"Hands"

by Dan Cooper

 

Lately, my brother has been frequently watching “Muppets From Space” (I love that movie, by the way). In the movie, Rizzo is captured by a top-secret government research facility to be used as a lab rat. He is soon told that escaping from the room would be totally impossible because rats lack the necessary opposable thumbs to open door knobs.

What would we do without thumbs? Even worse, what would we do without hands? We use them so much every day. Imagine playing dodgeball without hands. It’d suck pretty badly… Take a moment and think of all of the things you use your hands for.

I personally love working with my hands. I love fixing and building things, although I’m not very good at it. If you look closely, you’d see that my hands are covered with random scars from the many times that I have attempted to use them but have failed miserably. The time I stabbed myself with a chisel, or the time Lucas and I burnt the hairs off of our hands for entertainment, or the time I had a chain take a chunk out of my finger are all instances of the attempts made to use my hands.

The hand is considered one of the most versatile parts of our bodies.  Hands can be used to either hurt or heal. The same hand that can be used to make a fist can also be used to help a fallen friend. Hands are the medium for many different sins that separate us from the love of God.

In the Bible we learn about a guy named Isaiah. One day, Isaiah was working in the temple of God, minding his own business, when God himself came down. He was so amazing that the train from His robe filled the whole temple. When Isaiah saw God, he instantly realized how unworthy he was to be standing in the Lord’s presence. Isaiah 6:5 states that he cried out, "Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."

Isaiah could have easily said the same about his hands. If we could see what God sees, we would quickly realize just how dirty and disgusting our hands are. None of our hands would pass God’s expectations for cleanliness. This dirty sinfulness spreads to our whole bodies and we all have a sinful nature that we’ve inherited from Adam when he stretched out his hands to eat from the forbidden tree. This inherited failure is inevitable and terminal. No matter how much we scrub at them, our hands will never be clean; they continue to get dirtier with time.

Let me tell you about someone I know. He was a guy that lived a long time ago. He had two hands just like the rest of us, but he wasn’t your average guy. His hands were designed for some special jobs. When he was old enough to learn the tricks of the trade from his step-dad, he used his hands to build tables and chairs. His step-dad was a carpenter, therefore allowing Him to become efficient in that trade, taking on the role of a carpenter Himself someday. When he was 30 he changed careers and continued to use his hands for the special purpose that God had made them for.

He started using His hands to heal people. He went all over the place using His hands whenever He wasn’t using His mouth to heal and teach people. His hands healed people who had incurable skin diseases, people who were blind, paralytics etc.

His hands looked like normal hands to the rest of the people around Him, but looked totally different to God. This man’s hands were totally clean. There wasn’t even a speck of sin’s dark stain on them. He lived thirty-three years and managed to keep them totally clean.

This man had a really good friend named Judas; however, Judas had very unclean hands. Powered by greed, Judas’ hands stole some of the money that he and his friends had raised. Judas’ hands held back little children who wanted to hold the hand of the clean man. Ultimately his hands also gripped a bag of thirty silver coins, guided Roman soldiers to where his friend was praying and finally tied a rope around his neck when the guilt was too much.

Because of the poisonous sin that covered Judas’ hands, and the same sin that is all over us, the clean man was beaten, whipped, humiliated and was forced to carry, with bloodied and tired hands, a cross up a long and painful road to a place called Golgotha. Once He had finished his journey his hands were spread apart and put on either end of the cross that he had carried. He felt the excruciating pain of nails being driven through His feet and hands. The man with clean hands was named Jesus.

Jesus wasn’t just your average guy who had some whacked out ideas. He was the true Son of God, which probably makes you wonder: “If He was God why didn’t he free Himself?” While hanging there, Jesus wasn’t focusing on the agonizing pain that had gripped His body, He was looking at the hands of the people around Him. He saw how disgusting they were. He looked into the future and saw how ugly and filthy your hands would become. In his infinite compassion, Jesus took your sin, laid it upon Himself and died on that cross for your sake. As He died on that cross your sin died with Him.

After fighting with death for three days, Jesus rose from the dead and conquered death itself. I’m not talking about physical death, but spiritual death. Our bodies are only temporary - our souls will never rot away. The death that Jesus saved us from is the sin-bred spiritual death and separation from God the Father. Now that Jesus is alive, He is sitting at the right hand of His Father and still has his hands stretched out. The difference is that His hands aren’t stretched out on a cross but they are stretched out towards you.

Jesus loves you more than you could ever imagine and all he wants is to have a loving relationship with you and for you to be free from the bondage of sin. All you have to do is let go of your pride and fall into Jesus’ nail-pierced hands and ask for His forgiveness. The invitation is free for anyone, regardless of how old, young, rich, poor, good or bad you are – all you have to do is say “yes”.