“One will say, ‘I belong to the LORD’; another will call himself by the name of Jacob; still another will write on his hand, ‘The LORD’s,’ and will take the name Israel.” Isaiah 44:5.
When I was a teenager I was crazy about this guy during my eighth grade year. It was the spring with warm days and beautiful evenings. I remember lying on our trampoline one night and decided to do something that would define me as his girlfriend. The next day I spelled out his name with scotch tape on my stomach and laid out for the sun to tan the exposed areas. (Weird, right?) Of course after a few days of tanning, his name marked my stomach for the rest of the summer. We broke up a few weeks after this great idea.
How many times do we mark our lives with worldly things that define us? We highlight who we are as we build a certain image defining ourselves as lovers of the world. The transformation between who we are before God marks us and who we become after His touch is life transforming. Our passage this morning names three ways we show the world that we are lovers of God. We proclaim with our mouth through testimonies of how God has chosen us, loved and carried us. We replace who we were with the reality of who we have become. (Jacob means supplanter which means one who takes the place of something used, inferior, or irrelevant.) Our actions will ‘write upon our hands’ the presence of God in our lives.
Our new position in Christ will redefine us, re-establish us and redirect our lives. He will place upon our lives the mark of Christ and no matter how dark our valleys appear, His mark will always be predominant. The beauty of this choosing is the knowledge that before we wrote Him upon our lives He had already marked us as His. ‘See, I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands.’ Isaiah 49:16.
Luckily my markings faded by the next summer but our names will always be etched in the palm of our LORD and Savior…Our names will never fade.
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