Articles
God and His Reversals
Last week, as you know, we spoke of sin and its reversals. This week I want to share with you the idea of God and His reversals. Sin disrupted God’s good creation in Genesis. God saw everything that He had made was very good and the moment man decided that he knew better than God and that he wanted to follow his own desires, the pattern radically shifted. This pattern brought about a significant amount of pain and consequences including death (spiritual and physical).
It should go without saying, but physical death cannot remotely begin to compare to the spiritual alienation we achieve when we sin and act wickedly against God. Things changed drastically from good to bad, but God had a plan and He began to show this through various ways. The story of Joseph is not without its fair share of pain and excitement. Joseph experienced 3 major trials in his life that really impacted him, no doubt.
Yet, despite these painful circumstances where all the odds were heavily stacked against him, God reversed them, and Joseph ascended and grew to be a powerful leader in Egypt. No one could have seen this coming, but God is a God of reversals and He can do anything even what seems impossible in the face of evil and pain. Certainly, we could go on forever citing all the stories of reversals in the OT where God did the impossible and unexpected. Jonah was saved even though he was thrown into the raging seas. Hannah praises God because of His ability to do the impossible.
There are many more like these, but the greatest picture of God’s reversals is seen in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ! When Jesus was condemned to death and crucified by the hands of evil men, the devil thought he had won. He thought he defeated God by killing Jesus. Little did he know that God would reverse that action. Peter on the day of Pentecost boldly stated that Jesus was crucified by godless men with and evil intent, but God raised Him up according to the plan He had since the beginning (Gen. 3:15).
There is no greater reversal than Jesus’ resurrection. Many people fear death and we understand death is final and it is the thing that most people fear. Yet through Jesus’ resurrection He assures that we will rise from the dead just as He dead. We have no reason to fear death if our trust and our relationship is with Him. God can reverse anything, and He is capable of doing the impossible. How great is the God we serve!
