On Good Friday, we remembered Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice as Gabe reminded us how the hope of the Cross was an exchange and reversal of the sin that entered our story because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. When a situation in life looks good for nothing, God can turn it around into something good.
The words of Genesis 1:1 of ‘In the beginning’ is echoed again in John 1:1 and bring us to a pinnacle of something great that causes us to lean in and pay attention, much like our fairy tales ‘Once upon a time’, inviting us into a mystery. In the beginning, God created everything by His Word and in the beginning, was the Word. When God speaks, even nature obeys and after He had created everything out of nothing, He declared that it was all good.
Then when God created Adam, He didn’t just speak, but He leaned into the dirt with intimacy and breathed life into him. Then because it was not good to be alone, He pulled a rib from Adam’s side and fashioned Eve from His breath. God steps into our nothingness and does the same for us. God can awaken your dead destinies, and give you a fresh start and a new beginning, for He is in the business of rewriting stories that have gone wrong, into something good.
During that Passion week when Jesus entered Jerusalem, His followers were expecting their Messiah to overrule the Romans and take control of the city, but it didn’t play out as they had expected. On that awful Friday when Jesus was betrayed, denied, beaten, mocked and crucified, God reversed the narrative and turned it into something good. We are reminded too of our own false intimacy and fickleness in that there is a bit of Judas and Peter in each of us.
Just like Jesus was examined and passed around to be found guilty, so too were lambs brought to the temple to be examined and found to be with no blemish before they would be accepted as a worthy sacrifice. This was the small detail that the enemy had missed, thinking that when Jesus declared ‘It is finished’ that he had won and was ready to applause. Yet, that worst day in history became the best day in history, in that when Satan thought it was finished and Jesus had died, grace continued counting and never stops. Jesus was the second Adam whose side was also pierced to bring out a worthy bride. Even when we don’t deserve it, God is rewriting our story, bringing good out of our nothing. He continues to create good out of something bad and waits to do the same for you. If you feel taken out by the enemy today, feeling defeated in your weakness, with nothing left to give, ready to give up, or feel like you are good for nothing, call on God to lift you up into a new story of something good.