Cutting off Your Hand

“I would give me right arm for XXX”, we carelessly say. It’s hyperbolic; few of us would give our right arms for anything, if the exchange were for real. What about one’s right hand? Julija Adlesic, a 22-year-old Slovenian woman, sawed her right hand off last year in order to claim insurance pay-outs and disability payments valued at about £900k. That’s a lot of money, but is it worth a right hand? Suspicious insurance companies tipped off prosecutors who found her boyfriend had been searching prosthetic hands only a few days before the ‘accident’. Both of them are now in prison, denied all compensation, and Adlesic still lacks a hand. What a fool. Even if her fraud had succeeded, she would have qualified as one of the world’s stupidest people.

The Lord Jesus taught in Mark 9:

If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched—where

‘Their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’

Ms Adlesic removed her hand in order to sin, so she gets no credit even here. In any event, I do not think the Lord is counselling self-mutilation. Yet if our eyes, hands or feet cause us to sin, then we’d have been better off without them. Don’t cut off your body parts: rather, live lives pleasing to God. Adlesic is a foolish woman, yet there are bigger fools about with both hands intact whose rejection of Christ will prove far costlier.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay