'Behold! I have graven thee upon the palms of My hands; thy walls are
continually before Me.'--ISAIAH xlix. 16.
In the preceding context we have the infinitely tender and beautiful
words: 'Zion hath said, The Lord hath forsaken me. Can a woman forget
her sucking child? ... yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget
thee.' There is more than a mother's love in the Father's heart. But
wonderful in their revelation of God, and mighty to strengthen, calm,
and comfort, as these transcendent words are, those of my text, which
follow them, do not fall beneath their loftiness. They are a singularly
bold metaphor, drawn from the strange and half-savage custom, which
lingers still among sailors and others, of having beloved names or
other tokens of affection and remembrance indelibly inscribed on parts
of the body. Sometimes worshippers had the marks of the god thus set on
their flesh; here God writes on His hands the name of the city of His
worshippers. And it is not its name only, but its very likeness that He
stamps there, that He may ever look on it, as those who love bear with
them a picture of one dear face. The prophecy goes on: 'Thy walls are
continually before Me,' but in the prophet's time the walls were in
ruins, and yet they are present to the divine mind.
I. Now, the first thought suggested by these great words is that here
we have set forth for our strength and peace a divine remembrance,
tender as--yea, more tender than--a mother's.
When Israel came out of Egypt, the Passover was instituted as 'a
memorial unto all generations,' or, as the same idea is otherwise
expressed, 'it shall be for a sign unto thee upon thine hand.' Here God
represents Himself as doing for Israel what He had bid Israel do for
Him. They were, as it were, to write the supreme act of deliverance in
the Exodus upon their hands, that it might never be forgotten. He
writes Zion on His hands for the same purpose.
Now, of course, the text does not primarily refer to individuals, but
to the community, whether Zion is understood, as the prophet understood
the name, to be ancient Israel, or as the Christian Church. But the
recognition of that fact should not be allowed to rob us of the
preciousness of this text in its bearing on the individual. For God
remembers the community, not as an abstraction or a generalised
expression, but as the aggregate of all the individuals composing it.
We lose sight of the particulars when we generalise. We cannot see the
trees for the wood. We think of 'the Church,' and do not think of the
thousands of men and women who make it up. We cannot discern the
separate stars in the galaxy. But God's eye resolves what to us is a
nebula, and to Him every single glittering point of light hangs rounded
and separate in the heaven. Therefore this assurance of our text is to
be taken by every single soul that loves God, and trusts Him through
Jesus Christ, as belonging to it, as though there were not another
creature on earth but itself.
'The sun whose beams most glorious are,
Disdaineth no beholder.'
Its light floods the world, yet seems to go straight into the eyeball
of every man that looks at it. And such is the divine love and
remembrance. There is no jostling nor confusion in the wide space of
the heart of God. They that go before shall not hinder them that come
after. The hungry crowd sat down in companies on the green grass, and
the first fifty, no doubt, were envied by the last of the hundred
fifties that made up the five thousand, and wondered whether the five
loaves and the two small fishes could go round, but the last fed full
as did the first. The great promise of our text belongs to me and thee,
and therefore belongs to us all.
That remembrance which each man may take for himself--and we are poor
Christians if we do not live in its light--is infinitely tender. The
echo of the music of the previous words still haunts the verse, and the
remembrance promised in it is touched with more than a mother's love.
'I am poor and needy,' says the Psalmist, 'yet the Lord thinketh upon
me.' He might have said, 'I am poor and needy, therefore the Lord
thinketh upon me.' That remembrance is in full activity when things are
darkest with us. Israel said, 'My Lord hath forgotten me,' because at
the point of view taken in the second half of Isaiah, it was captive in
a far-off land. You and I sometimes are brought into circumstances in
which we are ready to think 'God has, somehow or other, left me, has
forgotten me.' Never! never! However mirk the night, however apparently
solitary the way, however mysterious and insoluble the difficulties of
our position, let us fall back on this, that the captive Israel was
remembered by God, and let us be sure that no circumstances of our
lives are so dark or mysterious as to warrant the faintest shadow of
suspicion creeping over the brightness of our confidence in this great
promise. His divine remembrance of each of His servants is certain.
But do not let us forget that it was a very sinful Zion that God thus
remembered. It was because the nation had transgressed that they were
captives, but their very captivity was a proof that they were not
forgotten. The loving divine remembrance had to smite in order to prove
that it was active. Let us neither be puzzled by our sorrows nor made
less confident when we think of our sins. For there is no sin that is
strong enough to chill the divine love, or to erase us from the divine
remembrance. 'Captive Israel! captive because sinful, I have graven
_thee_ on the palms of My hands.'
II. A second thought here is that the divine remembrance guides the
divine action.
The palm of the hand is the seat of strength, the instrument of work;
and so, if Zion's name is written there, that means not only
remembrance, but remembrance which is at the helm, as it were, which is
moulding and directing all the work that is done by the hand that bears
the name inscribed upon it. The thought is identical with the one which
is suggested by part of the High Priest's official dress, although
there the thought has a different application. He bore the names of the
twelve tribes graven upon his shoulder, the seat of power, and upon his
breastplate that lay above the heart, the home of love. God holds out
the mighty Hand which works all things, and says to His children:
'Look, you are graven there'--at the very fountain-head, as it were, of
the divine activity. Which, being turned into plain English, is just
this, that for His Church as a whole, He does move amidst the affairs
of nations. You remember the grand words of one of the Psalms,--'He
reproved kings for their sakes, saying, Touch not Mine anointed, and do
My prophets no harm.' It is no fanatical reading of the history of
earthly politics and kingdoms, if we recognise that one of the most
prominent reasons for the divine activities in moulding the kingdoms,
setting up and casting down, is the advancement of the kingdom of
heaven and the building of the City of God. 'I have graven thee on the
palms of My hands'--and when the hands go to work, it is for the Zion
whose likeness they bear.
But the same truth applies to us individually. 'All things work
together'; they would not do so, unless there was one dominant Will
which turned the chaos into a cosmos. 'All things work,' that is very
plain. The tremendous activities round us both in Nature and in history
are clear to us all. But if all things and events are co-operant,
working into each other, and for one end, like the wheels of a
well-constructed engine, then there must be an Engineer, and they work
together because He is directing them. Thus, because my name is graven
on the palms of the mighty Hand that doeth all things, therefore 'all
things work together for my good.' If we could but carry that quiet
conviction into all the mysteries, as they sometimes seem to be, of our
daily lives, and interpret everything in the light of that great
thought, how different all our days would be! How far above the petty
anxieties and cares and troubles that gnaw away so much of our strength
and joy; how serene, peaceful, lofty, submissive, would be our lives,
and how in the darkest darkness there would be a great light, not only
of hope for a distant future, but of confident assurance for the
present. 'I have graven thee on the palms of My hands '--do Thou, then,
as Thou wilt with me.
III. A last thought here is that the divine remembrance works all
things, to realise a great ideal end, as yet unreached.
'Thy walls are continually before Me.' When this prophecy was uttered
the Israelites were in captivity, and the city was a wilderness, 'the
holy and beautiful House'--as this very book says--'where the fathers
praised Thee was burned with fire,' the walls were broken down, rubbish
and solitude were there. Yet on the palms of God's hands were inscribed
the walls which were nowhere else! They were 'before Him,' though
Jerusalem was a ruin. What does that mean? It means that that divine
remembrance sees 'things that are not, as though they were.' In the
midst of the imperfect reality of the present condition of the Church
as a whole, and of us, its actual components, it sees the ideal, the
perfect vision of the perfect future, and 'all the wonder that shall
be.' Zion may be desolate, but 'before Him' stands what will one day
stand on the earth before all men, 'the new Jerusalem, coming down from
heaven,' having walls great and high, and its foundations garnished
with all manner of precious stones. 'Thy walls are before Me,' though
the ruins are there before men.
So, brethren, the most radiant optimism is the only fitting attitude
for Christian people in looking into the future, either of the Church
as a whole, or of themselves as individual members of it. God's hand is
working for Zion and for me. It is guided by love that does not lose
the individual in the mass, nor ever forgets any of its children, and
it works towards the attainment of unattained perfection. 'This Man'
does not 'begin to build and' prove 'not able to finish.'
So let us be sure that, if only we keep ourselves in the love, and
continue in the grace of God, He will not slack nor stay His hand on
which Zion is graven, until it has 'perfected that which concerneth
us,' and fulfilled to each of us that 'which He has spoken to us of.'
I said at the beginning of these remarks that God did what He bids us
do. God bids us do what He does. His name should be on our hands; that
is to say, memory of Him, love of Him, regard to Him, confidence in Him
should mould and guide all our activity, and the aim that we shall be
builded up for a habitation of God through the Spirit should be the
conscious aim of our lives, as it is the aim which He has in view in
all His dealings with us. Our names on His hand; His name on our hands;
so shall we be blessed.