“All through the long and trying illness had he been cared for and nursed by all in that humble home—a soldier brother even spending his furlough for the purpose of attending to the poor invalid, who was suffering from the dire disease of cancer, and sent home from a London hospital as incurable. Yet there was one hand, tender and true—a mother’s—which beyond all others, soothed the sufferer, and attended best to his terrible wounds.
But there was the Hand of One which surpassed even that of the fond mother—as you shall hear, my reader.
It was not long before the end, the sentence above quoted was feebly whispered, with the following addition.
“No hand like yours, Mother, no hand like yours”—a pause— “Barring the Hand of Jesus!”
“Ah! yes, God in His loving grace had reached the soul of the dying man. Not many weeks before a sister (an invalid for many years) had passed away rejoicing in the sense of sins forgiven, and longing to be with the Lord Jesus; so that two out of that house are “forever with the Lord.”
“Barring the Hand of Jesus!”
Well, dear reader, do you know what that Hand has done for such as you and me?
“Nailed to the accursed tree”
when bearing our sins. Yes, “the Hand our many sins have pierced,” He then and there made atonement for sin. Only to think those Hands which delighted to dispense blessings to the needy, healing to the sick, cleansing to the leper, pierced by the cruel nails when man set Him upon the Cross between the two malefactors! Can you look back to that scene and say, ‘That was done for me—He bore my sins in His own body on the tree—He suffered, the just One for me the unjust?’” Yes, it must be “barring the Hand of Jesus.”
That very Hand, too, which brake the loaves and divided the fishes when He fed the hungry multitude. That Hand which raised Peter’s wife’s mother (Mark 2:31), and put it forth to touch the poor leper (verse 41) to heal him, and on another special occasion, the reading of which always carries me back over thirty years, to a place thousands of miles distant from Old England—Dinapore, in Bengal, when stationed there shortly after the Indian mutiny. I allude to the account in Matthew 14 of Peter’s walking upon the waves―for he did walk—only instead of looking at Christ, he considered “the wind boisterous, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me! and immediately Jesus stretched forth His hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore Midst thou doubt?” That very Hand which ‘ere long was to be nailed to the Cross.
What gave me such joy was the fact that the Lord not only stretched forth His Hand, but did so “immediately”: and, further, caught hold of poor sinking Peter. Thank God! He did not tell Peter to catch hold of His outstretched Hand and hold on. No, no; that would not do. Peter, or you, or I would soon have got tired and let go. He laid hold of Peter, and kept him up. What a mercy, dear reader. Do you see the point? Not your holding on even to the outstretched Hand of Jesus, but He, with the Hand of power—the very Hand “our many sins have pierced”— guided by the heart of love, holding you up right on to the end?
Is it not then “barring the Hand of Jesus?” You may have needed and received all the attention and skillful training which a hospital could bestow, and lovingly and unselfishly tendered; but there is no Hand like His to make a downy pillow soft to an aching head and an anxious heart. If you have not experienced this up to now, may you do so, and at once, for “NOW is the accepted time, NOW is the day of salvation.”
S. V. H.