SEAL UPON HIS HEART AND HAND

SEAL UPON HIS HEART AND HAND

“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death: jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame”, tells the Shulamite to the king in verse 6 of Chapter 8 in the Song of Songs. Dear bride of Christ, you have to beseech Christ to set you as a seal upon His heart. Christ, the divine Shepherd has a huge flock of sheep all over the world. He knows and calls each one of them by name. The seal of a person is set on an object by engraving his image or name. It cannot be erased. You should wish to be a seal upon the heart of Christ. These days, people want their seals to be affixed on worldly possessions. The servants of God want their names or seals to be engraved upon their ministries or institutions so that their children may inherit the same. Even God’s people crave for worldly recognition like conferment of doctorates and want their names to adorn the hall of fames in the Christian world. Alas! They don’t want their seals to be set upon the heart of Christ. If your seal were set upon the heart of Christ and not upon the heart of the world, you would become very intimate to Christ so as to hear His voice. These days, we don’t hear His voice with the result that we give to the world not His message but our own message. We forget that we are His prophets to the world. As a pastor, you don’t give His message to His sheep because your seal is not set upon His heart. If Christ sets you as a seal upon His heart, you would hear His heartbeat and heart-cry for the backsliding members of your church, and for the poor saints of your church.

Secondly, you should wish to be a seal upon His arm so as to secure His power. You have to demonstrate God’s power to this unbelieving world like Elijah did on the Mount Carmel. Prophet Isaiah lamented, “to whom the arm of the Lord is revealed” (Is.53: 1). Through you only, the arm of the Lord is to be revealed. God graves your image or seal on the palms of His Hand (Is.49: 16). God’s power for miracles and healing is released through your seal on His Hand. Christ, the Word, through Whom the world was created will perform the miracles of creation through your evangelistic ministry. People who have lost their organs due to diseases or accidents and who are physically handicapped since birth would get new organs created through your ministry. For this, you have to beseech Christ to set you as a seal upon His arm. You need not either attend any training course of some evangelist or undertake strenuous fast just to receive the gifts of healing from Christ. You should simply ask Him by faith to set you as a seal upon His arm.

You have to seek your seal upon His Heart and Arm for love is strong as death and jealousy as cruel as the grave. Your desire for seal should spring out of your love for Christ, which should be evident from your devotion and obedience to Him. Love is strong as death. The strength of love is compared with death. Death is so strong that every human being whether rich or poor cannot escape its power. Likewise, love is so strong that it transcends barriers of race, religion, nationality and status. Love is so strong that it brought down the Heavenly Son of God. Jealousy is as cruel as grave. Here, jealousy is interlinked to love. It does not mean envy. It broadly means the state of being anxiously heedful or of mistrustfully vigilant or of brooking no unfaithfulness as per Chamber 20th Century Dictionary. The Tamil Version of the Bible means a kind of love, which brooks no dilution. The kind of love, which the Shulamite demands of her beloved, is the one which is steady and undiluted and which is cruel as the grave. The grave is so cruel that it swallows our dead dear ones and ends our earthly life once and for all. Likewise, the jealousy for love is so severe that it blinds the eyes of the person who loves another person and buries every thing, which stands in the way of love. It is not that kind of love, which is unsteady, unstable and wavering. It is not like a flickering flame. It is that kind of love, which is always stable and steady, and is like the flame, which emits from the burning coal. This kind of love brought down into the sin stinking world the Holy One from the Heaven because the love of Christ for us is strong as death and His jealousy for love toward us is cruel as the grave and is so severe that it cannot be quantified and expressed in terms of human language. That is why the divine Author uses the words like death, grave, flame etc., to express the severity of the love of Christ.

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