Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties upon him, because he cares for you.

1 Peter 5:6-7

Consider the concept of “the mighty hand of God.”  This is likely harder to do than we think.  We fallible human beings, so small and minute in the big scheme of things, have trouble wrapping our minds around the power of the storms of nature which our Creator made with His mighty hand.  How much harder would it be for us to grasp the awesomeness of the Being who made the hurricane, tsunami, gales, lightning, thunder, and raging fires!

Bob Winton in his commentary on 1 Peter said the following about the hand of God:

The “hand of God is used to depict the all-powerful might possessed by God.  His power is irresistible; no material force can stand against him; nothing on earth or in the spiritual realm can even begin to equate the omnipotence of the Almighty.  But we can place our complete trust in him.  A child or a deranged person with a loaded gun is to be feared; they are not able to control their faculties and do not comprehend the extreme danger represented by the weapon.  A nuclear weapon in the hands of a terrorist is greatly to be feared!  God, however, possesses all power, but he never uses his power in any dangerous manner.  He never acts arbitrarily or thoughtlessly.  We may safely put our trust in him.

David knew that “your hand, O Lord” would deliver his soul from the wicked  and support him (Ps. 17:13-14; 18:35).  Both David and Christ chose to commit their spirits into God’s hand (Ps. 31:5; Lk. 23:46), as did Stephen (Acts 7:59).  Yet David also recognized that the hand of God was used to harshly discipline the sinner as a rebuke for their transgressions (Ps. 39:8-11).  The discipline given to us by God’s mighty hand is not pleasant, but it serves a righteous purpose which benefits us by motivating us to repent, thus bringing us closer to eternal salvation (Heb. 12:5-14).

It is therefore fitting that Peter exhorts Christians to “humble themselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time he may exalt you…”  He had just directed the church to be subject to their elders (5:5a).  Recognizing that doing so would require humility, he commanded all Christians to “clothe yourselves…with humility toward one another” (5:5b), reminding them that “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (5:5c; cf. Prov. 3:34; James 4:6, 10).  Perhaps Peter remembered the anger which he had felt towards James and John when their mother asked them for exalted places in Christ’s kingdom (Matt. 20:20ff).  Jesus had responded to this indignation by calling the apostles together and saying to them, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.  It shall not be so among you.  But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:25-28).  Perhaps he also remembered his Lord humbly washing his feet over his own protestations and telling him, “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.  For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you” (John 13:1-17).

It goes against human nature to humble ourselves because our first impulse tends to assume that we are right in any given situation.  It certainly goes against our natural worldview to conclude that humility is the only path to exaltation; we tend to think that humble people “finish last.”  It even goes against our nature to “cast all (our) anxieties on (God), because he cares for (us)” (cf. Ps. 37:5; 55:22; Matt. 6:25) since doing so would inherently require us to acknowledge that we can’t do it all on our own.  Yet, this humility is still required of us all, Christians.  Repentance and salvation cannot occur without it.

— Jon