Lazarus

32Therefore when Mary came to where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you would have been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” 33When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews weeping who came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled, 34and said, “Where have you laid him?” They told him, “Lord, come and see.” 35Jesus wept. 36The Jews therefore said, “See how much affection he had for him!” 37Some of them said, “Couldn’t this man, who opened the eyes of him who was blind, have also kept this man from dying?” 38Jesus therefore, again groaning in himself, came to the tomb. Now it was a cave, and a stone lay against it. 39Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of him who was dead, said to him, “Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days.” 40Jesus said to her, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed, you would see God’s glory?” 41So they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying. Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, “Father, I thank you that you listened to me. 42I know that you always listen to me, but because of the multitude standing around I said this, that they may believe that you sent me.” 43When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44He who was dead came out, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Free him, and let him go.”

We know that when winter passes and spring comes, new buds break out on dry branches and shoots come up out of frozen ground. We know that shoots will come up next year too, probably because the order of nature has never once broken faith with us. This world God created circles on in the order he fixed. God’s law, unchanging always, is what gave us that trust.

For a person to be trusted by God as nature is trusted is a very important thing. Being trusted by parents and children, by pastor and believers, by neighbor and neighbor is evidence that you have shown them something unchanging. To be trusted like this you have to live a life that is always the same. A person who acts lightly on their own ideas and feels no great sense of sin about breaking God’s law can never in the end be trusted.

And yet, because God has kept his promises without change from the time he created the world until now, people are not afraid of him. In human relationships we grow tense and careful around someone whose moods swing and change sharply. But when someone treats people with an unchanging heart, we see that at first they are met with thanks, and as time goes on they are taken for granted. Such a person is a fool, and has no future.

In just this way, God treated people with the same character always, and people forgot to give thanks and did not fear him. They began to treat him not as a God to be feared but as a God shut up in heaven. But God is not shut up in heaven. He is the one who hears and feels with you and helps you in everything you are thinking and saying and doing right now. If you serve God as one who helps only when you want him to, he is no different from the idols the people of the world believe in.

People want to see the God they cannot see, and that is why churches and pastors are working to make a God who can be seen. They preach that if you live with positive thinking, good things will happen, and they teach that if you hold a goal and run hard, God will certainly bring your dreams and your vision about. Because they are taught they must have dreams and vision, everyone hangs on God trying to raise their own value so as to achieve some grand dream.

Friends, I hope you will not misunderstand what I am saying. A person must live with positive thinking in order to see God’s leading from the brighter side and to grow. It is also true that holding a dream and a vision, making plans and praying lets you understand God’s heart more deeply. But if what people want has nothing to do with Jesus Christ and is only for themselves, then however hard they live there is a problem.

A believer’s end is not this world but entering God’s kingdom. So believers must have the positive thinking that sees the world rightly through God’s word, and must have dreams and vision for God’s kingdom. If you say we should have dreams because Joseph dreamed and his dream came about, then you must also teach that in order for that dream to come about Joseph first sat in the place of death, and that the pain he suffered in prison has to be borne first. However positive a person’s thinking is, if it is not for the sake of faith they will only be recognized as a person of good temperament, and you should know that it has nothing at all to do with God. Dreams and vision that use God to raise your own value in the world are all garbage. It is not using God for my dream and my vision; it is working with dreams and vision for God’s sake, and then he will bless that faith.

Only by getting God interested in my life this way can I hold a bigger dream, and hold on to positive thinking in the middle of any hardship or suffering. But many believers mistake him for a God met only at worship in church, a God sought out when a problem too hard to solve comes up. Only when you receive God as one who rejoices with you and agonizes with you at every time and in every place, in joy and in sorrow, does life grow rich and strength come.

Where is your God right now? Is he stuck on a throne in heaven, coming only when you call him? Or is he a Father who hears even your groaning, and takes an interest, and helps?

Jesus said that God is greater than all, so no one can snatch a child out of the Father’s hand. What Jesus meant by *no one* includes the power of this world, and possessions, and death, and Satan too. Satan tried to shut Lazarus, God’s child, into death, and Jesus, who is life, showed us the miracle of pulling him out of the middle of it.

John 11:15

15I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, so that you may believe. Nevertheless, let’s go to him.”

When Jesus heard that Lazarus had fallen mortally ill, he deliberately delayed two more days by the Jordan, and only after confirming that Lazarus was completely dead did he set out for Bethany. He waited until Lazarus died in order to show that not only Lazarus but every person is a dead man who cannot shake off death. By raising a Lazarus who was completely dead, he meant to teach his disciples that the owner of life is Jesus himself. You must understand that Jesus’ thinking is different from people’s. If you want a God who helps like a servant every time you suffer, you will be as stubborn as the sick man at the pool of Bethesda, who met Jesus, the owner of life, and still insisted on getting into the pool.

What I want to say to you is this: do not believe in Jesus Christ out of your own need; believe in him and receive him as the owner of life. Jesus waited until Lazarus died because he had to teach his disciples through that event that he is the owner of life. If you too do not believe that Jesus is the owner of life, God will wait, as he did with Lazarus, until you die.

When I was being trained in faith, I too stayed up all night praying for God to send someone to help whenever a problem came, and I fasted for money. Then I went through suffering that no human being could possibly resolve, and I came to see how extravagant and how foolish a prayer for money and a prayer for someone to be sent really are. I found myself still standing at the center of every problem, commanding God and simply pestering him to solve it. I had not let go of human righteousness or of my pride, and I was insisting that God move according to my orders. Of course you must pray for help in solving a problem; but you must first grasp God’s will in it — what he wants you to be thankful for and what he wants you to learn through this.

If you cannot see the God who leads you along a wise road, if you insist that he answer according to your plan and try only to fix what is in front of your eyes, you will never know the Lord’s great and vast plan. It grieves me to see people so busy complaining that things did not go to their plan that they lose the Lord who is walking on ahead of them. Let go of the idea that things must go to your plan, live obeying the road God is leading you along, and you will receive astonishing grace. A child who accepts that a parent always judges rightly does not insist on their own ideas. If you believe God always leads along the right road, then even when suffering comes you will not lose heart or betray him or grow greedy. Stand at the center of suffering with God in that spirit, and Jesus Christ looms larger than the problem; doubt and unease fall away, and you can live a far wiser and freer life.

John 11:25-26

25Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies. 26Whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Jesus said plainly that her brother would rise again, and Martha could not let go of her own belief that he would rise later, not now, which is why she did not understand his words exactly. Shut inside the world and human limits, unable to believe the words of the Lord standing in front of her, who is the resurrection and the life — that is what a human being is. Jesus is saying he will raise him now, and Martha understands it as Lazarus rising on the last day; breaking through that is this hard.

I wonder whether you have had this sort of experience. The book plainly says the object is shaped like a triangle, but every object you have seen until now has been a square, and so you look at the word *triangle* and read *square* to the last. When you hear the truth while bound to worldly common sense and knowledge, then however right the word is, your thinking does not change, so in the end the truth only circles around outside your heart.

Martha and Mary had heard a great deal of Jesus’ teaching and had seen miracles with their own eyes, and they could not step over the limits they had set for themselves. What is more, they were full of resentment that Jesus had come late, and so they refused his word. That faith which had seen the widow’s son and the synagogue ruler’s daughter raised, rejoiced greatly, and trusted and leaned on the Lord — once it became my problem, my brother dying, thanksgiving turned into blame and praise turned into complaint and grievance.

Do you see the size of the vessel with which a human being believes God? Whatever the problem, we can be generous about it if someone else is going through it, and can pray for them in faith and give them counsel. But once it becomes my problem, even the way I see it changes. I who counseled someone to lean on God when it was another person’s affair cannot bear to hear the same words when they are said to me. The very words I used to rebuke someone who blamed God — why can you not believe him? — feel like judgment when I hear them, and put me in a bad mood and harden my heart. This is exactly the wicked nature of a human being full of sin.

When Jesus asked where they had laid Lazarus, the Jews, instead of answering, blamed him for not coming sooner and saving Lazarus. If they had believed Jesus was the Messiah they would have thanked him for coming even now; but they did not believe, and that is why they poured out unfiltered unbelief — you came after Lazarus died, so there is nothing you can possibly do. Behavior like this is the sin of mocking Jesus Christ.

Do you look at the behavior of the Jews and Mary and Martha and think that they truly believed in Jesus? They were believing in a God they had shut up inside their own ideas. They cannot entrust anything, because they think God absolutely cannot do what they cannot do, and God cannot solve the suffering they cannot overcome.

What kind of God do you believe in? Do you truly believe that he created this universe with a word, made a person out of dust and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils? If you have that faith, why are you living in agreement with people who say Jesus absolutely cannot raise him? Why, while confessing with your mouth that he is the living God, do you not believe that he raises the dead and raises a dead problem back to life and answers? Why do you not kill your own thinking, your own righteousness and your own pride, and come near to God? Why, knowing that Jesus raises you only when human righteousness dies, are you thrashing about in a world that is vanity of vanities? The kingdom of Christ is exactly the kingdom where you live forever only by dying.

When Jesus told them to take away the stone from the tomb, Martha complained again that he had been dead four days and there would be a smell. Martha’s thinking was a settled conviction that even a Jesus who can work miracles absolutely could not raise her dead brother. However much he is the Messiah, she says, he is already dead and there is a smell — how can he be raised? — and in doubting she commits a great sin. Lazarus, rotting and stinking and shut in a tomb, is Martha’s own portrait; how staggering it must have been for Jesus to watch her complain without knowing it.

Before we met Jesus Christ we too had not received the forgiveness of sin, so we were shut in death, and our whole bodies were bound with the cords of sin and we lived at Satan’s orders. It is no different at all from Lazarus shut in a tomb with his whole body bound. Friends, breathing is not the same as being alive.

Martha did not like it that a Jesus who had not come before her brother died was now telling them to open the tomb. If at that moment, unable to understand Jesus by her own thinking, she had obeyed in the faith that there must be a deep purpose of God’s in it, her feeling and her joy when Lazarus rose would have been doubled.

Jesus saw life in the Lazarus who lay inside that tomb. To people he was a stinking corpse, but by raising him Jesus showed what being saved means. Human beings, like Lazarus, are dead things that can do nothing before the Lord. That is why Jesus said, leave the dead to the dead, and follow me.

What can a human being this dead do for God? Above all, the first thing is to meet Jesus Christ and receive life. However much the dead praise God, he will not hear them, and however long they pray there will be no answer. Those who heard Jesus’ word, believed and came alive are exactly the living who see God’s glory, and the believers who give God glory.

After having the stone taken away, Jesus prayed toward God, ‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me, and I know that you always hear me.’ We need to listen closely to Jesus’ prayer. Giving thanks that he is heard not only now but always is a confession that can only be made out of a firm, unshaken faith. If believers too have Jesus’ assurance that God always hears their prayer, there is nothing to fear and nothing to lose heart over, and whatever problem they meet they will believe God is going to work.

Jesus took every problem as an opportunity to show how precious God holds life, and that life belongs to God. In the same way Jesus Christ wants all believers to live unshaken on a faith that trusts God absolutely. Believers will meet the Lord who returns on the last day, and if they look at the world’s problems without forgetting that those who have not received Jesus Christ will stand before the judgment seat, they will look for God’s will rather than complain. Lean on Jesus Christ, who tells us to go the road of truth however hard the narrow way is, and you can keep sin at a distance.

John 11:44

44He who was dead came out, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Free him, and let him go.”

When Jesus, the owner of resurrection and life, called Lazarus, shut in death, to come out, Lazarus, who had lain dead with his hands and feet bound in strips of cloth, walked out. This is the moment where life and death meet. Just as Lazarus came out of the tomb with his face covered by a cloth and his body bound, the people living in this world have not received Jesus Christ, so they are spiritually this dark, this foul-smelling, this far from freedom. However much they walk about and speak and hold worldly power and possessions, the human beings God sees are, like Lazarus, dead people with no life in them.

The dead cannot meet God, which is why Jesus is the one who came to this earth clothed in a human body in order to raise the dead. Had Jesus not paid off sin on the cross, people would have lived on dead, like Lazarus. Even when dead, stinking human beings hang jewels on their bodies and put on splendid clothes and come to God and praise and pray and give offerings, God does not receive it. God is the God of the living. The first thing people who worship God must do is to come alive through the blood of Jesus.

Just as Lazarus, who came out of the tomb at Jesus’ word, was unbound and walked about freely, we too must be loosed by the Lord’s blood from the death that bound us in sin, and give God glory by faith within the truth. To human beings who lived without knowing what sin is, God gave the law, and through that law he made us see that human beings are sinners who can only die.

The law was given so that we would see our sin, and now foolish human beings keep the law with their lives on the line and take that for faith. But salvation is received by grace, not by the act of keeping the law. By the works of the law no one ever escapes death, and the harder you try to keep the law the more your sin is exposed; and being unable to settle that sin, you go the road of death. For sinners floundering in the middle of sin, the righteous Son of God completed the law and overcame death.

Had Jesus not taken up the cross and overcome death, we would have stayed forever in the tomb, stinking like Lazarus. May you live on the cross as one whose flesh is dead and whose spirit is alive. When you hold the faith that says I am a dead man and cannot leave the tomb unless Jesus Christ raises me, you will receive the blessing of the words, unbind him and let him go.

God’s kingdom is a kingdom you can enter only when human righteousness has completely died. When Lazarus, who could not escape the yoke of death, met Jesus, who is life, he received freedom. Heaven is exactly a kingdom you can enter not by human sincerity and effort but wholly by God’s grace.

Believers! May the body of sin die on the Lord’s cross for you. Let go of all human righteousness, greed and craving and be born again, and you can live as one who never dies. If you live before God as one made alive through Jesus Christ, the darkness will withdraw and your spiritual life will be full in the light of the Holy Spirit.

As you live in this world, you must think hard about what comes first, and must train yourself to let go of human craving. When you praise God with thanks always, repent day by day, and offer him your heart, you will experience God’s work above the world.

God always protects believers who give off the light of Jesus Christ; he helps them with the armies of heaven and its angels, and he is writing their names in the book of life. May you be precious believers who, like Lazarus, receive the blessing of new life in the kingdom you enter by dying, and may you carry your calling well by the power Jesus Christ has given.