I have too often said “even God can’t change the past”. Now I’m not so sure.

I read Mark 7 for family devotions to the kids. The chapter ends with Jesus healing a deaf man. The text talks about the fact that the man could not hear, and could not speak plainly.

We watched this season of The Amazing Race where one of the contestants was a deaf man racing with him mother. This prompted a number of conversations with the children regarding deafness and why he spoke as he did. Since he couldn’t hear himself speak he wasn’t able to develop speech patterns that we are accustomed to. The physical abnormality cause the verbal abnormality through the process of history.

In the story Jesus not only heals the man’s ears, but he miraculously reverses history by causing he man to speak properly, instantly. This struck me for the first time. Jesus actually accomplished in the man the undoing of his broken history. Jesus undoes the history caused by his physical deafness, not only restoring (redemptively) that which was broken likely from prior to birth, but simultaneously reversing this history of loss that resulted in his inability to speak.

To me this gives amazing comfort. So much of our loss, so much of our pain is an accumulation of broken history. Tim Keller often quotes CS Lewis in saying that God will make all that is sad come untrue, but this is the first Biblical passage where I see it clearly illustrated.

God can even change the past.