The Revert Command

Every software developer knows the sinking feeling. You've pushed code to production — the live version of an application that real users depend on — and suddenly the error reports flood in. You introduced a catastrophic bug. And because of how version control works, that mistake is now permanently stamped into the history of the codebase with your name attached to it.

In Git, the version control system used by virtually every professional software team in the world, you cannot simply erase a bad commit. The record of what you did is immutable. But there is a command called `git revert` that does something remarkable: it doesn't delete the bad commit. It creates a new commit on top of it — one that undoes all the damage. The history still shows the original mistake, timestamped and attributed, but the present state of the code is fully restored. What was broken now works.

This is a precise picture of how God redeems us. He doesn't pretend our failures never happened. He doesn't minimize what we've done or scrub our record clean with a polite fiction. Instead, He writes something new on top of it — the atoning work of Christ — that fully reverses the damage. The old commit still sits in the archive of history, but it no longer controls the present. We are not trapped forever by our worst push to production.

Paul never forgot that he had once hunted Christians. But God had written something new over that history, and Paul spent the rest of his life marveling at it.

Your mistakes are real. But so is the revert command of grace.