The Curse Reversed

He comes to make His blessing flow/Far as the curse is found (“Joy to the World”)

No longer will there be any curse (Revelation 22:3).

For nearly a century, the Boston Red Sox supposedly lived under a curse.  Having won the World Series in 1918, the Sox owners made a diabolical deal to trade Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1919.  Ruth, nicknamed the “Bambino,” allegedly cursed the Sox for the trade (or something like that), so the “curse of the Bambino” kept the Sox from ever winning the Series again.

Every time the Sox were still in contention late in the season, “Reverse the Curse!” signs would spring up.  Comical public “exorcisms” were offered.  Then the Sox would break the hearts of red Sox Nation … again.

Until, gloriously, in 2004, they won!  It is hard to overestimate the joy that flooded Red Sox Nation.  Grown men wept in the streets!  The victory parade snaked through the streets of Boston; estimates put the crowd at over a million!  The curse broken!

While there may have been a few fans who took the idea of a curse seriously, for the vast majority it was simply a fun feature of local life.  After all, curses aren’t real … right?

In fact, Scripture tells us that all of life is lived under a curse.  It goes all the way back to Genesis 3: having chosen to break faith and break relationship with the Lord, Adam and Eve found themselves under a curse: their labor would hereinafter be toilsome and burdensome.  Child-bearing would be difficult and dangerous.  Human relationships would be shadowed by suspicion, duplicity and deceit.  

And they would die.  To be cursed is to live under the power and dominion of Death.

A curse is like a virus, like malware, like a worm inside every apple we pick, like an infection no one can escape and against which there is neither vaccine nor immunity. Even today, for all our prosperity and success, we live wearying and burdened lives because we live under a curse.

And then we hear and sing these words: “No more let sins and sorrows grow/Nor thorns infest the ground!  He comes to make His blessings flow/Far as the curse is found!”  

The blessing of God undoes the curse of Sin and Death.  The blessing is that God personally comes to our curse-infected world and curse-shadowed lives; in Jesus, God comes to us, as us, for us.  The undoing of the curse began when God invaded the world through a tiny Bethlehem baby; the curse was finally cancelled and destroyed when that Bethlehem boy, now full grown, bore the full weight of the curse on a Roman cross.

All it took to reverse the curse of the Bambino was for the Red Sox finally to win another Series.  What it took to reverse the curse of Sin and Death was God taking both the penalty of our sin and the reality of our death upon himself and, somehow, into himself, so that the blessing of God’s life, life eternal and abundant, might flow to every cursed place, every cursed life.

Every Christmas—and every day in between Christmases—we get to sing of the curse reversed, broken and overcome by overflowing blessing.  Joy breaks in upon the weary world, not because we have finally gotten our acts together, but because God shows up, in person, to bless every least-deserving one of us.

It’s a blessing we get in on.  We get in as recipients and we get in on it as releasers of the blessing to others.  We get to bear witness to the only future the world has ever had, a future described in the final book of Scripture as heaven and earth made new (Revelation 21:1).

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