But God’s action in the external world can be even more personal than it was when he led the Jews out of Egypt. We Christians should be grateful for that event, which, since we are spiritual Jews, is part of our history. It should be our environment to offset the environment of our own day when men are seen as only machines. But God can be even more personal. He can and does say, “I use my hand for you.”
One way God expresses his fatherly care for his children is in loving chastisement. How do parents spank their children? They use their hand. Similarly, when one of his children needs chastisement, God brings down his hand.
In Psalm 32:4, for instance, David says, “For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me,” or, in other words, “You have chastened me.” In Psalm 39:10, David cries, “Remove thy stroke away from me: I am consumed by the blow of thine hand.”
This chastisement was not merely psychological, another important truth for our generation to understand. The hand of God is pictured as working not in the thoughts of men but into the external world. He uses the word hand so that we have perfect communication: That which we use our hands to do, he, being a personal God, accomplishes without hands. One such action is chastisement.
The chastisement of David for his sin with Bathsheba was not just psychological. In this and in other pictures of chastisement in the Bible God did not do something inside the heads of men. Rather, in his loving care for his people, he chastened them through external situations. God worked into the machine not only to achieve the mighty exodus from Egypt, not only to carve his law upon the rock, but also to show love to his people by chastening them. God is not far off, acting only in the great moments of history; he is acting into our own personal history in a loving way as well.
Author
Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer was widely recognized as one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the day. He was the author of twenty-two books which have been translated into twenty-five foreign languages, with more than three million copies in print.
Dr. Schaeffer had lectured frequently at leading universities in the U.S. and abroad. With his wife, Edith, the Schaeffers founded L’Abri Fellowship, an international study center and community in Switzerland with branches in England, The Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.S.
This article is taken from his popular book, No Little People, pp. 27-41.
