Engraved on the Palm of His Hand
Notes
Transcript
Sermon Tone Analysis
A
D
F
J
S
Emotion
A
C
T
Language
O
C
E
A
E
Social
Travis family and friends, brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus: We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of Hazel, a beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt, sister and friend. However, today we do not grieve as others who have no hope (), for Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. And because Jesus has given His life in death for Hazel, and was raised from the dead, we grieve today only because of the physical loss we feel because the Lord has called Hazel home. You see, today is not about saying good bye. No! Today we bid Hazel auf Wiedersehen, or, “until we see each other again”. Loved ones who die in the faith of Jesus, will be joined together again in the resurrection. And in that day, there will be no more sorrow, no more tears, no more sickness, no more breathing problems, no more death ever again! Hazel will live again, and will live with a new resurrected body for all eternity.
The text chosen for today from Isaiah is for our comfort, it is for lifting you up and giving you objective hope and truth from the Word of God so that our time together this morning can be filled with peace and comfort.
Judah was in dire straights at this point in History. After King Solomon, the nation of Israel was divided. Ten tribes split off from Judah and the northern portion of the nation, Israel, decided to do what was right in their own eyes. This had been a devastating mind set for the people of Israel. Their kings and rulers despised the Word of the Lord and went chasing after other gods to worship. They fell headlong into the one thing that would anger the Lord more than anything else: they played the role of a spiritual whore who listens not to the Husband who has made her His. She does what she wants when she wanted to, or in the words of scripture, “everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”
God had sent messenger after messenger to the northern tribes to warn them of the impending horror that would befall them because of their apostasy. But they would not listen. They even employed their own prophets who would scratch their itching ears, or tell them what they wanted to hear rather than what they needed to hear. So the Lord raised up the Assyrians under Tiglath Pileaser who all but exterminated the northern ten tribes of Israel.
So now, Isaiah has been sent by the Lord to warn Judah of their following in the ways of the northern tribes of Israel. Unfortunately, Judah had hardened its heart as well, and continued in the path that they wanted to take. It wouldn’t be long before the Lord would raise up Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon who would come to bring war upon Judah and carry off into exile a remnant of her people.
So our text today brings us to a time in Judah’s exile where the Lord is finished disciplining His beloved children. Judah would one day soon be going home. “Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted His people, and will have compassion on His afflicted” (v. 13).
However, Judah (or Zion) felt as if the Lord had abandoned them because of their current situation. Their land had been devastated, the temple destroyed, and a huge percentage of their family and friends had perished in the fight. They were taken from their own land by force, taken to a foreign country to become servants of a foreign government and king. They felt as if God had forsaken them.
Isn’t this how it is with us? Most of our trials and tribulations in this life are due to our own actions and behaviors. When we suffer at our own hand, yet not recognize that even these things are for our own good, we too can feel as if God has abandoned us, forgotten us, forsaken us, and down right kicked us to the curb.
But this is our lot in life, and the end of all these things is death. Hazel was no exception to this. Yes, Hazel was one of the sweetest women i know. And yet, she too suffered in body and as a result in mind and spirit as well. Sin gets the best of us every day. There is no way that we can ever stop sinning and doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord. God’s Law says don’t do this, and don’t do that. However, that Law of God, those 10 simple statements of how our lives are to look as a child of God, doesn’t actually do anything to help us live in those commandments. Instead, when the Law of God says, “Thou shall not covet”, instead of those words bringing us to a place where we naturally are content with our life, our job, our family, our everything; they instill in us every thought on how we might covet and even get away with it.
There is no way that we can ever live perfectly in this life. Hazel as well as everyone living on the face of this earth, has been born with a nasty little disease. Its called “original sin”. The rebellion that took place in the Garden of Eden, when Eve allowed that serpent Satan to fill her with lies about God and begin to desire to be like God himself, well, that rebellion, we are all born into. So we are born with a rebellious streak.
Have you ever noticed, that not one parent has ever had to teach their child to do bad things? Instead of being able to encourage and properly love any small child in their good behavior, they constantly have to teach them to do the right things, and to stop doing the things that are wrong. Our focus on parenting has always been to keep our children safe, and that means even safe from themselves. And so we discipline, not out of anger and spite, but out of love so that our children would grow up to be men and women of character and integrity.
Our lives, since then, are focused on all the wrong things. As we are born with this disease of Original Sin, every thought is held captive to thoughts like, “What’s in it for me? How can I serve myself? How can I make myself happy? Its all about me, myself and I.” And so we lead our lives self-absorbed and self-fulfilled. And that, my friends, is the foundation of every sin we commit, or the good things that we should do being omitted. Our lives become a disaster. Sickness and disease are our lot anymore. Lives devastated by the effects of sin in this world, we become broken, frustrated, and angry, our bodies succumb to sickness and disease, and then we die. We can get to a point that instead of running to God for help in time of need, we can begin to resent Him, hold onto misplaced blame and feel just like Judah in exile, “The Lord has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me” (v. 14).
Sad part about it, there is nothing we can do on our own about it. We cannot save ourselves from our sinful human condition. We are no better than Judah sitting in exile for 70 years. They felt they were cut off from their home, their heritage, and their life. They felt as if they had been cut off from the Lord.
Yet God sends them comfort and hope. He encourages His people to sing for joy because He has had mercy on them, He has sent comfort to them. The Lord their God will have compassion on His afflicted.
God comforts His people with words of promise, words of truth. “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands” (vv 15-16).
Our Father’s comforting words are not like most platitudes we receive from people when we suffer. His Word is always backed by action. God has never spoken a promise He has never kept.
Since the fall of mankind, Adam and Eve’s deception and rebellion, our Lord has offered hope and comfort. He promised our original parents that one of their offspring will be there Redeemer, someone who would save them from their fallen state. This Redeemer would crush the head of the serpent who would bruise His heal.
But this ultimate redemption from sin and death would not necessarily come in their lifetime. God had made a promise. It was several thousand years before God would fulfill that original promise made to Adam and Eve. Might I remind you, that our God is not slow in fulfilling His promises, as we might consider Him slow. Our Lord knows things that we are totally incapable of knowing or understanding. Scripture says that “...when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” (, ESV)
God knew before He ever uttered those words “Let there be...” in creation that Adam and Eve would sin. He knew and yet even knowing what their sin would bring on the rest of the world for all of history, He still decided to say those words. It is a love that is so foreign to all of us. To make something that would choose for itself destruction and death is not a project that you and I would undertake. But for God, His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts (). It is love that drove God to create. It is a love that is so sacrificial that it looks on people bound for destruction because they want to live doing what is right in their own eyes, and takes matters into His own hands.
The final verse of our text this morning is God doing just that. He is taking matters into His own hands. “Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands”. The cost of redemption is so high, not one of us could every pay off even one sin, let alone a life full of them. Hazel knew this. She understood that she could do nothing on her own to save herself. She was wise enough to know that her help came from outside of herself. She could not work off her debt. She could not pay the extremely steep price of the blood of an innocent perfect substitute.
So God sent His Son Jesus at just the right time. God Himself assumed our human flesh to live among us. He alone was born without this deadly disease of Original Sin, so He alone could be the “Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” (). Jesus lived the life that Hazel was not able to. His life was led in perfect obedience to the will of God our Father. He kept the Law of God perfectly in thought, word and deed. In His baptism, God placed on Him all our sin, all of Hazel’s sin, all of your sin, and all of mine. All the sin of the totality of humanity, past, present and future, clung to He who knew no sin. And in His Passion, His arrest on trumped up charges, the mock trial in the wee hours of the morning, His brutal torture and beatings at the hands of the Jewish religious leaders and Roman soldiers, His being mocked and condemnation to crucifixion, finally to be nailed to a wooden cross and lifted up in shame and derision to die the death of a common criminal, Jesus won the victory over sin, Satan and death. In His resurrection three days later, Jesus opened the kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Hazel was baptized into Christ on May 19, 1946. As water and Word were applied to her little head, she was baptized into the death of Jesus. The blood and water that flowed from His side when the Roman soldier thrust his spear into the side of Jesus, fills every baptismal font from that day forth until the end of time. Hazel was cleansed by His blood, she was buried with Christ and she was also raised with Him in His resurrection. The old was drown and a new creature daily emerged, forever changed and daily changing, being conformed into the image of Christ. She was adopted as God’s own daughter, forever loved and cherished by He who engraved her in the palm of His hand.
All who believe and are baptized have been engraved into the palm of God’s hand. The nails that pierced Jesus’ hands engraved our names into those palms. The love that bled and died and rose again is our beloved Lord. He alone did all the work for Hazel, so that all she needed to do was believe. Cool part is, she didn’t even do that on her own. In her baptism, she was given the Holy Spirit. It is His duty to bring us to faith, and to keep us in that faith till the day of our Lord’s coming again. He did that for her. He can and will do that for you as well.
And so now, through repentance and faith in Jesus, Hazel rests with her Lord until He comes again. We read in scripture how Jesus will return, riding the clouds in victory and with the shout of command and the trumpets of God, He will raise all flesh. At that time, Jesus will call forth Hazel’s body from its final resting place. Her body will be changed to be like Jesus’ resurrected body. Her soul will be reunited with her new body and she will physically live for all eternity in the bliss of the Master’s goodness.
Hazel and all who believe will experience this. All of us will receive a new resurrected body. One that will never again know sin, because in the day of His return, sin and death will be no more. Each of us can know perfect peace and eternal life. It matters not who you are, where you have come from, nor what kind of life you have lived. The cross of Jesus is more powerful than your sin. Jesus comes to you today in His Word and tells you just how much He loves you. So much so, that He was engraved in His palms with your name. His death can be your death. His life can be given to you as if it were your own. Do you know Jesus? Hazel does. Better yet, does Jesus intimately know you? Have you received Him and all His work in life, innocent suffering and death, for your redemption? If not and you would like to get to know Jesus and all He has done for you, please do not hesitate. Seek Him out while He may be found. He comes to you today to invite you to have your sins forgiven, and to become a new creation, just as Hazel was His new creation, engraved on the palms of His hands.
In the name of Jesus and for His eternal glory. Amen.