Thy hands have made and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn thy commandments.
Psalm 119:73
As we continue our Lenten journey, our focus moves this week to the words “their hands.” While the genesis of this year’s Lenten series coincides with a capital campaign we are doing in my parish, this verse from Nehemiah 2:18 can be applied to our Christian lives in so many different ways. We will begin our reflection on “their hands” by discussing the hand of God, and how that is reflected in our hands.
Today’s Scripture verse from Psalm 119:73 is found in two places in our Divine Services. First, it is offered quietly by each member of the clergy when they put on their vestments, specifically the left “cuff” (or Epimaniki), the vestment that is worn over the left wrist. The “cuffs” represent the bound hands of Jesus at the Passion. All three orders of the clergy—deacon, priest and bishop—have these as part of their liturgical vestments. There is great symbolism in the cuffs and the prayer associated with them. We are reminded in this instance of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. We are also reminded (we priests as we put them on, and hopefully the people, as they see them) that we need to guard what we are doing with our hands. Because these same hands that will celebrate the services, and for the people, the same hands we raise to God in prayer, the same hand we make the sign of the cross with, can be used for destruction. We have to make sure that there isn’t a dichotomy in how we use our hands and to keep them consistently used to glorify God.
While we don’t hear this prayer at the Divine Liturgy, because the priest offers it privately as he vests before the service, we do hear it at the funeral services. There are three “stasis” of hymns which reflect 18 verses of the 176 verses of Psalm 119, and this verse begins the second stasis. At the funeral service, Psalm 119 is offered as a personal plea to God for his mercy on the one who has passed away. When we each stand before the judgment seat of Christ, He will examine what we did with our hands in this life. God made our hands to enable us to create and to help and undoubtedly how we used them will factor into our entrance into eternal life.
While it is hard to imagine what the hand of God looks like, we know that the hand of God created everything. It is His hand that placed the planets into the universe and the stars into the heavens. It is His creating hand that fashioned the plants and the animals. And it was His creating hand that fashioned us after His image and likeness.
In Acts 13, we read of the preaching of St. Paul, summarizing God’s plan throughout the Old Testament. In verses 20-23, we read:
“And after that He gave them judges until Samual the prophet. Then they asked for a king; and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years. And when He had removed him, He raised up David to be their king; of whom He testified and said, ‘I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after My heart, who will do all my will.’ Of this man’s posterity God has brough to Israel a Savior, Jesus, as He promised.”
God’s hand created a David, a man after God’s own heart. David was not perfect. He had some serious flaws and committed some egregious sins. Yet, from the line of David, the Lord brought forth the Messiah. God has made us also after His own heart. In making us in His image and after His likeness, we have hearts capable of loving God and serving Him, as well as hearts that are wired to love and serve others.
How often do we look at our hands and consider that they were fashioned by our Creator, to do things that honor Him? We probably don’t think about that as much as we should. The second part of the Psalm verse, Thy hands have made and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn thy commandments, (Psalm 119:73), reminds us that if we are to use our hands to praise God, we must take time to understand the commandments of God and to lean on God in prayer to grant us wisdom and understanding of what it means to use them to glorify Him.
For those who work with our hands, imagine your hands as the hands of God. For those in the medical field, your hands are His hands of healing. For those who build things, your hands are His creating hands. For those in the food industry, imagine it is His hands that are preparing the meal. And even if you sit at a computer all day, imagine it is His hands that are doing the writing or inputting. His hands have made our hands, they have fashioned our entire being to reflect Him. So as we begin our study of “their hands”, we do so with the humble acknowledgment that our hands were made reflect His.
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth! Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted by the mouths of babes and infants, Thou hast founded a bulwark because of Thy foes, to still the enemy and the avenger. When I look at Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast established; what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou dost care for him? Yet Thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor. Thou hast given him dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou has put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth! Psalm 8
Let your hands represent God’s hands in all that you do today!
