Posted on: 10th February 2025

When I was young, and the Bible was read in church beyond the bounds of sanitized lectionary, I heard that ‘ the whole world lies in the hands of the evil one’ (I John 5.19). Coming from under the Blitz, through the war, the holocaust, Hiroshima, into cold war, this text had plausibility. We took it at least half seriously.

Then Billy Graham, a late fruit of American invasion, which won the war and recovered Europe with Marshall Aid, brought us his singing colleague, Bev Shea, to tell us ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’ (see video below). It helped some people to move into the first half of I John 5.19: ‘we know that we are God’s children’ – but does it really cancel out the second half? Who today has the whole world in his hands?

Now we are in the Anthropocene Age, the human impact changing planet Earth, even making it unlivable. We’ve got the whole world in our hands – and we stifle it with plastic and greenhouse gas. What is the ‘we’ that now has this destructive power? We are called to freedom, but use it to indulge ourselves. The God we sideline advises us to serve one another by love, warning that if we go on biting, we will end by consuming one another (Gal. 5.13-15). 

God does not take the world out of our hands, but puts God-self into our hands. God is as he is in Jesus. Don’t risk yourself, unfriendly advisers said to Jesus, Herod means to kill you, as the Herods of the world always do. Jesus had words for ‘that fox’: ‘Today and tomorrow, I am casting out demons and performing cures, and tomorrow I finish my course’ (Luke 13.31-35). Jesus, faithful to his mission, took himself forward into the hands of men, who have their ‘hour, the power of darkness’ (Luke 22.53).

We shall soon be marking the 80th anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He followed Jesus and fell into the hands of evil, and yet found himself in the hands of God, who puts the world and Godself in Jesus into the hands of men. Consequently, ‘sharing the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world’ with Jesus is the core of faithful living (see the letters, 18 July 1944, and 21 July and the poem, Christians and Pagans in Letters and Papers from Prison). 

Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,
For mercy for them sick, sinning, or dead;
All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.

Men go to God when he is sore bestead,
Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead;
Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.

God goes to every man when sore bestead,
Feeds body and spirit with his bread;
For Christians, pagan alike he hangs dead,
And both alike forgiving.