended us to be as created in His own image. With regard to the fifth Commandment, too, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
The cutting remark, the looking the other way, the failure to act to help another, all grieve the Holy Spirit of God. How often have we done this? So many times we have tried to take life out of God’s hand.
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). The Muslim knows that abortion offends God. But that is all he knows. How hopeless we would be if we did not have more.
But, thanks be to God, there is more! Dear ones, our God will not suffer His lost creation to go unredeemed. He has taken up into His hand also our acts of violence which would take life out of His hand.
Do you see that hand? ”The hand of God” is not just a figure of speech. It is not merely a metaphor that stands for the acts of God. That hand belongs to the One who became one of us! God took our flesh upon Himself in the person of His own dear Son, conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. Hands and feet, mind and will, heart and lungs, to do the will of His Father, and to suffer our sins, our acts of violence and indifference to be laid upon Himself.
The hand of God is a nail-pierced hand, a hand that was stretched out upon the rough wood of the Cross to pay sin’s penalty. The hand of God became a cold and lifeless hand, the body of the dear Son of God laid to rest in the tomb, put to death for our transgressions. The hand of God, our God and Savior, is the hand of Him who was raised for our justification. It is a hand that is now alive forevermore, a hand that bears witness to God the Father for us. It is a hand that pleads intercession for us, held out to the Father as evidence that all our sin has been atoned by Him and must needs be forgiven for His sake.
It is our Lord Jesus who bears this hand. He is the One who has loved us with such love that will go through death and hell to save us. He is the One who declares Calvary’s marks of His love for us, that will tell for all eternity just how much we mean to Him: “Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands” (Isaiah 49:16a).
That is why we sing the Ascension hymn:
Crown Him the Lord of love.
Behold His hands and side,
Rich wounds, yet visible above,
In beauty glorified.
(“Crown Him with Many Crowns,” Lutheran Service Book, No. 25)
Our life, our redeemed life, destined to be glorified with our God for all eternity, is in this Hand! This is a strong and tender hand, infinitely more tender, stronger than all others. This is the hand of Him who says to His own, who listen and who believe in Him: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:27-28).
As long as we believe that, we are safe. We belong to Him. Whatever troubles us so and vexes us, we place into that strong and tender hand. Whatever it is that truly gladdens our own heart, comes by way of blessing from that same hand.
All life is in that hand, the hand one bright and shining Day it will be our deepest joy before which to kneel, and in holy thanksgiving with all the saints, to take into our own hands, and kiss. Amen.
Rev. Thomas V. Aadland is former president of the American Association of Lutheran Churches and former secretary of the Lutherans For Life’s national board of directors.