Reading: 1 Peter 5:6–11
The hand of God created the heavens and the earth, cares for and controls life, displays God’s power, provides for every living thing, executes justice, and brings about victory for His people. But being under the mighty hand of God does not sound like a position in which we would want to be. Under God’s hand, we feel the weight of His justice, and it is much to bear.
Yet, the Father is disciplining His sons for everlasting maturity, purifying His people for eternal glory. Under God’s hand, He lovingly corrects you, so that you may learn to be sober-minded, watchful, resisting the roaring lion firm in your faith. He would teach you to cast “all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (v. 7). The final goal of suffering under God’s hand is “so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (v. 6). This He will do in the eternal glory His Son won for you on the tree when God’s hands were pierced.
The hand you are under is the same hand that upholds you even now and bears you heavenward. And it is this hand that will restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you in His dominion forever and ever.
Prayer
Almighty God, You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing. Grant that we, whom You have made alive in Baptism, may rejoice in being humbled under Your hand, that our desire to live according to Your ways may be fully satisfied in Your eternal glory; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Hymn
Your hand, O Lord, in days of old
Was strong to heal and save;
It triumphed over ills and death,
O’er darkness and the grave.
To You they came, the blind, the mute,
The palsied and the lame,
The lepers in their misery,
The sick with fevered frame. (LSB 846:1)
Silas Hasselbrook (Sem II, CTSFW)