-Strength for Today- "Father, Into Thy hands I Commend My Spirit." - Luke 23:46

One of the great challenges that we all face is surrendering our “all” into God’s hands.  But with Jesus, He had just expressed to His Father that the work, He assigned to Him from “eternity pass,” is “finished.” And to “fortify” the strength of that prophetic word pertaining to Him, Jesus, the only human ever to fully deserve the title, “Son of Man,” hangs desolate on a cross. But in that moment of “prophetic completion, Jesus “entrusts” His spirit to His Father, knowing that the “fading breath He’s breathing,” is “God’s essence living in Him.” And by asserting that trust:  He’s affirming that there’s a “resurrection of the dead,” and that “life after death exist.” 

Why? Because God is “sovereign even over death,” and because of His love for us, (John 3:16), He won’t let us go.  God is Lord over everything, and because God loves us, our lives are safe in His hands, even after death.  This “significance” is expressed in Jesus’ final statement from the cross. 

 It was Him submitting to that which had been in His heart from the very beginning.  And like Luke records His final words, with a loud voice”...‘Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.’ Having said this, He breathed His last,” (Luke 23:46), shows that Jesus died as no other man has ever died.  

• In one sense He was murdered by the hands of “wicked men” - Acts 2:23.  
• But on the other hand, it was His Father’s pleasure to send Him to the cross and “bruised Him, and put Him to grief” - Isaiah 53:10. 

      Yet in reality: 

       1. No one took His life.  

       2. He gave it up willingly for those whom He loved. John 10:17-18.  

      when Jesus breathed His last on the cross, it was not with a “wrenching struggle against His killers,” but was a “deliberate act of His own sovereign will,” showing that “to the very end, He was sovereignly in control of all that was happening.” John 19:30 says, “...He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.” So, quietly and submissively He yield up His life. 

   So, from “eternity pass,” to the “crib” and now the “finality of the cross,” everything had come to pass exactly as He said it would. This prophetic statement  included His killers, and the mocking crowd, together with Pilate, Herod, and the Sanhedrin. Because they all had perfectly fulfilled the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God to the letter. 

And now Jesus “majestically” displayed “His sovereignty to the end.” To those who “loved Him,” and the many who “cared little for Him,” this seemed like a “supreme tragedy.” But it was the greatest moment of victory in the history of redemption, and Jesus would make that fact “gloriously clear” when He would burst triumphantly from the grave, “in a few days!” 

author: Plez Lovelady, Jr., PhD