This series of meditations on the seven utterances made by our Lord Jesus in the hours when he was hanging on the Cross were originally given at Communion services, and subsequently produced as booklets.
This is the link to the Audio version of the meditation: CR 5 – “I thirst” – Audio
FATHER INTO YOUR HANDS…
“Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he breathed his last.” (Luke 23:46)
This is the last of the seven times the Lord Jesus spoke from the cross prior to His death. I have entitled this meditation, A wonderful way to die.
“‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he breathed his last.” Of course, I don’t mean that crucifixion is a wonderful way to die. It is one of the most horrible and cruel ways to die. But crucifixion was not the last thing, you see. His last breath was not taken from him by crucifixion. He gave up his life. He committed his life to God at the last. And we will come back to that.
Three reasons why it was a wonderful way to die.
HE DIED WITH A PRAYER
“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Our Lord Jesus was a man of prayer, wasn’t he? He would rise up very early in the morning sometimes to go out to be alone to pray. Or he would detach himself from his disciples and from the crowd and get alone in order to pray. Anywhere he could be or go, just to be quiet and to pray, he would do so.
He taught us that God works in answer to prayer. “Ask and it will be given to you” (Matthew 7:7), and he was a preacher who practiced what he preached. Believing that, he prayed and taught us to pray. His first cry from the cross was a prayer, wasn’t it? “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” What a wonderful prayer that was. An intercession on behalf of the very people who were doing him to death.
So, a death may be violent, even cruel and unjust, and yet may be accompanied by a most wonderful prayer of trust and calm. We find the same thing in the Acts of the Apostles. You may remember that the first Christian martyr so far as the records are concerned was a man called Stephen who was taken out and stoned to death.
Here is the account of his death:
“When they heard this. . .” this is his defense, his speech, “. . . they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. But Stephen full of the Holy Spirit looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’
At this they covered their ears, and yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him. They dragged him out of the city and they began to stone him. Meanwhile the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning him Stephen prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. . .'” He echoed his Savior’s prayer . . .“Then he fell on his knees and cried out, ‘Lord do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he fell asleep.” (Acts 7:54-60)
So, our Lord Jesus prayed as he died, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” It was actually a Scripture quotation, Psalm 31, verse 5. If Jesus was a man of prayer, he was also a man of the Word, wasn’t he? He was full of the Word. C H Spurgeon says that Jesus was as full of Scripture as the fleece of Gideon was full of dew.
Now David had written in Psalm 31:5, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” Jesus adds the word, Father. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Of course, you may say that he could do that because he was the unique Son of God, and you would be right. No Orthodox Jew would have ever called God, “Father.” He would have thought that presumptuous, even irreverent, even blasphemous. Yet you know that the Lord Jesus gave his disciples that right; to address God as Father, for so he is when we trust in Christ.
“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in His name he gave the right to become the children of God” (John 1:12). The word translated in the King James “power” is the word “right”, the authority. “Children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision, nor of a husband’s will, but born of God.”
It is a wonderful privilege to be able to call God, “Father.” Not all have that privilege. We have to be brought into the family of God. We’re not born naturally into the family of God. We have to be born supernaturally into the family of God. The Bible speaks of being born from above, born again. That is how we come into the family of God.
But there is another way too, and both are necessary. He brings us into his family, we are told, by adoption. Now normally if you have a child, you either brought that child into your family by generation and natural progression and natural birth, or else you brought the child into your family by adoption. But God brings us into his family by both means. Regeneration is the experience of having a new life, the Holy Spirit coming into your life, and you are a new creation. Adoption is the legal side of it. Forever signed by the blood of Christ. This man, this woman, this boy, this girl belongs to God, as a prince or princess of heaven and will spend eternity with Jesus adopted into his family.
Do you have the right? Could you come before God as the Lord Jesus did and pray, “Father?” Do you? If we would die with the comforts of Christ, let us first make sure that we are God’s children by believing in Jesus. Second, let us be full of Scripture as he was. Meditate on it. Memorize it. Live by it. For it is the Word of God.
Thirdly, let us make frequent use of our right and privilege to pray, and then we shall find it very natural and comforting to do so in our last hours. Don’t think to wait until you are on your deathbed with your last breath before you begin to pray. You will not know how to. Let it be part of your daily experience now to call upon your Father. And then when the time comes for you to be called into eternity and breathe your last it will be natural for you to do so.
So, the first way it was a wonderful way to die was because he died with a prayer.
HE HAD FINISHED HIS WORK
The second is, that it was a wonderful way to die because he had finished his work and was ready to die. Of course, Jesus was only thirty-three years old and some people would have said, “What a waste. Just in his prime.” Well, that is how we would perceive it. But no, it is not necessarily such a waste to die young. What is a waste is to live your life whether it be many days or few and waste it. Never to find out why God put you here. Never to find out who you are meant to be and what you are meant to do, and waste it.
That was certainly not true of the Lord Jesus. In fact, the utterance before this one was one word: “tetalesti.” It was a triumphant cry. As we have seen in the meditation “It is Finished,” it means: I have accomplished it. It is done. It is finished. He knew it. You see, Jesus came for two reasons. Always remember that. One, to show us God, and the other to bring us to God, that we might be reconciled to God. And he did that latter by his shed blood. He paid the price for an innumerable company of sinners to go to heaven with him and live for evermore. To the Jewish people seven was a perfect number. And Jesus utters his seventh cry because he had finished a perfect work.
It was a “loud cry,” it says. It was not a last gasp or a final moan or groan. It was a loud cry because Jesus was voluntarily laying down his life. He said earlier, “No man takes my life from me, I lay it down of myself,” (Matthew 27:50). He yielded up, or dismissed his spirit. “He gave up the ghost” (or the spirit – John 19:30). The soldiers were surprised when they came and found him already dead.
You see, Jesus holds the keys of death and the grave. He still does. He always will until death is abolished. Stephen had finished his work. The stones were the instruments that killed him, but Jesus determined when it should be. Now we will not necessarily know when our task on earth is done, and so we must trust him to determine the day and the hour when we shall expire. But always believe he has your days in his hand and he has your heartbeat in his hand. Nobody, not a stone, not a nail, not a cancer, nothing can take your life from you until he determines that your task on earth is done and it is time for you to go to your reward.
What are you doing with your life, my brother, sister? Whatever you are doing do you consult God about it? Is it a task given to you by the Saviour? Do you do it unto him whatever it may be? Will he say at the end, “Bless you? Welcome home for you have raised those children in my name. Well done.”
Will he say, “Bless you because you did that job for my glory and you did it well? Come home. Thank you for your earning and your tithing. Bless you for your teaching and your praying. Bless you for your working and your witnessing. A task well done. A life well spent. It’s done. Now come home.”
I say to you, don’t waste your life so that you have nothing on your deathbed except regrets. Somebody may say: “Harry, it’s too late. I have wasted it.”
No, it isn’t because it is not over yet. You may say: “But I’m retired now. I’m older now. If only I could start again.”
O yes, but you do not know the almightiness of God. He is able to do more in a day than even many Christians may do in a lifetime.
The Bible has an interesting verse that speaks about God restoring the years that the locusts have eaten. He can bring more fruitful harvest out of maybe a few weeks or months or whatever he has determined you have remaining – maybe more years than you think – he can make those so fruitful that it would be just the same as if they had been twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty years. The important thing is not to waste another day. Do not waste another hour. Say to him: Take my life, whatever is left of it, and let me live it to your glory until my task is done.
Yes, it was a wonderful way to die because he died with a beautiful prayer; because he had finished the work and was ready to go; and then it was thirdly because:
HE WAS ABOUT TO GO HOME TO HEAVEN
Jesus said to the brigand who was dying beside him, who trusted in him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). He had said to his disciples the night before, In my Father’s house, you know, there are many accommodations, many resting places. “In my Father’s house there are many apartments, beautiful apartments, wonderful apartments. I am going to prepare a place for you.” There will be one with your name on it. There will be one that we will get ready for you. “That where I am, there you may be also” (See John 14:1-3)
He was going home to heaven. The book of Hebrews says, “For the joy that was set before him he endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). There is going to be rest and reward now for our Saviour. The seventh cry. Seven not only meant to Jewish people perfection, but also the rest day, the Sabbath day. God worked in creation six days. It says on the seventh day they rested (Genesis 2:3). It always meant rest. Seven. . . rest.
Jesus was now going to enter into his rest. You see, he was on the cross for six hours, the first three suffering at the hands of men with all their mocking and their scorn, but the next three hours suffering at the hands of God. Darkness covered the face of the earth, and darkness covered the soul of the Saviour until, as he was bearing our sins and the wrath of God was upon him he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)
Now the darkness has lifted. Now he has uttered his triumphant cry. He has taken a little liquid to quench his thirst. Now he is going home. Rest. Reward. Welcome. Angels.
And so will all who die in Jesus. I go to prepare a place for you, he says, Christian brother, sister. That is why the Bible says, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15). Death is not precious. It is an enemy. One day death is going to be abolished forever, but yet God is able to say, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints,” because his saints . . . and that does not mean special Christians it means all Christians . . . are going home to heaven.
What trials and tribulations in this life, are there not? What injustices and sorrows there are! There is a vale of tears, heartaches. How tired we may become and how sick, and sick and tired, and sick and tired of being sick and tired; and we long for home, for heaven the place of peace and beauty and purity and love, and Jesus who beckons us on. Stephen had a foretaste even before he got to heaven of heaven opening to receive him, as we saw earlier in this meditation.
So did my mother. My mother died when I was a little boy of seven. I do not have many childhood memories, but I do remember that one.
I do not remember her actually dying because they took me to a friend’s house toward the end, right at the very end. I cannot remember my mother very well. As a young girl she contracted rheumatic fever and as a consequence in adult life she suffered from valvular heart disease and was an invalid and very weak. So, my memories of her are of her being in bed. The bed was brought downstairs from the bedroom to the living room and that was where she was. I would be taken in to see her from time to time. She was very grey and weak and appeared much older than her young years.
One day we heard a loud cry, a kind of triumphant cry from her room.
“Jim, Jim, come here, come here.” Jim was my dad. She said, “Bring my mother. Bring Harry.”
So, we all went rushing in. She was sitting up in bed. I can see her with this shawl around her shoulders and leaning forward away from the pillows. There was a light in her eyes and she was gazing upwards with her arms lifted up.
She said, “Jim, I’ve seen Jesus.”
And my dad said, “Did you darling? What did he look like?”
“O,” she said, “he’s wonderful, and he was beckoning for me.”
I never forgot that. I had never seen her look so well. I had never seen anyone with that radiant face and that light. It impinged itself on my little mind as a seven-year-old. And my dad was so tender. Two days later she died.
You see, some of us believe in heaven. We don’t talk about it as much as we should. People who are suffering the most heartaches talk about it. The slaves used to talk about it, they used to sing about it. The Christian lives in tension because in this vale of tears and pain and parting he is ready to go home and be with Jesus; and yet we have an instinct to cling to life that God has put within us and we also know that it is not for us to go Home until he determines it. O, how sad not to know where you are going or what lies beyond that it might reflect on your life now.
Some years ago my wife and I saw the movie “Hamlet.” If you know the Shakespeare play you will remember that the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, discovers that his father, the king, had not died of natural causes, but had been murdered. The young prince is consumed by a desire to get revenge upon the perpetrator of the murder, the usurper. He is also desperately depressed and wants to die. He wants to die by his own hand, to take a bodkin (the old word for stiletto) and kill himself. But he does not do it because he does not know what lies beyond the grave. Maybe it will be judgment.
When I listened to that speech, I thought of the Apostle Paul who was also perplexed as to whether, or not he wanted to die. He was in prison on a capital charge and he did not know whether he would be beheaded or set free. He wrote a “thank-you” letter to the Christians at Philippi and revealed to them his dilemma. “For to me, to live is Christ,” he says, “and to die is gain.” He would rather be at Home with the Lord. That is “…better by far but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body” (Philippians 1:23).
Notice the difference between Hamlet and the Apostle Paul. Hamlet says,
To be or not to be; that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take to arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. To die. To sleep. No more. And by asleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die. To sleep. Perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub, for in the sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil? Must give us pause. There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time? The oppressor’s wrong. The proud man’s contumely. The pangs of despised love. The laws delay. The insolence of office when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin. Who would fardels bare to grunt and sweat under a weary life? But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
There’s a man who does not know God. There is a man who has no prayer. There is a man who has no purpose to live and only longs to get away from the trials, slings and arrows of this life even if he has to do it by his own hand.
Listen to the apostle: “I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now, as always, Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again your joy in Christ Jesus will overflow on account of me” (Phil 2: 20-26).
What are you? Are you a Prince of Denmark, a prince of gloom and despondency, confusion and despair; or, a prince of heaven? In one sense you care not whether you live or die because to live is Christ and fruitful labor for those around you to whom you are sent, but to die is gain, reward, joy and reunion.
CONCLUSION
So here are my closing words. Don’t be afraid to die. Look forward to heaven. It will not make you suicidal. It never has. Those who are the most heavenly-minded are the most earthly use. I have always found that to be so. You live the moment for your death. You commit that moment to his hands, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
Isn’t death the most traumatic thing that any of us will ever have to face – when the final curtain comes down? And yet is there anyone of us who would not want to pray at that moment like Jesus did? “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” My dying breath. We would all want to be at that point at that moment.
Well then, are you facing some lesser trauma, some lesser trial? Can you not commit that to him? Can you not say, “Father, into your hands I commit my hospitalization?” “Father, into your hands I commit my marriage.” “Father, into your hands I commit my family.” “Father, into your hands I commit this problem that I face in my job.” “Father, into your hands I commit my future, because I would commit my dying breath, my dying into your hands. So, I commit every day into your hands.”
Is there someone reading this meditation who has never committed their life to God?
Do it now? Say, “Father, whether my days will be few or many, I commit every one of them to you and then my eternity.”