No insignificant people

My God, with His lovingkindness, will meet me.
Psalm 59:10, RV of 1901

No insignificant people
Amy Carmichael

To some of us, there often comes such a sense of the vastness of things and of our own insignificance that it can be a shaking thing. It can even shake our faith in the truth that our Father regards with compassion even the fall of a single sparrow.

To me, one of the proofs that God’s hand is behind and all throughout this marvelous Book we know as the Bible is the way it continually touches upon this very fear in us – the fear that we are so insignificant as to be forgotten. That we are nothing. Unconsciously, His Word meets this fear, and answers it – not always by direct statement, but often by giving a simple, loving story.

Daniel, for instance, was so overwhelmed by this supernatural vision of the vast, majestic march of history and the glory of the Lord that his physical strength vanished – until “a hand touched me” (Daniel 8:8-10).

John, looking through the thin veil of time into eternity, saw his Lord – the Lord he had seen pierced – now holding in His hand seven stars. John declares, “I fell at His feet as though dead.” Immediately – just as though this fallen one mattered more than the seven stars, as though there were no stars – “He placed His right hand on upon me (Revelation 1:16-17).

Isn’t it beautiful that there was no rebuke at all for their human weakness? And there never is a rebuke for our weaknesses either. “The soul of the wounded calls for help, and God does not regard it as foolish” (Job 24:12, Rotherham).

He comforts. He lays His right hand on the soul wounded by weariness, or fear, or any kind of weakness at all. And He says, as if that one were the only soul in the universe:

O man, greatly beloved, fear not: peace be unto thee. Be strong – yea, be strong! (Daniel 10:19, Rotherham)

Alleluia!