“What are these wounds in your hands?… those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.”
Zechariah 13:6
How many have been wounded by their friends? I mean physical wounding. We might get wounded in our hearts, we might get upset by the things people say to us, but wounded in our hands? How many people have had that happen to them?
Over the time I was presenting the God’s Awesome Book seminar, I would ask the audience which cumulatively numbered in the tens of thousands, if they had ever been:
- Wounded in their hands
- Wounded in the hand(s) by their friends.
Only one person in all of that time confessed to the first category. No one ever responded to being wounded in the hands by their friends. In fairness, the one who responded said it was his brother who wounded him in the hand. He said his younger brother was holding a sharp knife and he tried to take it from him but the brother who was holding the handle drew it quickly away and sliced him across his right hand. He held up his right hand to show the scar as evidence. I suppose one could class the brother as a friend, but perhaps not at that moment in time.
You can ask your friends that same question. Have they ever been wounded in the hand by a friend or relative?
Let’s forget us for a moment. For Jesus let’s say it was a one in twelve chance. If we take that prophecy, Jesus had twelve friends, there was a chance that one in twelve would betray him. Let’s keep the maths simple – one in ten. One in every ten people will have wounds in their hands as a result of what friends did to them. I suggest to you that is inconceivable. These are just guesstimates but you will see where I am heading with this as we go through this series. There will come a point where the maths will shock you.
Let’s allow a probability factor of 1:10