IN GOD'S HANDS

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them. All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.

As it is with the good, so with the sinful; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them. This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead.

I have seen something else under the sun:

The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come.

 No one knows what is coming—who can tell someone else what will happen after them?

Ecclesiastes 9:1-3, 11-12a , 10:14b

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

There is an inevitable truth that everyone in life will face, no matter how long they try to suppress or deny it.

Everyone’s life is going to end.

That’s not exactly good news for people, especially the ones who wish to never leave the world they live in, a world they treasure and love for all that it offers them. Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21) and so when the world is a person’s treasure, you can see where the prospect of death leaves them heart-broken. Perhaps you are one of those people as you read this today.

With this, it’s little wonder who Solomon makes the following statement in our scripture passage today found in Ecclesiastes, Chapter 9:

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. (v 3a)

That destiny of course is death and the view of it being evil is only from the world’s view. For death need not be something seen as evil but something one actually might look forward to when it comes. More on that later for there is one other very key point here when it comes to this passage, one we would do well to remember, one we had better think about as we consider this matter of death and life.

The point is that we are all in God’s hands and all (the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not), share a common destiny which is death. No one knows when that time will come but rest assured it will come in the time that God appoints it. He ordained our coming into the world at His time and He will take us from the world at His time.

Here’s what makes things really tricky for someone who is of the world and loves it so very much.

The world is evil and sinful because it is inhabited by people who are evil and sinful. No one has lived and not sinned. Solomon says this about people in our passage:

The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live. (v 3b)

The big problem with this is that God hates sin and, remember, we are all in His hands. Not exactly a good place to be, is it?

This is why we need Jesus, the only One who can save wretched sinners like us from the wrath and judgment we deserve. Before any of us were born, He willfully allowed Himself to be crucified, a living sacrifice that God, His Father, commissioned to pay the price for the sins of humanity, all the sin. Solomon mentioned people who made sacrifices. That was the way to atone for sin before Jesus. People would bring unblemished animals and sacrifice them on the altar, the shed blood atoning for their sins before God. In Jesus, the perfect unblemished Lamb of God, His blood, shed on Calvary’s cross, was the last sacrifice required and after Christ’s death and resurrection, anyone who believed in Him would find their sins covered and receive the promise of eternal life.

In other words, death had lost its sting for those who placed their trust in Jesus as Savior.

Friends, this is at the heart of the Gospel which when translated simply means good news. The God who holds us in His hands does not wish for us to perish but rather live with Him and His Son, Jesus, forever. All that’s required is for us to confess our sins, believe that Jesus died for us to pay the price for our sinfulness, and then ask Jesus to enter our hearts and minds and souls to lead and guide us to live in His ways and in accordance with His will, which is incidentally the same will as God, His Father.

Yes, we are all in God’s hands but we only need be afraid of dying if we don’t have Jesus.

Do you have Him in your life today?

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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