In the hands of God

“I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of My hand.” John 10:28
Here’s a comforting verse for all of us. Do you sometimes feel that life is like a rollercoaster, and you don’t have a seatbelt? You see the drops and loop-the-loops coming up and think, ‘How am I going to make it through this!?’ Jesus tells us here that we are safe in His hands. He goes on to say, “My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of My Father’s hand” (John 10:29). There are two hands in view. We are completely protected from anything that would try to strip us of our salvation. That’s what ‘eternal life’ means – eternal, everlasting, neverending! Certainly there will be temptations, and we will fall into sin, but we don’t lose our salvation over those things. We are still in God’s hands.
There’s another issue that arises here: no-one can snatch us out of God’s hand, but what if we choose to turn our back on Him? Can we revoke our salvation and jump out of His hand ourselves? Calvinists would argue ‘no’, on the basis of ‘once-saved-always-saved’, and say that a person who does this was never saved in the first place. Arminians would say ‘yes’, and some would even go further to say that we need to be careful to keep ourselves in God’s hands, so that we don’t fall out. Scripture clearly tells us we are not in danger of falling out. God isn’t careless with us – He loves us too much to let us go that easily. But can we, by our free will, extract ourselves from His hands? For me the answer is possibly – but once you have known the Lord, why would you want to?