{"id":3493,"date":"2012-05-27T21:33:37","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T04:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/?p=3493"},"modified":"2012-05-27T21:33:37","modified_gmt":"2012-05-28T04:33:37","slug":"the-resurrection-of-lazarus-part-33-dead-men-can-do-exactly-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/2012\/05\/27\/the-resurrection-of-lazarus-part-33-dead-men-can-do-exactly-nothing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Resurrection of Lazarus, (Part 3\/3): Dead men can do exactly nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Now we come to see the divine nature of Jesus here. The time for sadness is over. For a moment now, he is going to give us a hint of what the power of the resurrection is really like. Jesus commands the dead Lazarus in the same tone of voice as he earlier commanded the storm to still earlier when he was on the boat.<\/p>\n

Imagine yourself for a moment as something else in nature. Can you imagine being a rock? I think it would be a very boring existence, just being a stone there, maybe as part of the pavement of a road if you\u2019re lucky. I think I would get pretty sleepy. But then Jesus speaks up, WHOA! What was that?? Holy smokes, that is the voice of my creator. That rock isn\u2019t asleep anymore. That wind that was howling and just doing its thing on the sea of Galilee earlier? It stopped on a dime. Jesus holds sway over all of nature.<\/p>\n

The same goes for dead bodies. Notice how much Lazarus had to DO to wake up. How hard did he have to work? Did he hear Jesus\u2019s voice and (fortunately) decide to come out and see him? Of course not. He was a corpse.<\/p>\n

The disciples did not yet fully understand this at the time. Martha confessed her faith that Jesus was the Messiah and could easily have healed Lazarus earlier, but it hasn\u2019t entered her imagination yet that he can just as easily heal him after the fact. Her faith is about to be expanded.<\/p>\n

These next few things I have to say about the subject are a mix of my own thoughts and some some commentary by theologian Robert Capon, a writer I\u2019ve been influenced by quite a bit. These aren\u2019t really my ideas, but they make me very excited to be a Christian!<\/p>\n

For Lazarus to stay dead was a metaphysical impossibility! You can\u2019t get away from a love that will not let you go. When Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life says, \u201cLazarus, come forth!\u201d, the rest of the story doesn\u2019t depend on Lazarus. Jesus wasn\u2019t dealing with someone who just needed a pep talk to get their act together. He was dealing with a dead body.<\/p>\n

You remember when Martha was worried about opening up the tomb because of the terrible smell? She spoke the whole truth not only about Lazarus but about every one of us in particular and about the human race in general. \u2018Lord, by now we stink.\u2019 We have been dead four days, four thousand days, four hundred thousand times four thousand days. In the midst of all our life we have been in death. And in the midst of that abiding death we have been in Nothing. Knee-deep in it, waist-deep in it, up to our noses and over our heads in Not-a-Thing.<\/p>\n

But Jesus shouts to us in the mire to wake us up, to pull us up. Making things jump out of nothing is God\u2019s favorite act. He creates us out of it (ex nihilo) and he raises us up from in. Jesus came to raise the dead. Not to improve the improvable, not to perfect the perfectible, not to teach the teachable. That stuff doesn\u2019t work and he knows it. Those things only work on nice health people, but that\u2019s not us. We\u2019re dead, dead in our sin and helpless to even role over. But he, the Son of God is our total help.<\/p>\n

He holds us now, even as he held Lazarus in the tomb and kept his body from decaying so that he could wake him back up and show the Glory of God to all the people around watching. A few years later, Lazarus kicked the bucket again and was buried for a long time, just like we will be. But because Christ has conquered death, he will hold us in his love even then and raise us to eternal life at the end of days.. The seventh sign of John was the raising of Lazarus. But that miracle was resuscitation back into the fallen world. Jesus\u2019 own resurrection, the one that we follow him in, is a resurrection into a deathless world. That is our permanent hope in Christ.<\/p>\n

Now, I know this is a Sunday and you\u2019ve all shown up in a church building, so one might be able to assume that everyone here more or less believes all this stuff in the Bible about Jesus. You may be confused about how many of these stories (or my explanations!) you believe or not. If you think this account about Jesus raising some guy from the dead a long time ago is only a myth, then congratulations – you are part of a large company when it comes to the entire world.<\/p>\n

Now I could try to show you archeological evidence proving that Jesus really existed and was held in amazingly high regard. There are old manuscripts that have been dug up dating the book of John from the first century. Some folks really get a kick out of that sort of thing, but I doubt any of those things mean anything to you today. Honestly, they don\u2019t to me. The reason I find this story about Jesus so compelling is the picture of unmerited grace and unaided power it provides. When I get angry at my kids (and there are four of them now, so there is plenty of opportunity to completely lose my gourd), or when I fight with my wife about something stupid, when that happens I feel like a dirtbag. The same goes for when I feel lazy at work. I can make excuses like complaining that I don\u2019t have enough money or time to do a good job at (fill in the blank), or blame my problems on other people. I don\u2019t buy the modern wisdom that this guilt I feel is just some kind of social conditioning or imaginary religious oppression. I know what\u2019s beautiful when I see it and I know what\u2019s ugly. So do you, right? And in myself I see a whole lot of ugly, a whole lot of decay. My heart is still beating and I\u2019m walking around, but it\u2019s like a prelude to death. I\u2019m up to my eyeballs in shortcomings and seriously, it\u2019s not getting any better! You can \u201cget religion\u201d and that won\u2019t help \u2013 I got it when I was young\u2013 you just might notice it a little more if you do.<\/p>\n

But if there is any meaning in this life, if there is a God who cared enough about our race to make it out of nothing, who cares enough to sustain MY little life here and let me keep breathing, then he must love me very much indeed. When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he wasn\u2019t playing the role of a life coach but rather a death-defying Messiah, whether Lazarus deserved it or not. (Hint: He didn\u2019t deserve it and I definitely don\u2019t and neither do you.) But that sort of love is the only kind worth having. Christ alone dispenses that to me, to you, every day. I\u2019m certain of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now we come to see the divine nature of Jesus here. The time for sadness is over. For a moment now, he is going to give us a hint of what the power of the resurrection is really like. Jesus commands the dead Lazarus in the same tone of voice as he earlier commanded the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Resurrection of Lazarus, (Part 3\/3): Dead men can do exactly nothing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3493"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3503,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493\/revisions\/3503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}