Untitled Sermon (2)

Questioning God

Tonight we’re going to try something that you may have seen done at our church, or at other churches, it’s a little call and response. So let’s try this:

God is good! (all the time)

And all the time (God is good)

You may have heard that done in a church on a Sunday morning before the sermon, or during announcements. And I 100% believe that this saying is true and a valuable thing for us as believers to keep in mind, and remind one another of.

But I’ve always had a little trouble with that saying--not because of what we’re saying when we do this, but because of when we’re saying it.

It is always a good time to remember God’s goodness, but I always seen it done in a beautiful auditorium, by someone in their nicest clothing, with a huge smile on their face, when things are ostensibly going well for everyone involved. And the people who shout it the loudest are the people for whom everything is going well at the moment.

There’s nothing wrong with doing it there. But I’ve never seen it done as part of a funeral service.

Here’s why I bring this up: I have spent a lot of time with people who believe in God, and who have a relationship with Jesus. And here’s what I’ve noticed: The times where our faith is tested, and grown, and where we ask the big questions like “Is God really good?” and “Is he really in control” are NEVER in the good times.

We don’t ask “Is God good and really in control?” when we win the raffle for the new car, or get that promotion or job we wanted, or get that awesome piece of technology we’ve wanted. It’s not hard to believe that God is good and powerful when things are working out for us.

We ask those questions when life is hard. When a loved one is diagnosed with a terrible, incurable disease. When we aren’t sure if our parent’s marriage is going to make it. When a friend betrays us. When we aren’t sure how we’re going to make that school or car payment, or if we’re unsure whether we’re ever going to be able to pay off those student loans.

The difficult times are when our relationship with God feels closest to the surface. Even people who don’t believe in God pray when they’re in a bad spot! It’s a part of our makeup! Our struggle and need naturally drive us back to the God who created us. We either cry out in need and vulnerability, or shake our fist at him because we feel like he’s letting us down.

God is good, all the time. And all the time, God is good.

See if you know God, you know these things to be true. But in the tough times, our conviction is tested. It’s when we find out if that’s just something we say on a bright, sunny Sunday morning, or if it’s something we hold onto in the midst of our darkest night.

Today we’re going to be studying through , and we’re going to read the first 3/4s of our story right now, and as we do, I want you to notice all the time these people--who have Jesus walking alongside them--question him, question the God of the universe, incarnate--having taken on human flesh.

God is right there with them, and yet they continually question him.

Let’s read, starting in 11:1

Slide

Read

Whew. Ok, that’s a lot of text. But let’s look through here now and see all the times people question him.

Slide (v. 3 underlined)

Right from the beginning of our story, we find out that these sisters, Mary and Martha, have sent messages to Jesus, telling him that Lazarus is sick.

Quick question for you: When you have a cold, do you write to random people to give them an update? Ok, maybe on social media. But you don’t call people just to say “Hey Great-Aunt-Sue, just wanted to let you know I have a cold. K--Bye!”

These sisters are writing to Jesus, because Lazarus is very ill, and they want him to do something about it.

But Jesus, understanding this, has something else in mind. He tells the disciples around him, “this illness doesn’t lead to death.” Which would make you think, “hey, Lazarus is sick, but he won’t die.”

This leads to some confusion, when a couple of days later, Jesus says “Hey guys, let’s go to Judea”

Slide (underline v. 8)

Surprise surprise, the disciples aren’t down with this plan. “Um, hey Jesus?... remember how we just left Judea, because the authorities were looking around for you, repeatedly trying to stone you?”

“Yeah?”

“Soooooo, shouldn’t we stay away from there?”

Look at Jesus’s response, verse 9-10

Slide (v. 9-10 underlined)

The disciples are essentially worried that Jesus is about to make a big mistake--to stumble over an obstacle--or stone… that He didn’t account for.

Jesus’s response? “People don’t usually trip over stuff they can’t see in the dark during the day. You have the sun--the light of the world. At night is when you have to worry about this stuff.”

Jesus is pointing back to when he declared himself the light of the world. He’s saying--look, you don’t need to worry about hitting an unexpected obstacle when you have the Light of the World--me--with you. Lazarus has “fallen asleep,” and I go to awaken him.

The disciples, still nervous, say, “hey Jesus, if he’s just asleep, anybody can wake him. It doesn’t need to be you! Let’s stay safe over here.”

Jesus finally clearly tells them what’s going on: He’s dead guys. And I for one am glad about it!

---WHAT?!?!?!---

That sounds pretty callous. Thankfully for us, Jesus goes on to explain: If I had been there to stop him from dying, you wouldn’t get to see him raised from the dead.

More on that later, let’s keep moving along.

So against the disciples’ better judgment, they all go to Bethany, only two miles away from Jerusalem.

When they get there. Jesus speaks to each of the sisters, one at a time, but both of them have the same first reaction:

Slide (21, 32)

verse 21 and 32, exact same wording “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

These words are almost an accusation: Lord, if you had come when we sent to you, He wouldn’t be dead right now. You could have stopped this!”

They make their way to the tomb, with the whole host of people who were mourning with Mary and Martha following along afterwards. They’re all making a lot of noise, carrying on as was the tradition in their culture.

And now comes the shortest verse in all of the bible: “Jesus wept.” More on that later, but the Jews see Jesus visibly moved, and some of them still have something critical to say,

Slide

verse 37, “Couldn’t he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?”

Everybody’s got something to say.

It’s funny, because LITERALLY every character in this whole story has some sort of criticism for Jesus. Mary and Martha, the disciples, and then this crowd of friends and hangers-on who were mourning with them.

This is what I love about the bible. You get to see real humanity in here. We have the God of the universe, who has taken on human flesh. He’s been walking around healing people, and feeding thousands with just a couple of loaves of bread and a few fish, and everyone is acting like everything has gone off the rails. “Cool magic tricks Jesus, but now our buddy is dead. You could have stopped it, but you didn’t. And now he’s dead!

Isn’t that how we are sometimes?

Here we all are, all of us having lived for at least nearly 20 years. There have been lean years, but God has kept us from starving or freezing to death. He’s blessed us and provided for us in so many ways. But then a storm comes up and we start questioning if He’s good, or if he’s even there.

The good news is, God understands this. And he is incredibly patient with us. Even though he has shown up time and time again, constantly providing for us, protecting us from things we didn’t even know were a threat, He is still patient with us when we respond in fear, when we question him. But that doesn’t mean He doesn’t respond.

Look at verses 33-35

Slide (underline 33-35)

This part is often misunderstood, in fact Jesus’s reaction here was misunderstood by some of the people who were there. Jesus is deeply impacted, “troubled” by the scene here in , and some of the crowd who were there see him weep and say “Boy, He really cared about this guy.”

That’s not what’s going on here. This word here “Deeply moved” is embri-mae-omai. It’s only used a couple of other times in scripture--but it’s never used for people feeling sad. In Mark it’s used twice, and both times in the sense of scolding or rebuke.

So when we see it here, Jesus is not encountering grief, he’s expressing indignation. Why is that?

Well in verse 5 John gave us significant insight into Jesus’s relationship with this trio of sisters and brother--Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. It says Jesus loved them. They have relationship. And they aren’t confused about who He is. Even in their accusation against him, they say “LORD, if you had only been here….”

Martha’s understanding of who he is is even clearer in verse 27: “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

She gets who He is. And yet when she sees him, and Jesus tells her “Your brother will rise again,” her response is “Yeah, I know, I know. On the last day when everybody is resurrected, He will be too.”

She’s in the middle of chiding him for not arriving on time to save him, and hinting that if He would just ask God to give Lazarus back, it would be done. Jesus directly responds to her request: “He’s going to rise again.” And she nearly interrupts him saying “yeah yeah, I get it. End-times stuff. Cool.”

Martha’s reaction in this whole crisis is how direct people handle things. She goes to Jesus with a sort of accusative tone: Hey Jesus, why didn’t you do what you could have done to stop this?

Mary on the other hand, responds a little less directly. She’s still back at the house. Martha tries to give her a chance to meet Jesus privately, but the group of supporters who were with them in their mourning think she’s headed to the tomb, so they all follow close behind.

Mary runs up to Jesus, falls at his feet, weeping out the same thing her sister had said, “Jesus, if only you’d been here! This wouldn’t have happened.” She and the crowd of mourners all burst out weeping.

To this, Jesus responds with indignation. He’s been in ministry for a couple of years now. He’s been doing miracle after miracle, showing that when Jesus is around, things don’t go how you’d usually expect. He’s able to make things happen supernaturally that don’t happen in the natural course of events.

And here is a family that knows him, and loves him, and knows who He is, but they are still responding like they don’t have the God of the universe on their side. Mary and the crowd of mourners are a great negative example of something the Apostle Paul talks about in .

Slide

Paul is writing because the Thessalonians are worried that people who die before Jesus comes back are missing the boat on eternal life with him, and Paul says he wants to write to give them hope, so “that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.”

This is such a great perspective. See, it’s not that we won’t experience hard, tragic, gut-wrenching difficulties in life, that are truly reason to be sad. But we never experience them with the hopelessness that everything has gone off the rails, and cannot be redeemed or recovered.

God has promised that He is working all things for the good of those who love Him (). That’s the hope that we have. But how often do we respond in crisis kinda like everyone else does?

Here’s the truth about us and how we respond to God. This story shows us three ways we respond to God in times of Crisis or difficulty:

Slide

Informing: We respond like the disciples: we try to give God the info we think He’s lacking. “Um, Jesus, today’s not a great day to go get stoned by the Jewish authorities. Can we do something else?”

Accusing: We respond like Martha: Hey God, you could have done something, and you didn’t.

Resignation: We respond like Mary. We lean towards despair. God let this happen and now we’ve gotta deal with it, and it’s a bum deal.

Think about this: all of the people involved here have already imagined in their heads how this thing is going to go--and they’re all wrong.

The Disciples think Jesus is going to make a strategic error, and accidentally get himself killed. Even though he’s already escaped sure death at the hands of the authorities three or four times at least.

Martha thinks Jesus didn’t care enough to come, and even though He has standing with God to ask for Lazarus’s resurrection, he won’t. Boy was she wrong.

Mary thinks that everything worked out terribly, and her brother is lost forever. But before her stands Jesus, God-in-flesh.

So let’s get from the worst-case-scenarios imagined by these people who all know and love Jesus, to what Jesus really does.

Let’s read starting in verse 38

Slide

Even as Jesus steps into the situation to intervene miraculously, Martha questions him one more time: Don’t do that Jesus--it’s really gonna stink in there. He’s been dead 4 days.

See in the Jewish culture in those days, they believed that a person’s spirit hung around their body for 3 days after they died. But after the 4th day, they believed the spirit departed to the afterlife. So for the first 3 days they might be hoping for some kind of return or recovery, but once that fourth day hit, they were resigned: This guys dead, and His spirit is gone.

The interesting thing about the timing of all this, is that when Jesus heard about Lazarus’s sickness, He waited two days. Then when he finally left for Bethany, Lazarus had been dead for 4 days. Let’s do the math here. If Jesus had left immediately, how would he have found Lazarus? Only 2 days dead. But dead nonetheless.

At the beginning of the story, verse 14, Jesus’s response sounds kind of heartless, “Lazarus is dead guys, and I’m glad. For your sakes. So that you may believe.”

But now we see his purpose. By waiting those two days, Jesus essentially upgraded the miracle they were about to see. Bringing Lazarus back after two days likely would have been viewed as a healing--sometimes people seem dead, but wake up after a day or two. In the ancient world they had all kinds of practices of making sure people were dead before they buried them, because you couldn’t be sure all the time.

But by day 4, everybody is in agreement--this guy is dead. So Jesus prays--and in doing so explicitly says things for the sake of those listening:

Slide: (underline v 41-42)

“Father, thank you for hearing me. I wasn’t worried you wouldn’t here, but these other people were, so for their sake, I want to acknowledge that you’re hearing me, so they can truly believe and understand what is happening here.”

Then here Jesus, calling to a dead guy in a tomb, “Hey Lazarus, come out here.”

And the dead man comes out of the tomb. Bound up in the traditional burial cloths, bound in a way He needs help being freed from them. And Jesus says “let him out of those--he doesn’t need them any more.”

Conclusion: Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Our hope is in him.