One of the great hymns of the church is “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” which begins like this:
Guide me, O thou great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through this barren land;
I am weak, but thou art mighty,
Hold me with thy powerful hand.
The phrase “hold me with thy powerful hand” has been a great comfort and blessing to God’s people down through the ages. But I would raise two questions about it: First, does the word hand used this way show primitivism in the Scripture? Does it demonstrate that the Bible is, after all, an ancient book which from an evolutionary perspective should be viewed as being old-fashioned in a very basic way? Second, is it just romanticism, merely a poetic expression that gives God’s people only emotional comfort?
God Is Spirit
The Bible says plainly that God is a pure Spirit and does not literally have a hand. That we are made in the image of God does not mean that God has feet, eyes and hands like ours.
Nor does God need a hand, for in the greatest of all acts, the creation of all things out of nothing, he merely spoke and it was (Ps. 33:9), the most dynamic and over-flowing short phrase in all of language. Psalm 148 has a parallel statement: “He commanded, and they were created” (v. 5). The whole Bible makes it plain that in this titanic beginning of all things, God who is Spirit created by divine fiat. He willed, he spoke and all things came into existence.
If God does not literally have a hand, then why does the Scripture use this expression? The answer is simple. God wants us to know him as personal. He wants to communicate to us in propositional, verbalized form the reality of his personality working in history. And how can he do this? By making use of the tremendous parallels between us finite men, created in God’s image, and God himself.
What do hands mean to us men? Hands equal action. The hands are that part of a man which produces something in the external world. We move always from our thought world outward. As men, we think, we have emotions and we will. The artist desiring to paint a picture, the engineer desiring to build a bridge, the house-wife desiring to bake a cake—each must do more than mere thinking and willing. Action must flow from the thought world of the inward man out through his hands into the external world which confronts him.
If a business letter must be typed, hands upon the typewriter produce it. If we are digging in our garden in the Spring or Fall, our hands hold the spade. If a poet wants to write a poem, his hand guides the pen. In warfare, the hand holds the sword. In each case, man projects the wonder of his personality—his thoughts, his emotions and the determinations of his will—into a historic, space-time world through the use of his body, and especially his hands.
So in order to communicate to us that he is a personal God who acts into space-time history, God uses the image of “the hand of God.” It is a familiar phrase, easily understood. But there is nothing primitive about this way of speaking. He uses this term which we know in order that we might understand exactly what he is saying. Nor does God use this expression in a poetic, romantic way merely so that we can feel better when we think of it. Rather, he is telling us an overwhelming yet basic truth: that he, without physical hands, can equal and surpass in space-time history all that we men can do with physical hands.
Now let us consider several ways God uses his “hand.”
The Hand of God Creates
As we have already mentioned, God uses his hand to create: “Hearken unto me, O Jacob and Israel, my called; I am he; I am the first, I also am the last. Mine hand also hath laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand hath spanned the heavens: when I call unto them, they stand up together” (Is. 48:12-13). In this tremendous picture, we see that the hand of God is no puny thing either in the past at the creation or in the present.
We have in Isaiah’s brief statement almost an entire theology of God, a whole system concerning who God is. First, he is transcendent. Because he is the Creator of the external world, he is not caught in it; he is above his creation. This stands in contrast to modern theology with its pure immanence. But, second, he is not transcendent in the sense of being the philosophic other or the impersonal everything. He is also truly immanent.
Though he is transcendent, he still can and does work in the universe. And it is important in a day like our own to understand this relationship between God and the machine. The universe exists because God made it, and he made it to work on a cause-and-effect basis. But it is not controlled entirely by the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. God has made the machine, but he can work into it anytime he wills.
On the one hand, then, cause-and-effect relationships exist. Without them there would be no science, there would be nothing we could know. It is not just arbitrary actions on the part of God that make the tree grow, the snow come, the rain fall. And yet, at the same time, God is not caught within these cause-and-effect relationships. He is not part of the machine. He has made it and can act into it anytime he wishes.
This theology of God and his relation to the world is emphasized often in Isaiah. For instance, we read in Isaiah 45: “I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded” (Is. 45:12). God has not made a little universe. He has made the wide stretches of space and has put there all the flaming hosts we see at night, all the planets, stars and galaxies. Wherever we go let us remind ourselves that God has made everything we see.
No matter what man eventually discovers the universe to be, no matter how much it contains or how great its stretch, this man must know—that God made it all. And not only did God make it all, but he is present to work in any part of it at any time he wishes. There is no place in the far-flung universe where the hand of God cannot work.
The entire Old Testament cries out that God is not a localized God, not a God of one part of the land, nor a God who dwells only in the temple, nor a God who is carried in the box of the ark. He is the God who dwells in the heavens and does what he wills. “Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands,” the psalmist affirms (Ps. 102:25).
The Hand of God Preserves
In addition to declaring that God is the Creator of the entire universe, the Bible also makes clear that he did not create the earth and then walk away. His hand also operates to preserve his creation, both conscious and unconscious life: “That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good” (Ps. 104:28). And again, “The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their food in due season. Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing” (Ps. 145:15-16).
Nothing lives in a vacuum. Everything in the world is preserved by God on its own level. Machines, plants, animals, men, angels—God preserves each one existentially, moment by moment, on its own level. Can we use our hands to work in the external world? God works in the external world.
An antiphonal doxology in the psalms praises God for being a worker in the creation he has made:
O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good:
for his mercy endureth for ever.
O give thanks unto the God of gods:
for his mercy endureth for ever.
O give thanks to the Lord of lords:
for his mercy endureth for ever.
To him who alone doeth great wonders:
for his mercy endureth for ever. (Ps. 136:1-4)
The succeeding verses praise God for specific actions. One is that God “brought Israel out from among them [the Egyptians]. . . with a strong hand, and with a stretched out arm” (vv. 11-12). Not just a generalized statement about preservation, this mentions a specific event—the Jews’ deliverance from Egypt. Praise is being given here because God is a worker in the creation he has made. The Jews always looked back to this work that God had done in space and time, and therefore they were linked to something that was tough enough to bear the weight of life, for they knew that God was not far away. Their affirmation was not just a poetic expression. Since God had acted in past history, the people knew they could trust him for the future.
After God had brought many plagues upon Egypt, the court magicians had said to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God” (Ex. 8:19). During the earliest plagues, the magicians undoubtedly had thought that these might be chance occurrences or that by using the power of the demons they themselves would be able to duplicate the plagues. But as they watched the increasing horror of the plagues, these magicians came to another conclusion: This is more than chance, or, to speak in modern terms, this is more than the machine, more than merely cause and effect in a closed system. They concluded that there was a God who was acting in history. They admitted, “This is the finger of God.”
God’s acting in history is also portrayed forcefully in the giving of the Ten Commandments soon after the Jews left Egypt. The scene is described this way: “And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God” (Ex. 31:18). God took two blank tables of stone (we are not sure what they looked like; we think we do because of the way the artists have painted them for so many centuries, but we really do not) and then, either gradually or suddenly, carved on them the words he wanted there.
If Michelangelo had wanted to chisel words on these tables, he would have placed the tables in his studio, fastened them properly, taken his favorite hammer and chisel (which he would have made lovingly with his own hands, as sculptors did in those days) and worked away. With one hand holding the chisel and the other the hammer, he gradually would have produced words on the stone, and beautifully carved ones, I am sure. Out of his own thought world whatever he would have wanted to put on the tables would have appeared—his personality would have flowed through his fingers into the external world.
And that is exactly what God did on Mount Sinai. As Moses looked at the tables of stone with nothing on them, words appeared. But God did not need physical hands or a chisel. He who spoke all things into existence had only to will, and, in the historic, space-time world, words appeared on stone.
God speaks to men through verbalization, using natural syntax and grammar, as when, on the Damascus road, Jesus spoke to Paul in the Hebrew tongue. He did not use a “heavenly language.” Both on the Damascus road and on Mount Sinai, God used regular verbalization—and the syntax was good, let us be sure. And both events affirm, let us stress again, that God is able to work into the machine any time he will.
Here is the distinction we must see between existential theology, Greek thought and Jewish thought. Modern existential theology says, “Truth is all in your head. You must make a leap, completely removed from the common things of life.” The Greeks were tougher than this, for they said, “If you’re going to have truth, it has to make sense.” If a man would insist, as modem man does, “I will believe these things whether they make sense or not,” the Greek philosopher would answer, “That is foolish. A system which is internally inconsistent is unacceptable.” So the Greeks were better than modern man in his modern theology.
But the Jews were stronger yet. The Jews said, “Yes, truth must fit together in a system that is non-contradictory, but it must do something more. It must be rooted in the space-time stuff of history.” The Jews throughout their history affirmed that God’s hand had done a great thing in releasing them from Egypt. Therefore, they were not shaken in the midst of trial because they knew what God could do in the external world.
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.
