The Repair That Never Stops

In 2015, three scientists shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering something remarkable happening inside every living cell. Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar mapped the mechanisms by which your DNA — a molecule constantly under assault from radiation, chemicals, and simple metabolic errors — repairs itself thousands of times every single day.

Your genetic code sustains roughly 100,000 damaging events each day. Left unrepaired, those breaks and mutations would unravel life itself. But specialized proteins move along the double helix like skilled craftsmen, identifying the damage, excising the broken section, and rebuilding it — letter by letter — using the opposite strand as a template. The original design is always present, ready to restore what was lost.

This is a picture of what God does with us.

Sin damages us at a level so deep it touches the very image we were made in. The brokenness can feel absolute, irreversible — like something essential has been corrupted beyond recovery. But the Almighty is not watching from a distance. Like those repair enzymes, He moves into the deepest places of the soul, restoring what our failures and wounds have broken. The original design He wrote into us has not been erased. It is still there, held in the hands of the One who formed us.

Redemption is not God learning to live with a damaged version of you. It is God insisting — patiently, persistently, at every level — on restoring the original.