Jesus Turns Things Around

This is an article on Easter from pastor Mark Batterson. It's a good word in the middle of an Easter week.

 "One of my earliest movie memories is the 1978 version of Superman. I remember sitting in the theater, and honestly, any movie from the 70s is a little disappointing at this point when you show it to your kids, it doesn’t have all the special effects, but when I was a kid, it was pretty amazing. I remember one scene in particular. Lois Lane is driving through some desert terrain and there was an earthquake and this earthquake swallows up her car and Superman can’t get there in time to prevent it from happening. So Superman gets super angry and flies a counter rotational around the earth at supersonic speed reversing the rotation of the earth, thereby turning back time. Now, I know that on a scientific level, there are problems with that. For example, the earth spins on its axis at about 1,000 miles an hour, so if Superman had really done that, he would have saved Lois but everybody else would have died of whiplash! But don’t you wish you could do that? All of us, there are things that we’ve said, things we’ve done, and if we could just, oh, excuse me for a second, I’ve got to fly around the earth at supersonic speed and I’ll be right back and we’ll pick up before I left off. See, there’s a part of us that makes it difficult for us to deal with things we can’t seem to change. The truth is, the arrow of time points in one direction, some things are irreversible.

The second law of thermodynamics, what’s done is done. Cars rust, toys break, ice cream melts, people die. There are some things you can’t undo. But here’s the good news of the gospel. Here’s where the gospel meets the reality of our lives that we don’t want to accept. But here’s the good news, you don’t have to accept it because there is a higher reality in play, because if you read the gospels, what you discover is this, Jesus routinely reversed the irreversible! He reversed weather systems, He reversed blindness. There were no nerves between the optic nerve and the visual cortex, nothing there, no one had ever heard of a man being born blind and then receiving sight, but Jesus reverses things that are irreversible. He reverses leprosy. 2,000 years ago, He reversed death itself. So what we celebrate is the fact that there is a God who is higher than, who is bigger than the universal laws and the universe that He has created. What God accomplished on that resurrection morning is He defeated death, He reversed the irreversible. And I would suggest that that is exactly what He came to do in your life. He came to reverse the effects of sin, we’ll talk about that in a moment. He came to reverse the effects of death. That’s who He is and what He does."