Nail-Scarred Hands

In his superbly crafted poem entitled “The Creation,” famed African-American poet and educator, James Weldon Johnson, uses majestic imagery to explain how God built the cosmos. The Creator’s hands are key to this imagery, as illustrated in the following lines:

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Then God reached out and took the light in His hands, And God rolled the light in His hands Until He made the sun; And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens. And the light that was left from making the sun God gathered it up in a shining ball And flung it against the darkness, Spangling the night with the moon and stars. Then down between the darkness and the light He hurled the world….

As Johnson’s beautiful story unfolds, God, having created the earth and all its faunal and floral inhabitants, ponders what work is yet undone. But not for long, as the poem explains:

Then God sat down On the side of a hill where He could think; By a deep, wide river He sat down; With His head in His hands, He thought and He thought, Till He thought, “I’ll make Me a man."

And so He did. But as the ages rolled by, this creature called man disappointed the one true God of the universe, detracting from His otherwise perfect cosmological craftsmanship. He might have agreed with Mark Twain, who once said, “I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey,” but with serious reservations as to whether there was much refinement. Flooding the earth and starting afresh with Noah and his progeny set things on an even keel for a while, as people were lured less by Lucifer and focused more on loving the Lord. But, oh the stiff-necked human race! Even the chastisement of several centuries in servitude to Babylonian pagans eventually gave way to riotous living, licentiousness, and epicurean libertinism. But God never fails to balance the cosmological equation, and never will. The ultimate solution came some twenty centuries ago when the hands that made everything created the Son of Man in the womb of a virgin. God loves His world — loves it so much that He set in motion a perfect plan to erase evil by offering sin’s ultimate redemption on a cross at Calvary: the agonizing death, burial, and resurrection of His own Son. Here again, hands are key to the most wonderful story ever told. They are the hands of Jesus Christ. Like His Father’s hands, Jesus’ hands wielded unlimited power … power to restore life to the dead, cleanse lepers, open the eyes of the blind, and feed thousands with what should have fed only a few. These hands. Even as the cruel nails pierced them, I believe their Owner’s message to Satan was clear and undeniable: “Devil, you will taste eternal defeat; I taste death, but will arise again to free men from your hateful bondage. Forever, they are protected from you because I hold them in these nail-scarred hands.”