God has chosen three times to record in His own handwriting that which He wished man especially to notice. Once the finger of the mighty God traced the letters in the solid stone, a second time on the plaster of a king's palace wall, and a third time in the drifting sand. We hear of things written in heaven, but how solemn when God stoops to write on earth!
The Writing on Stone
In Deut. 9:10, God wrote the law on two tables of stone "written with the finger of God." God is holy; man is sinful, and has no righteousness of his own that will enable him to stand in the presence of a righteous God. If Israel of old wished for God's favor, they must walk before Him in a way to obtain it. God therefore gave Israel the law, being a standard of what He required from man, so that Israel could now say "It shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the Lord our God, as He hath commanded us." Deut. 6:25. Yes, "if." No one but the man Christ Jesus ever attained to that, or ever could.
God wrote the law in stone, a type of its unbending, enduring claims on man. For though it finds a man helpless to keep it, yet it abates not one jot of its claims. "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them." Gal. 3:10.
The Writing on Plaster
In Dan. 5:5, 24-28, again God writes, this time the sentence of judgment on a guilty king. On the plaster of the palace wall, over by the candlestick, where the light enabled all to see it, a Hand was seen writing: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting." No need to record that on stone! On plaster, emblem of weakness and speedy decay, that awful sentence would stand as long as needed. "That night was Belshazzar... slain.”
Babylon's mighty city has long been blotted off the face of the earth; the plaster wall, with God's handwriting on it, has long ago decayed, its dust become the sport of desert winds. But your condemnation, if still unsaved, stands recorded on the pages of God's own Word, which shall endure forever. "This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." John 3:19.
The Writing on the Ground
In John 8:3-11, we behold God writing the third time. In the One stooping to write on the ground we see "God manifest in flesh." The Jews had brought to Him a woman guilty of adultery. Moses said "that such should be stoned: but what sayest Thou?" they ask. The Lord from Sinai had given that command. Can He now speak contrary to His own command through Moses? He is silent; He stoops, and writes on the ground. Scoffers say it was to gain time to think. Away with such satanic insinuations, as though man, a thing of dust, could put his Creator into a dilemma! His silence! What a proof, even under the law, that "God is slow to anger," that "judgment is ever His strange work"! At last He answers the Jews. "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
If stone flinging is to begin, all around must be stoned. Again He writes on the ground. Writes what? Scripture does not say what He wrote, but records what He said.
Christ is seen as God delighting in mercy. Did He then wink at sin, and annul His own laws? No; He had come to take "the guilty culprit's place, and suffer in his stead." He had not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. The Jews had made Him the judge in this case. I love to think that in that capacity, while He had written the law in stone, He wrote possibly the sentence of death on the ground where the next gust of wind could blow it away! It was a sentence no man was able to execute, and the Lord, alone qualified to do so, would not. He was going to die for such as her, and thus the law would be carried out. As a man who writes on the shore may see the waves wash it all away, so what the Lord wrote was never recorded only the gracious words of forgiveness.
The waves of God's awful judgment soon rolled over Him, and wrung from Him the cry, "All Thy waves and Thy billows have gone over Me.”
Oh, what a Savior, in such wondrous pity and grace to love us so much as to die for us, in order that His precious blood might cleanse away our sins and fit us for His own presence throughout eternal ages!
Echoes of Grace