April 12
“When Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, He said, ‘Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.’ Having said this, He breathed His last,” Luke 23:46.
The last words that a dying person speaks are long remembered by loved ones. They are often quoted by people as they reminisce about the departed.
In his famous Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Lincoln’s words do not apply to what Jesus said. What Jesus both said and did has been preserved for us in Holy Scripture. By the grace of God, it has been preserved for the sake of our salvation.
For about thirty-three years, Jesus had journeyed from the cradle to the cross to complete the work of redemption for which God the Father had sent Him into the world, as He had promised. “God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons,” Galatians 4:4. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the Word of reconciliation . . . (God) made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him,” 2 Corinthians 5:19, 21. “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” Romans 5:8.
When He spoke from the cross and said, “It is finished!” He knew that He had completed everything that was necessary for our salvation. Now, He was ready to “walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” when He said, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” As He had told His disciples, He knew that He would rise again and come forth victoriously from the tomb.
When Jesus said, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit,” He was fulfilling what He had spoken to a multitude during the days of His public ministry: “I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd gives His life for the sheep . . . As the Father knows Me, even so I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep . . . My Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again,” John 10:11, 15, 17-18. On Friday He willingly laid down His life, and on Easter morning He took it again!
In His Word from the cross, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit,” Jesus gives us the example of how we too can face our final hour. With faith and trust in Jesus as the Son of God and your Savior, whose blood has washed away all your sins, you can commit your soul into the Father’s hands and say with the psalmist, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me,” Psalm 23:4.
“When my last hour cometh,
Fraught with strife and pain,
When my dust returneth
To the dust again,
On Thy truth relying,
Thro’ that mortal strife,
Jesus, take me, dying,
To eternal life.”
“Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me!” Amen.