9/30/07 Lazarus Come Forth!

We ended our study last week

half way through John’s account

of what is possibly the most remarkable miracle ever to take place

prior to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We are studying the Gospel of John,

and our study has brought us to the eleventh chapter,

the chapter in which John records for us Jesus’ resurrection of His friend, Lazarus.

Last week we saw the events that led up to that event.

We saw that this event was most likely

Jesus’ final great statement to the Jewish people about Himself

in the few months immediately preceding the Passover Feast that would culminate with His own death.

In those final weeks

Jesus entered into a whirlwind tour throughout the nation,

presenting one final offer of Himself as the promised Messiah to the Jews.

Those who held positions of power within the nation were terrified with what they heard and saw,

while many of those who did not hold positions of power were thrilled.

Here was a Man who spoke as no man had ever spoken before,

a Man who was in every way absolutely righteous, good,

and yet a man who shattered so many of the religious rules of the day.

In every situation He looked for what would communicate love, compassion, kindness, truth.

And then that’s what He would do.

If His actions violated some arbitrary religious rule,

then He ignored the rule for the sake of true righteousness and love.

And I can’t let that pass

without pointing out the obvious application

for those of us who carry His name.

For the Christian

our goal in each situation

is to see what it means to love,

and then make our choices on that basis.

And I need to warn you that this is a very different way of approaching life

than what we may have been given by the religious world around us.

Peter expressed this approach perfectly in a single sentence when he said,

1PE 2:16 Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God.

Actually, the whole context of that statement

gives it even more power.

He begins by saying,

1PE 2:15 For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men.

Now, isn’t that great!

Doesn’t it just say perfectly

what you sometimes find yourself longing to do - silence the ignorance of foolish men.

Maybe I’m a little more sensitive about some of this than others because I’m a Bible Teacher,

but most of you know what it’s like

when you become openly identified as a “Christian” in our society.

People make all sorts of assumptions about you.

They assume you are filled to the brim with a whole lot of rules,

rules that make you both self-righteous

and critical and condemning of those around you.

They assume that you will not associate yourself with those who break your rules.

They assume you understand very little about the dark side of life

and that you’ve certainly never been there yourself.

They assume that you live in a sheltered, protected world,

and they assume that you could never understand the life they live,

or the stresses they feel.

Do you know what that is?

That’s “the ignorance of foolish men.”

That’s the world around us assuming

that being Christian is the same thing as being religious.

It doesn’t surprise me that Peter touched on this in his letter

because I think just the thought of it infuriated him to the extreme.

Peter never was a religious man.

He had no toleration for religious games.

From the very beginning he was simply a commercial fisherman

who had been caught by the King of creation.

But he had no more toleration for religion after his submission to the King than before.

And I think he, too, was offended by the ignorance of foolish men

who assumed that His Lord made Him religious.

But then Peter goes on to describe how we go about silencing their ignorance.

1PE 2:16 Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God.

What a fascinating command - act as free men!

Paul picks up the same theme when he tells the Galatians,

GAL 5:1 It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.

What they’re saying to us

is something that isn’t all that easy for me to know how to communicate

because most of all they’re talking about an attitude toward life

and about the way in which we live out that attitude in each new situation.

But at the heart of it

is the understanding that to live with Christ is just exactly that - to live with Christ,

hearing His voice,

following His lead in each new situation.

This is just what we’ve been talking about

in the four weeks we spent looking at how we hear and follow the voice of the Spirit in our lives.

It’s altogether different from following a specific list of rules.

Rules can never show us how to love.

When is it best for the health of a relationship

to overlook the other person’s offense against you,

and when is it better to go to them and confront them?

When is it better to step back and trust the life of Christ within your teenage son or daughter,

and when is it better to exercise parental authority?

When is it truly an act of love to help another person financially,

and when is such an act simply enabling their own irresponsibility

or meddling in a work that God is seeking to do in their life?

In practical ways,

what does it mean in each new situation

to make the health of any given relationship more important than our rights, our things, or our ideas?

What list of rules can answer any such questions?

What religious system can teach us how to really love?

Obviously, no such system exists,

and in the end what religious systems do

is to provide us with a place to hide from the really important and far more difficult issues of life.

This is what the first century Jews had done.

If they carefully avoided anything that could be considered “work” on the Sabbath,

and offered the prescribed sacrifices at the required times,

and tithed their 10% they then declared themselves righteous in the eyes of God.

But when this Jesus came into their world

both His life and His words shattered their self-righteous security.

And when He comes into our world

He does the same thing.

That’s why Peter said what he said...

1PE 2:16 Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God.

He was telling us that our goal as we live before this corrupt world around us

is to live lives that project a dual message of absolute freedom and absolute righteousness.

And to the degree we succeed in doing that

it will drive the world around us crazy.

It will make the religious folk angry,

but it will make many of the others curious, and hungry, and fascinated, and hopeful all at the same time.

That’s what happened in the nation of Israel

when Jesus came on the scene.

And that is certainly what happened within the nation

as a result of those final few months prior to His return to Jerusalem for the Passover.

Last week we walked through a whirlwind survey of those final months

and then returned to the great culminating event of that nationwide tour,

an event that brought Jesus to the tomb of Lazarus,

His friend, now dead and buried for four days.

We ended our study last week

with John 11:35,

a verse in which we see our King standing before the tomb,

confronted with the kind of pain and suffering that our sin has brought to all of us.

And we saw His response to that suffering.

And what we saw told us so much about our God

and His response to us in our sin.

It wasn’t what we would have expected.

It certainly wasn’t what we deserve.

It wasn’t an angry, righteous Creator

faced with the mess we’ve made of everything,

calling us to account,

telling us that we have simply reaped the rightful consequences of our rebellion against Him.

Not even close!

What we see is our God overcome with sorrow and pain,

sorrow and pain He felt for us,

with us.

You know what causes that kind of emotional response within a person, don’t you?

We live our lives surrounded by suffering everyday,

and yet most of it does not touch us deeply.

But let some of that suffering touch someone we love

and look at the difference.

All at once their suffering, their pain

becomes our suffering, our pain as well...because we love.

And that’s what we see happening between us and our God in John 11:35.

JOH 11:35 Jesus wept.

But that isn’t where the account stops,

so this morning we’ll follow through and see what happens next.

There were some there who saw what was happening

and did what we so often do -

they misunderstood the Lord’s actions, or lack of them.

JOH 11:37 But some of them said, "Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man also from dying?"

Why didn’t Jesus prevent this from happening?

He certainly had the power to,

so why didn’t He?

Now, in this particular situation we’re given the answer to that question.

It becomes obvious in just a few verses.

But in our own lives

sometimes the answer is not so obvious,

and certainly not so quick to come.

There was a time in my own life during my early adult years

when I looked at some of the events and influences of my own childhood

and wondered why...why had God not intervened in some way?

But now, as I look back on my life,

and as I see the way in which He has taken

some of the pieces of my past

and reshaped them, recreated them into tremendous good in my life,

I understand...a little bit.

God does not ever cause evil in our lives,

any more than He caused the death of Lazarus.

Lazarus died for the same reason we all die -

because our sin brought death into the world.

But God’s arrangement with us through Christ

is that He can and will take any evil we may be faced with

and He will reshape it into good in our lives

if we will place it into His hands

and then follow His lead through the healing process.

And He will ultimately defeat even death itself forever.

That’s a big part of what He’s saying to us through Lazarus.

JOH 11:38-44 So Jesus, again being deeply moved within, came to the tomb. Now it was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, "Remove the stone." Martha, the sister of the deceased, said to Him, "Lord, by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days." Jesus said to her, "Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?"

And here again we have such a beautiful presentation

of the two worlds in which we live.

There is the physical world that we know so well,

the one that we always see first,

the one in which God is at best just a hope without reality.

And it is that world that caused Martha to speak the obvious, logical, reasonable truth.

“Lord, by now by brother is rotting!”

And of course there is always an obvious, logical, reasonable truth.

There was for Martha,

and there is for us.

Occasionally I receive e-mails from people who know me from the books or the on-line notes.

I assume most of them contact me because what they’ve read gives them a level of trust in me.

Some time ago I received a note from a young lady in her 20's

who wanted my advice concerning her living situation with her boy friend.

The two of them are engaged,

and though they have been sexually involved in the past,

through some difficult growth choices with both of them

they have made a firm commitment to one another

to refrain from sex until after the wedding.

But then she came to her question for me.

She said in part,

...since neither of us have close friends or family in the area, and we hope to be married within the next 6 to 12 months, we are living together. I know it may not sound like the optimal situation, but it makes sense to us. We realize that living together may lead to an increase in temptation, but if he wasn't living in my apartment, he would be there the majority of the time anyway. If he was making more money, or if we were living closer to our parents, we would not live together. But as it is, we feel that a second apartment is a waste of $600-$700 a month.

I guess my question is this: what do you think?”

And from a logical, reasonable, financial perspective

what she says seems to make perfect sense.

“Don’t open that tomb, Lord - the stench will be terrible.”

“Why waste money on two separate apartments?”

That’s the reasonable, logical physical world in which we live.

But then there is the other world,

the one we know so little about,

yet the one our Lord has called us into.

It is the world of life in His presence,

the world that is even more real than the one we see and touch and hear around us,

but the one that we must choose to trust

often in the face of what appears to be strong evidence to the contrary

from the physical world around us.

I suppose we could call it the world of faith,

but to be honest I have some problem with that

because this whole “faith” thing has been so misused and misunderstood by the religious world.

So let’s not call it that.

Let’s call it the world of practical trust in our Lord,

trust that He’s really there,

that He really does love us,

and that what He says can be trusted absolutely.

That’s what Martha faced as she stood with Jesus before that tomb.

She had to trust that His command to open that tomb

was even more reliable than the natural order of the physical world.

It’s never complicated, you know.

It’s certainly not easy,

but neither is it complicated.

Most of the greatest battles we face in life

are simply battles over whom we choose to trust more -

the voice of our own logic and reasoning based on the principles of this physical world,

or the voice of our Lord.

With my e-mail correspondent I tried to help the process a little.

At least I tried to offer her

some added information she may not have considered,

information that might help.

In my response to her I said in part,

“Concerning your living situation I have only two thoughts I might share with you. The first is one you've already mentioned yourself. Living in the same house will make it much, much harder for you both. To be honest, I find it difficult to know how, given the fact that you've both been sexually involved in the past, it would be possible to live together and remain faithful to your new commitment to sexual abstinence. The other thought I had about your living situation may not be a concern to you if you are not involved in the lives of younger Christians and have no interest in doing so in the years ahead. But if you do, I will tell you honestly that if you choose to live together you forfeit your right ever to counsel another young Christian not to do the same thing because you will simply have no credibility in their life. And no matter what commitments you have made to one another, no one who sees you living in the same house will believe you are not sexually active. The time will come, and sooner than you would believe, when your daughter will ask you, "How did you and dad handle this whole sex thing when you were dating?" The answer you'll offer her is, "We chose to live together because it was cheaper. Of course we didn't have sex." It's the highest standard you'll be able to offer her with any credibility.”

Sometimes added information helps.

Certainly the Lord knew it would help Martha.

In response to her concerns He said,

JOH 11:40 "Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?"

Well, actually He’d said more than that:

JOH 11:25-26 Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?"

“Do you believe this?”

And that’s the tough one, isn’t it?

With the voices of this physical world screaming in our ears,

do we believe what He’s said?

Nothing has really changed in the past 2000 years.

We wear different clothes,

the speed of life has increased dramatically,

as has our level of stress.

We have our pockets, and belts, and desks, and houses filled with no end of electronic wonders.

And yet the central question we face each day,

in each new situation,

the one upon which our true success in life always depends

has not changed and never will.

Do you believe what your God has said to you?

Do you trust His voice even more than what you feel, or hear, or see around you?

So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised His eyes, and said, "Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I knew that You always hear Me; but because of the people standing around I said it, so that they may believe that You sent Me." When He had said these things, He cried out with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come forth." The man who had died came forth, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."

It must have been quite a scene -

Lazarus all trussed up in linen wrappings like a mummy,

his arms bound to his sides,

his legs bound together,

literally hopping out of the tomb.

It wasn’t that way a few days later

when Jesus Himself came out of His tomb.

When He came out

He simply left all of the wrappings behind.

But then, He had one of those nifty new bodies that wasn’t bound by the rules governing this physical world.

Lazarus still had his old physical body,

revived, alive, healed, but still physical.

And I find that last comment of the Lord’s to be interesting, too.

To the people around him He said, "Unbind him, and let him go."

Now I certainly don’t want to build an empire on this,

but still I think there is a great picture here

of what happens, or what should happen in the lives of people

when they receive new life through Christ.

Lazarus was alive,

but he needed the help of those around him to enter into the freedom of his new life.

And when we find new life in Christ

we all need the help of those around us

to discover our true freedom in Him.

Without it we may have His life within us,

but we can remain bound in all the lies of our old life.

When the family of God is operating as God intended

that’s what we do for one another.

Unfortunately, once religion gets it’s grip on the people of God,

all too often rather than freeing us,

it produces greater and greater bondage,

just as if those who stood before the tomb that day,

rather than freeing Lazarus,

would have wound him in more and more layers of linen

until he couldn’t even hop or cry out.

Before we leave this passage

there are two more observations I want to make

about what happened as a result of this incredible event,

but I think we’ll save those until the next time we’re in this passage together.