22 april 2025 www.goodnewsfl.org Good News • South Florida Edition YOU ASK WHY Jesus Came to Reverse the Curse! “No longer will there be any curse . . . ‘for the old order of things has passed away’” (Revelation 22:3, 21:4). This month we celebrate Easter, and let me make something perfectly clear – EASTER IS FOR EVERYONE but not EVERYONE IS FOR EASTER! Easter is for everyone who, by grace through faith, will acknowledge Jesus as the crucified and risen Savior of the world, confess and repent of their sin, and receive the forgiveness of God the Father and Jesus as Lord over their lives. If this is you, oh what a word of encouragement I have for you this month. There is a time coming when there will no longer be any curse in the universe, for the old order of things has passed away. But before that day when Jesus returns and consummates His Kingdom completely, Jesus is reversing the curse inside of each one of us. And it all started on the day that God raised us from death to life and we surrendered control of our lives to Him. The curse The curse was a result of the rebellion of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. God gave paradise to our first parents with only one prohibition and sure enough, they did what they were told not to do and plunged all of creation into a cosmic curse. God first pronounced His curse upon Satan for deceiving and tempting the woman to turn away from God. Next, God cursed the woman, increasing her suffering in childbirth, followed by the man, who would live a life of toil amongst the thorns and thistles. It was, in a phrase, paradise lost. Together, they made filthy what was clean, bad what was good, and dead what was alive. But God did not leave them in their sin, sorrow and separation. He promised to send One who would be able to reverse the curse in Genesis 3:15. Our redeemer Jesus, the Son of God, who left the throne room of heaven, came into this world to reverse the curse by taking upon Himself the punishment that we deserved. His sinless life, sacrificial death, and supernatural resurrection satisfied the wrath and judgment of God and destroyed the works of the devil, ultimately becoming the death of death. Paul writes in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us – for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’” Jesus has made a way for us to get back into a right relationship with God. When we transfer our trust to Christ, we are given the first fruit of the reversed curse . . . our justification – peace with God. This was the first thing lost by Adam and Eve when they sinned. They were in fear of God and on the run away from Him, hiding in the bushes. But Jesus has reversed this curse for every child of God. Yet, it will not be complete until we get to the other side of the grave or until the day Jesus returns on the clouds of heaven. Our experience So how should this truth instruct our lives? We need to remember that inasmuch as the curse has been reversed when Jesus conquered the grave, we will continue to experience the curse on our way into glory. As my friend Steve Brown likes to say, “The dragon has been slain, but his tail still swishes.” And every time we encounter one of those “swishes” we feel the sting of sin. No matter how long we have been walking with the Lord, we are still broken people living in a broken world and things don’t always go the way we hope or expect them to go. When we find ourselves experiencing a bit of the curse in some area of our life experience, we need to be reminded that the day is coming when no longer will there be any curse. In the new heavens and the new earth, the filthy will have been made clean, the bad will have been made good, and the dead will have been made alive in Christ! The curse came upon Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden when they refused to believe God about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent got them to question what God had said. But what started in unbelief, is reversed by belief in Jesus as the One who came to reverse the curse. You can rise above May that promise empower you to rise above the challenges of daily living and the storm winds of life, personally, professionally, and relationally, knowing that He who began a good work in you will one day bring it to completion. Oh, by the way, as I come to the end of this word of encouragement to you know this: the ending of the Easter story is found in the fact that there is no ending. It goes on forever and ever, because the One who is life, has given all who are His, eternal life, having reversed the curse by conquering, once and for all, sin, Satan, and our last enemy death itself. Happy Easter. This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN! Dr. Tommy Boland is senior pastor of Cross Community Church in Deerfield Beach (www.thecrosscc.org). He blogs regularly at tommyboland.com. - Dr. Tommy Boland - Pastor, Cross Community Church Image of Adam and Eve, taken in a church in the city of Kropyvnytskyi in 2019. Ukraine
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