Into Your Hand

There is a single sentence near the beginning of this Psalm that the Lord Jesus picked up off the page of the Psalter and made the last sentence of His earthly life. "Into your hand I commit my spirit." Luke records that He cried it out at the ninth hour as He died. The Psalm written a thousand years before His birth had been waiting in His Bible for this moment. He had read it as a boy; He had sung it as a young man; He had carried it into Gethsemane and now He gave it back to His Father from the cross. Notice what He is doing. He is not bargaining; He is not negotiating an exit; He is handing Himself over. Spirit, body, mission, all of it, into His Father's hand. And in doing so He showed every dying child of God how to die — and every living one how to live.

Because His hands are now the hands the Father holds, our lives can be committed into them without fear. "My times are in your hand," David says a little later in the same Psalm. Our times — the long ones, the bitter ones, the ordinary ones — are not in the hand of the calendar or the doctor or the boss or the news. They are in the hand of a Father who already received the spirit of His Son out of the dark and gave it back in resurrection. The Psalm does not promise an easy passage; it speaks of grief and broken bones and forgotten friendships and the cup of the enemy's mockery. But every line is held inside a larger frame. The hand into which Christ committed His spirit is the hand into which He has carried ours. So when the day is hard, the prayer is simple. Take this day too. Into Your hand.