A Precious Drop of Honey

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"Behold, I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands!" Isaiah 49:16

God’s promises are not exhausted by one fulfillment. They are manifold mercies, so that after you have opened one fold, and found out one signification, you may unfurl them still more, and find another which shall be equally true, and then another, and another, and another, almost without end. Like the cherubim, God’s promises have a face for every quarter of the earth, and like the wheels, they are full of eyes for every trial of the chosen people. The Lord knows how to speak many-handed promises; his words, like the trees of the New Jerusalem, bear twelve manner of fruits, and yield their fruit every month. No doubt the text and the preceding promises all refer to the seed of Abraham; God will not cast them away; he does no more forget them than does a woman forget her nursing child. They shall return to their own land, and accept Messiah, the Prince whom they have so long despised. But the seed of Abraham are the grand type of the Church; and hence we believe that every word here, in its widest and most extensive sense, belongs to the elect of God — those who are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and for whom Jesus shed his blood.

We feel persuaded that the favor which is pertains to the whole body is given to each member, and therefore any true believer who is, through faith, one of the spiritual seed of Abraham, may take the promises to himself, and say, "Thus says the Lord unto my soul; thus and thus speaks he comfortably concerning me." I believe, I say, that the text before us belongs primarily to the seed of Israel; next, to the whole Church as a body; and then to every individual member. Understand it so, and may each one of you, even though you are numbered among the little in Israel, have grace to draw forth marrow and fatness out of the inexpressibly rich text which today the Spirit of God presents to us. I intend, first of all, to consider our text verbally, pulling it to pieces word by word; then next, to consider it as a whole; and then, to incite you by it as a whole, to consider what is the conduct demanded of you by truth so sweet.

I. First of all, then, my text is one of those remarkable sentences in which EVERY SINGLE WORD DESERVES TO BE EMPHASIZED. We will begin with the first word, "Behold." "Behold, I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands." "Behold," is a word of wonder; it is intended to excite admiration. Wherever you see it hung out in Scripture, it is like an ancient sign-board, signifying that there are rich wares within, or like the handswhich some readers have observed in the margin of the older Puritanic books, drawing attention to something particularly worthy of observation. Here, indeed, we have a theme for marveling. Heaven and earth may well be astonished that God should ever engraved upon his hands the names ofsinners; that rebels should attain so great a nearness to his heart as to be written upon the palms of his hands. Well might the angels wonder, and those bright spirits be lost in amazement, for unto which of the angels said he at any time, "I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands?" What cherub ever attained this dignity, or to what seraph was this honor awarded? But to man, who is but a worm; to the son of man who is but dust and ashes; to man who has rebelled, who has lost all claim upon God’s favor and deserves his hottest wrath — to man is this consolation given, "I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands." Speak of the seven wonders of the world, why this is a wonder in the seventh heavens!

No doubt a part of the wonder which is concentrated in the word "Behold," is excited by the unbelieving lamentation of the preceding sentence. Zion said, "The Lord has forsaken me, and my God has forgotten me." How amazed the divine mind seems to be at this wicked unbelief of man! What Can Be More Astounding than the Unfounded Doubts and Fears of God’s Favored People. He seems to say, "How can I have forgotten you, when I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands? How can it be? How dare you doubt my constant remembrance, when the memorial is set upon my very flesh?" O unbelief, how strange a marvel you are! I know not which most to wonder at, the faithfulness of God or the unbelief of his people. He keeps his promise a thousand times, and yet the next trial makes us doubt him. He never fails; he is never a dry well; he is never as a setting sun, a passing meteor, or a melting vapor, and yet we are as continually vexed with anxieties, molested with suspicions, and disturbed with fears, as if our God were fickle and untrue. Here follows the great marvel, That God Should Be Faithful to Such a Faithless People, and that when he is provoked with their doubting, he nevertheless abides true.

Behold! Behold! I say, and be ashamed and confounded for all your cruel doubts of your indulgent Lord. I remarked that the "Behold" in our text is intended to attract particular attention. There is something here worthy of being studied. If you should spend a month over such a text as this, you should only begin to understand it. It is a Gold Mine! There are nuggets upon the surface, but there is richer gold for the man who can dig deep.

I can only indicate the veins of gold, it is for you afterwards in your meditations to follow them out. I beg you, be very careful with the text; lose not a drop of the wine of consolation contained in its precious crystal; be prayerful and anxious to grind forth from this wheat every atom of its fine flour; leave no meal to grow stale in this barrel; drain all the oil from this cruse, for where God sets a "Behold," depend upon it, there is a something that is not to be trifled with, nor to be passed over in indifference.

We pass on now to the next word, "Behold, Ihave engraved you upon the palms of my hands." The Divine Artist, who has been pleased to engrave his people for a memorial, is none other than God himself. Here we learn the lesson which Christ afterwards taught his disciples — "You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you." No one can write upon the hand of God but God himself. Neither our merits, prayers, repentance, nor faith, can write our names there, for these in their goodness extend not unto God so as to write upon his hands. Nor did blind chance or mere necessity of fate inscribe our names; but the living hand of a living Father, unprompted by anything except the spontaneous and omnipotent love of his own heart, wrote the names of his people upon his own hands. How dependent are we upon God then! If my name be in the Lamb’s Book of Life, how ought I to adore the sovereignty of the grace which placed it there! Had it not been there, I could not have inscribed it. Had it not been found in the list, no archangel could by any possibility have inserted it. "What if my name should be left out When you for them shall call?"

Is a black thought to any of us, but when I know that it is not left out, but is written there among the bright spirits chosen of God and precious, how this should make me leap for joy! "Ihave engraved you." Then, again, if the Lord has done it, there is no mistake about it. If some human hand had cut the memorial, the hieroglyphs might be at fault; but since perfect wisdom has combined with perfect love to make a memorial of the saints, then no error by any possibility can have occurred; there can be no erasures, no crossing out of what God has written, no blotting out of what the Eternal has decreed. Fixed, and fixed for ever must be the inscription which is of divine authorship; the powers of darkness cannot erase those everlasting lines. "I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands."

Soul, this is enough to overwhelm you with humble adoration that God should so much as take notice of you. When you receive the daily tokens of Divine care, ought you not to exclaim with David — "When I consider your heavens the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you visit him." But how is it, Lord, that you can go farther than this, and yourself write the names of these insignificant mortals upon your own hands?

"Ihave engraved you." It is wonderful to see how God comes into immediate contact with his saints, and appears in person in all his acts of grace towards them. In other works it is his far-reaching voice, but in the wonders of his grace it is his present hand. In the making of worlds, he stands at a distance and speaks his will; but when he creates saints, and redeems his people, he comes out of his chambers — he rends the heavens and comes down, he reveals himself as a God nigh at hand; he stands over his work as the potter over the clay upon the wheel. It is written, that when he made the heavens and the earth, that "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy;" but I never hear that God sang; there is nothing in the merely material universe to stir the Infinite heart; the work is not dear enough to him, nor so full of satisfaction as the grand work of redeeming love. But when he saved his people — when he created Israel for himself, I hear it said — "He shall rest in his love; he shall rejoice over you with singing." Oh, matchless verse! in which the Eternal Trinity burst forth into sacred song! Do you not catch the strain even now. "I have done it; I have come forth myself out of the secret of my tabernacle wherein I have concealed myself from the gaze of men, and I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands."

Take the next word. We have many wells here out of which we may draw water. "Behold, I haveengraved you." Not, "I will," you see; nor yet, "I am doing it;" it is a thing of the past, and how far back in the past! Oh! the antiquity of this inscription! They take us to the British Museum, and show us most reverend writings, which are the memorials of those hoary ages, which were the first born of the years beyond the flood, but here is an inscription older than them all. Compared with it, Assyrian antiquities, and Egyptian records are things of yesterday. Before the young earth had burst her swaddling bands of mist, yes, before the globe had been begotten, or yon sun had darted his infant arrows, or yon stars had opened their eyes, the Eternal had fixed his eye of love upon his favorites!

Fly back as far as you will, until this present world and all the worlds within the universe slept in the mind of God, like unborn forests in an acorn-cup, and even then you have not reached the time, before all time, when it was first said — "I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands."

"From everlasting to everlasting you are God;" from everlasting to everlasting you are the same, and your people’s names are written on your hands! Yet, methinks, there may be a prophetic reference here to a later writing of the names, when Jesus Christ submitted his outstretched palms to those cruel graving-tools, the nails. Then was it surely, when the executioner with the hammer smote the tender hands of the loving Jesus, that he engraved our names upon the palms of his hands, and today when he points to those wounds, when by faith he permits us to put our fingers into the prints of the nails, he may still say to us — "Deep on the palms of both my hands, I have engraved your name."

Well, Christian, do not these deep things comfort you? Have you no consolation in the ancient things of the everlasting mountains? Does not eternal love delight you? God is no stranger to you; he has known you long before you knew yourself; ay, long before you were curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth, in his book all your members were written, which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them. Known unto God from the foundation of the earth were you; he was always thinking of you; there was never a period when you were not in his mind and on his heart. "I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands."

But the next word is "engraved." My dear friend, The Reverend John Anderson, of Helensburgh, whom I am glad to welcome here to day, told me this morning that while traveling in the east he has frequently seen persons with the portraits of their friends upon their hands, so that wherever they went, as one in this country would carry the portrait of a friend in a brooch or a watch, they carry these likenesses printed on their palms. I said to him, "Surely they would wash out." They might by degrees, he said, but they frequently had them pricked in with strong indelible ink, so that while the palm lasts, there lasts the memorial of the friend. Surely this is what the text refers to. I have engraved you in.

I have not merely printed you, stamped you on the surface, but I have Permanently Cut You into My Hand with Marks Which Never Can Be Removed.

That word "engraved" sets forth the perpetuity of the inscription. Not on the hand of man but on the hand of God is it engraved. Oh! mysterious thought! On that hand immortal and eternal is it dug, engraved in! Our engravers press upon their tools; they tell us how stern the labor when they cut the hard metal to mark each line. And God has thus engraved; with the whole strength of Omnipotence he has leaned upon the tool to Cut Our Names into His Flesh. Was there not such an engraving at Calvary? Is it not written, "It pleased the Father to bruise him; he has put him to grief?"

It is as if eternal strength leaned upon that graving-tool to write the memorial of his chosen people in the hands of Jesus. "I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands." We need not indulge the dark foreboding that we shall be lost, but we may sing with Hammond: "If Jesus is ours we have a true friend, Whose goodness endures the same to the end; Our comforts may vary, our frames may decline; We cannot miscarry; our aid is divine. The hills may depart and mountains remove, But faithful you are O fountain of love! The Father has engraved our names on your hands; Our record, in Heaven eternally stands."

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