The God of Great Reversals

It is common today to look at our culture and our world, and despair that things are bad. "Look how far we our nation has fallen," we cry. "Look how feeble and worldly the church has grown." The temptation is the same temptation of the people of God throughout history: the temptation to make what is presented to our immediate senses greater than our God. 

We are not so much different from the Israelites in the time of the Exodus. For years I have marveled at the seeming idiocy of the people. What other generation witnessed more incredible acts of God than the plagues and the parting of the red sea? Time and time again they saw with their very eyes the supernatural hand of God. And with all of that in their recent memory, when finally on the door step of the promised land they somehow are filled with despair: "There we saw the giants; and we were like grasshoppers in their sight." How could anyone, after witnessing what that generation witnessed, doubt that God could not do the same as He had with the whole Egyptian army? I am left astounded. 

And yet we do the same thing. There is a tendency to make the visible, the seen, bigger than it really is. As Stephen Nichols writes, "What we need today, more than sight, is vision. Seeing, in our day, easily leads to fear. In fact, this has been the case through most of the ages. One of the things that separated the prophets of Israel from the people of Israel was the difference between sight and vision. The people saw the temporal, and they could not get past what they were seeing. God granted the prophets vision of the eternal, which towered above and overshadowed the temporal." (Nichols, 3)

The truth is we are all too much alike those Israelites of old. We too allow what we see in the immediate to drive us to fear and defeatism. What we need is vision rather than sight. We need Spiritual eyes to see beyond the manifold obstacles and downward trends in our day, and see the power of God.

Christianity is the story of great reversals. As I write this, the day before Resurrection Sunday, I think back to what must have been the bleakest day in history. Good Friday saw the brutal death of Jesus Christ, now "Holy Saturday" has dawned and He is gone. It really happened. The disciples and the women are left coming to terms with the new normal. Jesus died. He was just a man after all. All the promises, the miracles, the crowds--it was all for nothing. 

But we know Sunday is coming, and this is just like our God to make the most dazzling dawn follow the blackest night. He is a God of great reversals. He is a God who breaths dust to life. Who turns hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. Who makes a threefold denier the rock upon which the church was built. Who makes the church's chief persecutor its apostle. Who makes a full tomb empty.

This resurrection tendency in Christianity is not only reflected through out our Bible and our creeds, but also throughout church history. When things are thought dead, then there is reformation. When nations seem to have have finally killed the last of the saints, there, in their very blood is new life. As William Gurnall said:

"Yea, what though the church were like Jonah in the whale's belly, swallowed up to the eye of reason by the fury of men, yet dost [thou] not remember [that] the whale had not power to digest the prophet? O be not too quick to bury the church before she be dead. Stay while Christ tries his skill before you give it over; bring Christ by your prayers to its grace, to speak a resurrecting word." 

Let us look no longer to the many visible warning signs of the church's demise. May we allow a spirit of defeatism no more. Instead, may we look to the One who is making all things new, praying that in our own cultural night, a marvelous dawn would lie just beneath the horizon. That God in his mercy would bring a time of revival that would shake the foundations of our communities and bring life and breath to these dry bones. He has done it before, why can't he do it again?

"At the heart of our faith is the glory of the resurrection of Jesus. The same God who brought the universe into being out of nothing and 'calls into being that which does not exist' is the God who gives life to the dead and makes the dry bones live. There is a moment when all our 'under the sun' estimates appear both realistic and persuasive, and we should never be other than realistic. But then, when God speaks and acts, everything is changed and nothing is the same. With the glory of the resurrection at the center of our faith, and the long story of the church's decline and renewal behind us, it is no cliche but a conviction that the darkest hour is just before the dawn."(Guinness, 131)
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Nichols, Stephen. A Time For Confidence: Trusting God in a Post-Christian Society; Reformation Trust. 2017. Pg 3.

Guinness, Os. Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times. IVP Books, 2014. Pg 131.