In Good Hands

“Father, Into your hands I commit my spirit”-Luke 23:46

For six hours Jesus had been hanging on the Cross, and now we get a last look at His suffering face. His whole body is drooping and shivering with the last chill. His breath is growing feebler and feebler – until He gives one long, deep, last sigh – “Father into your hands I commit my spirit.”

Jesus was always submitting Himself to God, and when He died, He died just as He had lived. We too are told to “Commit our way unto the Lord; trust also in Him and He shall bring it to pass.” The Christian may (like Stephen in Acts 7) cry with his last breath, “Lord Jesus receive my spirit.”

During the last year of the Civil War, a man paid a visit to the battlefield of Chickamauga, where on the 20th of September, 1863, the Union army was almost destroyed. The battlefield was not then, as now, a beautiful place with stately monuments rising among the trees. It still bore the scars of battle. Over one of the newly made graves, the visitor saw a man on his knees planting flowers. The visitor said to the man, “Is it a son who is buried there?” And the man said “No it’s not a son” – and he went on to explain why he was there to decorate the grave.

He said that he had been drafted into the Confederate army, but just before he was ready to say “good-bye” to his wife and family and report to the training camp, a young man came to see him and said, “You have a wife and family, and when you are gone, you’ll be unable to support them, whereas I am unmarried and have no one depending on me. Let me go in your place.” The offer was accepted and the young man went off in his place to the training camp. At the Battle of Chickamauga he was mortally wounded. The news of his death had drifted back to the southern home of the man whose place he had taken. And as soon as he had saved enough money, he made the journey to Chickamauga, and there he found the grave of his friend with its crude marker.

 

The visitor was deeply touched by the narrative, and then went on his way over the grim Battlefield. But on the way back, he passed this same grave again. It was now well covered with flowers and on a rough board, at the head of the grave, were carved these four words, “He died for me.”

 

It is these four words that express the great truth centered in the death of Jesus Christ on Calvary.  He died for you.  Scripture says "...all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God."  Then we to can commit our spirit into His hands, and what good hands they are.