Reversing the Irreversible

April 3, 2002

In the last basketball game of my sophomore season in college, I tore the anterior cruciate ligament in my left knee. I asked the doctor when it would heal. He said, “Never.” I remember two distinct feelings as I sat in the doctor’s office. There was a feeling of finality--the damage was already done. And there was a feeling of helplessness--there was nothing I could do about it. I learned a tough lesson in the doctor’s office that day: some things in life are irreversible. You can’t untear a ligament and ligaments don’t heal. I’ve also learned from personal experience that you can’t unrun a red light, undelete a document, or unbake cookies!

Some things in life are irreversible, but here’s some good news. Read through the gospels and you’ll discover that Jesus routinely reversed the irreversible. He reversed weather systems. He reversed blindness. He reversed incurable diseases. And on a Sunday morning two thousand years ago, he reversed death itself. Easter is all about reversing the irreversible. Let me take you on a journey through the gospels as we look at three miraculous reversals.

God Destroys the Evidence against Us

Jesus is praying on the Mount of Olives in Luke 22 when a mob comes to arrest him. Verse 49 says, “When Jesus’ followers saw what was going to happen, they said, ‘Lord, should we strike with our swords?’ And one of them struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his right ear.” We know from John’s gospel that the disciple is Peter and the servant’s name is Malchus.

Let me state the obvious. Peter’s in trouble. You don’t cut off someone’s ear and get by with it, especially when that someone is the servant of the high priest. Worse case scenario: Peter gets charged with attempted murder. Best case scenario: he’s charged with assault and battery. But that’s when Jesus intervenes in verse 51. “Jesus answered, ‘No more of this!’ And he touched the man’s ear and healed him.” Jesus reattached an amputated ear. But he does more than that. Jesus destroys the evidence! Imagine Malchus filing suit against Peter. He takes the witness stand and says, “Peter cut off my ear.” The Judge says, “Which ear?” Malchus says, “My right ear.” The Judge says, “It looks fine to me,” and throws out the case for of lack of evidence.

Jesus doesn’t just reverse an amputation. He destroys the evidence. And this isn’t just a story about Peter and Malchus. It’s about you and me and the way God forgives us. Jesus went to the cross to destroy the evidence against us. I John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” When we put our faith in Christ, we are justified--"just as if I’d never sinned.” God forgives and forgets our sin. What a fact! What a feeling!

Supernatural Window of Opportunity

In John 9, Jesus heals a blind man. But this man wasn’t just blind. He was born blind. And there’s a difference. As he himself testified in verse 32, “Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind.” Let me try to explain why.

At birth, our brains begin a process called synaptogenesis. Here’s how it works. As a baby experiences new sights and sounds, the brain begins making new connections called synapses. Almost like the telephone wires that crisscross Washington, DC, billions of synapses crisscross the brain. At birth, each brain cell has about 2500 connections. By the time a baby is six-months old, each brain cell will have about 18,000 connections. A baby’s brain is literally being hardwired for life.

During this process of synaptogenesis, there are natural windows of opportunity. Vision, for example, is primarily wired between birth and eighteen months. Here’s where it gets interesting. According to neurologists, if you were to place a patch over the eye of a newborn baby and leave it there during the first few years of life, that baby would be blind in that eye the rest of their life even if there was no physical deformity or genetic defect. The reason is simple: there would be no synapses or connections between the visual cortex and optical nerve. And once a natural window of opportunity closes, it can’t be reopened.

Back to the blind man in John 9. Ophthalmologists would call his condition irreversible! The natural window of opportunity had closed, but Jesus opened a supernatural window of opportunity. It wasn’t as “simple” as restoring eyesight. Jesus has to “hardwire” this blind man’s brain. It was a miracle of synaptogenesis.

Die-Hard Faith

Let me set the scene. Lazarus is sick. So sick that his sisters send some messengers to tell Jesus. But when Jesus heard the news, John 11:6 says, “He stayed where he was two more days.”

The 64,000 question is: why? You best friend is on his deathbed. You have the power to heal him. Why wait? Jesus explains in verse 3, “It is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” Impossible situations are opportunities for God to reveal His glory. Jesus could have kept Lazarus from dying, but he’d been there and done that. He wanted to reveal more of his glory so he waited till Lazarus had been dead for four days.

Let me make a distinction between two types of faith. Mary had what I’d call “preventative” faith. She believed that Jesus could have prevented Lazarus’ death. “Lord, if you had been here, you could have kept my brother from dying.” The other mourners had “preventative” faith as well. They say in verse 37, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

“Preventative” faith is a good thing. It’s faith in God’s proactive ability to keep things from happening. I think God deserves alot more credit in the “preventative” category than we give him credit for. But there is another level of faith. There is a juxtaposition betwen Mary and Martha.

Martha had “preventative” faith. She says exactly what Mary says, “Lord, if you had been here you could have kept my brother from dying.” But Martha takes it one step further. She says, “I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” That is “die-hard” faith. Her brother has been dead four days and she still believes that God can reverse the irreversible.

I’m a die-hard football fan. And there’s one thing you need to know about a die-hard fans: die-hard fans never give up. It doesn’t matter what the score is or how much time is left in the game, we never stop believing! My wife, Lora, is still trying to figure out this side of me. My team can be down by two touchdowns with two minutes left in the game, but there’s no way we’re turning off the TV. She’ll say, “It’s over,” and I won’t even hear her because I’m imagining scenarios of how we can still win the game. I’m thinking, “All we need to do is score a touchdown, recover an onside kick, throw a Hail Mary, and make the two-point conversion!”

Martha has “die-hard” faith. She never stops believing! Her brother has been dead for four days, but she says, “Even now God will give you whatever you ask.” On one level, this kind of faith seems irrational and illogical. But it’s not irrational or illogical. It’s super-natural. And the super-natural is super-rational and super-logical, or illogical. In other words, it’s beyond our ability to comprehend. But that’s what makes God God. When we try to make God fit into our cognitive box, what we end up with, in the words of A.W. Tozer, is a God who can “never surprise us, never astonish us, never overwhelm us, never transcend us.”

Periods and Commas

A few years ago I heard a message titled God’s Grammar and I’ll never forget one quip. The speaker said, “Never put a comma where God puts a period. And never put a period where God puts a comma.” Jesus said in verse 3, “This sickness will not end in death.” Lazarus dies, but that’s not the end of the story! God turns a period into a comma. Oswald Chambers once said, “Sometimes it looks like God is missing the mark because we are too short-sighted to see what He’s aiming for.”