The Seventh of His Signs

Introduction

It’s not that hard to have faith when everything is going right. When you’ve been going to church every week and everyone in your life is healthy. No one is challenging you and the things your reading in the Bible right now are all making sense to you. The real test of our faith comes when the going gets tough. Just like our true character shows when trials come.

So where do we turn as Christians when we face trials? Let’s get a little more specific. What happens when we face sickness and death? When we lose loved ones or face down our own mortality? What words of reassurance does the Bible have for us in those kinds of seasons? Well I believe our passage this morning is a great place to turn for some of those answers. Today we will be looking at Jesus’ seventh sign in John’s gospel, found in chapter 11 verses 1 to 45. John has throughout the gospel been emphasizing seven miracles that he calls “signs” which point to Jesus’ character and deity in interesting ways. Let’s take a look at this one.

John 11:1–45 CSB

Now a man was sick—Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair, and it was her brother Lazarus who was sick. So the sisters sent a message to him: “Lord, the one you love is sick.” When Jesus heard it, he said, “This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Now Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was sick, he stayed two more days in the place where he was. Then after that, he said to the disciples, “Let’s go to Judea again.” “Rabbi,” the disciples told him, “just now the Jews tried to stone you, and you’re going there again?” “Aren’t there twelve hours in a day?” Jesus answered. “If anyone walks during the day, he doesn’t stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks during the night, he does stumble, because the light is not in him.” He said this, and then he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I’m on my way to wake him up.” Then the disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will get well.” Jesus, however, was speaking about his death, but they thought he was speaking about natural sleep. So Jesus then told them plainly, “Lazarus has died. I’m glad for you that I wasn’t there so that you may believe. But let’s go to him.” Then Thomas (called “Twin”) said to his fellow disciples, “Let’s go too so that we may die with him.” When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Bethany was near Jerusalem (less than two miles away). Many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them about their brother. As soon as Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him, but Mary remained seated in the house. Then Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Yet even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” “Your brother will rise again,” Jesus told her. Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” “Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who comes into the world.” Having said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, saying in private, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” As soon as Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. Jesus had not yet come into the village but was still in the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw that Mary got up quickly and went out. They followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to cry there. As soon as Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and told him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died!” When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, he was deeply moved in his spirit and troubled. “Where have you put him?” he asked. “Lord,” they told him, “come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Couldn’t he who opened the blind man’s eyes also have kept this man from dying?” Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. “Remove the stone,” Jesus said. Martha, the dead man’s sister, told him, “Lord, there is already a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you heard me. I know that you always hear me, but because of the crowd standing here I said this, so that they may believe you sent me.” After he said this, he shouted with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out bound hand and foot with linen strips and with his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unwrap him and let him go.” Therefore, many of the Jews who came to Mary and saw what he did believed in him.

What an amazing story about the love and the power of our God and savior Jesus Christ, am I right? Showing even before His own resurrection that He has authority over even death itself. So when we read this passage as 21st century disciples of Jesus, what message should we be walking away with? How does the resurrection of Lazarus teach us how to be better disciples who make disciples? Well first I would say that it gives us a pretty profound and important answer to the question “where is Jesus in our pain?” It helps us to understand what God feels about our suffering and what hope we have when God isn’t intervening. We also see in this narrative the call on followers of Jesus to demonstrate our faith with our actions. To step out in obedience even when it’s hard to believe. And finally I think we see in this passage an amazing hope that is awaiting in our future, a reasurance that what seems like the end really isn’t the end.

Where is Jesus in Our Pain?

Illustration: Chelsea dying when I was young.

Now in hindsight, looking back on that moment now it seems so much smaller than it did then. I mean don’t get me wrong I love animals, but Chelsea was just a dog after all and would have long died by now even if she hadn’t gotten suddenly sick. Not to minimize animal suffering, but I’ve had worse losses since then and I’m sure a lot if not all of you have gone through difficult losses in your life. Pain and suffering for now are just a reality of life. One you wish you could avoid but you can’t.

It’s natural in those moments to sometimes ask the question, where is God? I can remember my brother in the hospital when my Grandmother was dying taking out his anger on God and asking how a loving God could allow such a thing to happen. The problem of suffering has been around for a long time and many people have struggled with it. Not just as a philosphical argument about the consistency of the Christian worldview, but a desperate cry of a heart in pain.

Many say that surely a loving God couldn’t stand idly by while the children He loves go through suffering. Well what about when God became flesh and came to earth? How did He act with those who were suffering around Him? Probably the first thing you think of is all the times that Jesus heals people with diseases and drives out demons. These are amazing hopeful stories about what God can do in our lives. But what about the time Jesus did stand by and let someone suffer? This story is about a lot more than that, and it isn’t the end of the story, but I want to shift our perspective for a moment so that we don’t miss an important lesson here about where God is in our suffering. Let’s first go back to the beginning of this passage:

John 11:1–6 CSB

Now a man was sick—Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair, and it was her brother Lazarus who was sick. So the sisters sent a message to him: “Lord, the one you love is sick.” When Jesus heard it, he said, “This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Now Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was sick, he stayed two more days in the place where he was.

Think about this for a minute, forget what’s about to happen and put yourself in the shoes of Mary and Martha. Their brother is dying. Meanwhile they’ve been following Jesus and watching Him work wonders. Surely, they think, He can save our dying brother? So they send Him a letter telling Him that Lazarus is sick, the implication being they want Him to come do something about it. So He rushes over and saves His friend… no wait. He stays where He is for two days. Long enough so that by the time Jesus arrives on the scene Lazarus has been dead for four days. Imagine what this must have been like for Mary and Martha in the meantime. They didn’t know Jesus was about to bring their brother back from the dead. They couldn’t imagine such a thing, I’m sure. Well we don’t have to wonder what they were thinking, because they both say the same thing to Jesus as soon as He comes on the scene:

John 11:21 CSB

Then Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.

John 11:32 CSB

As soon as Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and told him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died!”

What a heartbreaking honest confession to their Lord. Where were you Jesus? Why weren’t you here? You could have saved Him if you were here! And how does Jesus react to this heartbreaking plea from the sisters? Does He rebuke them for their despair and give them some theological explanation for the value of suffering. No. Here is what happens next after Mary confronts Him.

John 11:33–37 CSB

When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, he was deeply moved in his spirit and troubled. “Where have you put him?” he asked. “Lord,” they told him, “come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Couldn’t he who opened the blind man’s eyes also have kept this man from dying?”

So let’s ask this question again, where is Jesus in our suffering? He is weeping beside us. My friends Jesus knows all things, especially He knows that Lazarus is about to be resurrected. For all those things that we go through in life Jesus knows the good that God will bring out of our suffering. He knows the greater purpose behind the suffering that we go through in this life and why in the end it will be worth it. But He still weeps with us when we weep.

So to bring it back when I was a little boy weeping on my bed for my poor sick dog, where was Jesus? He was weeping with me. Because He loves me and cares about my pain and wants to be beside me in the pain. He doesn’t want us to hurt and it breaks His heart when we do. That’s where Jesus is in our pain. So next time you go through a difficult trial in your life I want you to remember that Jesus is right beside you and sharing in your pain.

Demonstrating Active Trust

Illustration: When you think of demonstrating trust the first thing that comes to mind is probably a trust fall. Classic exercise to test how much you trust someone. You know what else takes trust? Letting someone cut your hair. Letting someone parallel park your car. Life is full of opportunities to demonstrate trust in other people.

Some people are more skeptical than others, but at the end of the day you’ve got to put your trust in people sometimes. The more people you have in your life that you can trust the better. No one wants to go around paranoid and not trusting anyone. But there are times when our trust in other people gets tested. When things get hard we find out the true character of the people around us. We also find out just how strong for other people is.

Sometimes when life gets hard our trust in God gets tested. When those tragedies of life come our way, how do we feel about our God who is loving and good? We might question Him, we might wonder about how real He is and how much He truly cares about us. And He might ask us a scary question, like what happens with Martha in our passage for this morning.

John 11:23–27 CSB

“Your brother will rise again,” Jesus told her. Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” “Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who comes into the world.”

So Jesus gives Martha His word. He says that He is the resurrection and the life. Not that He has it, but that He is it. Then He asks her that scary question. Do you believe this? While your brother is sitting dead and rotting in his grave and I wasn’t there to save him, do you believe that I am the resurrection and the life and that whoever lives and believes in me will never die? What a difficult thing to ask her. And of course she has the right answer. She says yes, and goes further and tells Him that she believes that He is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that He came into the world, meaning He had a prehuman existance. These are great words.

The words are good, but then later in this account Jesus pushes her even further. He asks her to back up her words with actions. Let’s take a look at verses 38 to 42.

John 11:38–42 CSB

Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. “Remove the stone,” Jesus said. Martha, the dead man’s sister, told him, “Lord, there is already a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you heard me. I know that you always hear me, but because of the crowd standing here I said this, so that they may believe you sent me.”

An interesting thing is happening here that can be easy to miss. Jesus tells them to remove the stone. This is the test of whether or not Mary truly believes what Jesus said. He said that her brother would be raised. She told Him that she believed Him. But will she roll away the stone? At first she objects. Milne points out that not only does she show that she doubts Him in her worry that her brother might smell by now, having been decomposing for four days, but according to a Bible scholar named Milne in the original Greek she doesn’t even call her brother a “he” at this point, meaning she’s speaking as if he is a corpse.

This is why Jesus gives her a soft rebuke in the next verse, because when it came time to act she hesitated. Let’s not be too harsh on her though, because after this reminder she does give permission for the tomb to be opened. She does step out in faith and show her trust by her actions.

My friends God is calling us every day to demonstrate our active trust in Him by the way that we live. Do we live for ourselves or for God? Do we live as if everything depends on ourselves or do we turn to Him in prayer? Do we make up our own mind about how to live or do we turn to His word? When we pray do we act as if He hears us or do we live like it’s just an exercise we should do. Let us like Mary hear the Lord’s gentle rebuke and put our trust in Him into action every day.

Death is Not the End

Illustration: For a while, and perhaps even still today, movie theatre employees were frustrated with Marvel films. That’s because before Marvel people would leave the movie theatre while the credits were rolling and the employees could get in right away to clean up the theatre for the next movie. Then suddenly people were waiting through the credits for the after credits scene. Then other studios started doing the same thing until today sometimes I’ll stay just in case even if it’s something you really wouldn’t expect to have a post credit scene like a rom com or something.

This is perhaps a very cheesy illustration of what it’s like to expect and ending but instead find out that there’s more to the story. Almost as fun as when you find out there’s a sequel to a story you loved and it’s actually good. Endings can be a downer, especially if it’s a good story. What ending is more of a downer than the ending of life itself? Yet we all must live with the knowledge that the end of life is coming. We may try to ignore it but then we are reminded when loved ones pass or when we have health scares.

Yet as Christians we know that as one of my favorite bands “House of Heroes” put it that “The End is Not The End.” One of the greatest albums of all time but I digress. All throughout Scripture we see promises from God that He will not allow His people to rot in the grave. Here we have the ultimate story of when God put His money on the table with this story. It’s as if someone told Jesus prove it and He said watch me.

Knowing this is why Jesus said this when news came that Lazarus was sick:

John 11:4 CSB

When Jesus heard it, he said, “This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

Lazarus did die. But it didn’t end there. The end is not the end as Jesus uses this moment to show the glory of God and to show that He is more powerful than the grave. This is what Jesus is trying to tell Martha in these verses:

John 11:23–25 CSB

“Your brother will rise again,” Jesus told her. Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live.

Martha is right about the resurrection at the last day by the way. That’s the hope waiting for all of us. We will have a resurrection even greater than Lazarus’. But here Jesus gives us just a little foretaste of what’s to come in verses 43-45

John 11:43–45 CSB

After he said this, he shouted with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out bound hand and foot with linen strips and with his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unwrap him and let him go.” Therefore, many of the Jews who came to Mary and saw what he did believed in him.

And how could you not believe Him after that? Well, we’ll see that answer next week when the Pharisees react to the news, but that’s beyond what we’re looking at here. Jesus called out to His sheep and His sheep came to Him, and not even the grave could hold him back. What an amazing display of the power and authority of Jesus Christ.

But here’s the thing. Our resurrection will be greater than this. In case you were wondering Lazarus isn’t still alive today. He died again, whether the Pharisees finally got him or if he died of some other cause at a later time we know that he eventually died the same death that waits for all people. But God promises us that in the last day we will be resurrection as immortal and imperishable. As Paul says the perishable will be made imperishable and the mortal will be made immortal. Unlike Lazarus we won’t have to die twice. Instead we will live forever in paradise, and the same Jesus who wept beside us when we were living in this temporary life will “Wipe away every tear from [our] eyes” as His word says in Revelation 21:4

Revelation 21:4 CSB

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away.

That’s the hope waiting for us, and that’s what I think we should all come away with today. Hope. That even when we’re at our darkest we can know the hope that awaits us beyond the grave because death is not the end, Amen?

Conclusion

So then I think it’s fair to say that Lazarus has a lot to teach us about how our faith in God interacts with the reality of suffering and death. When we become Christians the harsh realities of life don’t just go away. Instead we have a new hope to go with them. We can know that when we are going through difficult times that Jesus is with us in our weeping and holding us lovingly against the pain. We can know that God is worthy of our trust and that He is calling us to put our faith in Him and to show it through the way that we act. Finally we can know that although from here it may seem so, that death is not the end for those of us who are in Christ. That one day Jesus will raise us from the grave to be with Him forever.

So my friends if you are going through difficult circumstances right now than I hope this message has been an encouragement for you to put your hope in Jesus. To turn to Him and let His presence reassure and strengthen you in the face of fear and doubt. And if you are blessed this morning to be in good times than I pray that the Lord would help you to remember this story about Lazarus when the trials come, and they will, so that you can be reminded of God’s love in the midst of pain.

Let us pray.