This post by christinecoltman was originally published at GRACE PLACE
What I’m sharing with you today is what the Lord has been teaching me as I’ve studied for this talk, and how He has been ministering to me as I have grappled with and continue to fight the biggest fear I have; the fear of death. We have been looking at the I AM statements of Jesus as we’ve been going through the gospel of John, in order to help us ‘Behold our God’ as our series title suggests. When I signed up to preach on this particular I AM statement that Jesus made; I am the Resurrection and the Life, I had no idea that I would dredge up issues and baggage that would cause countless tears and a lot of mental wrestling. But it has been GOOD and I am excited to share some of my journey with you as we look together at what Jesus meant when he said ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’. If I had to give this talk a name, it would be ‘No fear in death; this is the power of Christ in me’. That is what my heart has been learning through all my studying of the Bible for tonight; it might be simple but if you can take one thing away, I’d love it to be “I do not need to fear death because Jesus has the ultimate victory and has given me life!’.
Do you remember Reader’s Digest? Those mini magazines. There always seemed to be one lying around our house when I was a girl; I think I was a little addicted to the real-life stories of people who amazingly got out of difficult situations. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that if you sent off coupons from the back of those magazines for several months, you could get a glossy coffee-table style book and my parents must have done, because we owned a large Reader’s Digest Encyclopaedia of Human Diseases! What a lovely topic for a coffee-table book! Pictures of skin diseases, growths and tumours. It didn’t live on our coffee table to be fair, but behind the armchair on the bottom row of the bookshelf. I was 7 or 8 when I crawled behind the armchair and found that book; it opened up an awful world of potential ailments that I could possibly have, when my mind had been innocent to those things before. That was when the idea of illness and death first entered my little heart and I have been battling fear in that area of my life ever since. Intrusive thoughts, fear of illness, constant battles with mental ‘what-if’s?’ and panic attacks. Maybe you can remember when you first realised with clarity that you were a mortal being? That there were things out of your control? That one day those you love or you yourself would no longer be alive on this earth?
I realise this is a pretty dark way to start a talk, but we can’t really look at John chapter 11 without talking about death! I mean, one of the main characters is in the grave not long after the chapter begins! Let’s start by reminding ourselves of the events surrounding Jesus’ famous I AM statement.
Jesus has been in Jerusalem with his disciples, teaching and answering their questions. In John chapter 10 where we were last month, we saw Jesus making some bold claims about himself; he would be the one to save his people (I am the gate) and the one who would ultimately voluntarily lay down his life for his own sheep as the Good Shepherd. At the end of chapter 10 we see Jesus escape arrest and stoning; he was not in the Pharisees and religious leader’s good books for making these claims! Jesus knows it is not yet his time to die, so he removes himself to a region beyond the river Jordan for a while. While he is preaching there, a messenger comes from Bethany to let him know his friend is sick. But this is not just any old acquaintance.
Lazarus and his sisters were close friends of Jesus; they had opened their home to him and ministered to him, both physically and with their friendship. The word that comes via the messenger from Mary and Martha confirms the bond they have; “the one you love is sick” in verse 3. It is baffling to us as readers, and must have been to those who knew of this friendship, that Jesus lingered two more days before setting out for Bethany! How is that logical? You love someone, and therefore you don’t come? Eh? But Jesus is unruffled and unperturbed. He knows that by the time that messenger has arrived, Lazarus is already dead. It will take them two more days to get over to Bethany, and we know that Lazarus has been dead for four days by the time Jesus arrives. Lazarus is not only-just-dead, he is decaying-dead! But Jesus knows the Father’s plan. His delay has an ultimate purpose; to allow Lazarus, his sisters, his own disciples and all those present to know forevermore that there IS resurrection of the dead.
But poor Mary and Martha don’t know all this yet. They have seen Jesus doing miracles, they’ve seen him heal the sick. They know what he is able to do! You can almost hear them rehearsing to one another as they care for their dying brother “where is Jesus? Why does he not come? If he was here, Lazarus could be healed!”. But he doesn’t come, and their brother dies. Let’s pick up the story from here in Scripture.
Read John 11:17-27
In those days, due to the hot climate, a body would be buried immediately when someone died. Lazarus was probably buried in a cave with a stone that sealed the entrance. Cultural traditions meant that a period of mourning began immediately; there was no space for private grieving as very public displays of mourning were typical and all the friends, family and community would gather to weep. You could even hire professional mourners! Jesus arrived in Bethany and he and the disciples would have heard the wailing long before they got there. Martha hears Jesus has finally come and rushes out to see him; typical Martha! She tends to be known in Christian circles as the busy one who didn’t have time to sit and listen to Jesus; this passage has definitely helped me see Martha in a different light. Still, here she is running out to see Jesus; I imagine her a little hot-headed and impetuous, wearing her heart on her sleeve. She blurts out what everyone has been thinking; and what she says appears to be a mixture of complaint, disappointment, rebuke but also faith. In verse 21 “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask”. Amazing words at the end there! In the midst of blinding grief, she still has faith. We’ll come back to Jesus’ response to her outburst in a minute, but I find Martha here SO impressive and think her responses here should be her hallmark. Her faith is deep! Before we plunge into the I AM statement, let’s break out into small groups or pairs to discuss this question…
BREAK OUT – In what ways can you relate to Martha here in how you approach Jesus with your struggles? How does Jesus respond to us when we come to him like this? Think of Scriptures that reveal his heart for us in difficult times.
So my question to myself as I set out to unpack this particular I AM statement was why does Jesus say “I am the resurrection and the life?” I’m sure there are lots of answers but these are the three that have impacted me.
Firstly, Jesus is providing himself as a solution for our ultimate problem – death. This is the obvious problem faced by Lazarus and his family; their loved one has died and has been in the grave for 4 days. Ultimately it is the same problem we have too; we will ALL die one day. We all have the same eventual outcome in this life! No-one escapes it, and no-one can put it off forever – no amount of anti-aging creams or healthy diets will put off the inevitable in the end. Death is very final to humans; Mary and Martha felt that the death of Lazarus was an absolute boundary; their despair testified to that.
But the problem we have as a human race goes deeper than that. Yes, physical death is something that we find abhorrent and abnormal, and so we should because we were created at the beginning of time by an eternal God who placed a longing for eternity in our hearts! However, the Bible tells us death is more than just the heart stopping beating; it is separation from God for all eternity.
Think back to Genesis at the very beginning of the Bible. God had spoken everything into being and the whole of creation was beautiful and perfect; God himself called his workmanship “good”. Adam and Eve enjoyed all He had made and to top it all off, they had an intimate relationship with their Father and Creator. We all know that it went wrong; the serpent, our enemy Satan, caused them to doubt God’s goodness and they disobeyed Him. Death came into the world as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin; as soon as they’d sinned, an animal had to die to provide clothing to ‘cover up’ their nakedness. In the curse spoken over them God said “you will return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). We know from Romans 6 “the wages of sin is death”; sin deserves death and separation from God; it is the penalty we must pay. So now we are talking about more than a physical death; this is a separation-from-God-forever death. You see, physical death will separate us from the present world, but our souls will not cease to exist; they will be conscious. The Bible says we will be judged according to what we know. Decisions we make now in this life will affect our eternal destiny beyond our physical death, and yet we treat it so lightly. This is scary stuff!
But wait! The story doesn’t end there, thank the Lord. Here comes the solution to our problem! God promises to Adam and Eve that there will be one who will crush the serpent; someone will come who will ‘bridge the gap’ between His holy standards and us, His sin-stained children. In saying “I am the resurrection and the life”, Jesus is suggesting he is the solution to the problem of ‘separation-from-God-forever death’. You see, going back to our passage, when Jesus promises to Martha that her brother will “rise again” in verse 23, he is not just talking about Lazarus’ physical rising from the tomb that will happen minutes later. He is also not, as she assumes, talking about Lazarus rising to eternal life at the end of time. He is calling her, and all who were there, to look towards the most important event in his own life; the event that the whole of the Bible points to. He is drawing their attention to the present! Mary and Martha did not know yet what we know now; that Jesus would within a few weeks take on the sins of the world, the sins of every man and woman from the past, present and future by willingly laying down his own life as a perfect sacrifice. WE ought to die as the penalty for our own sin, but Jesus took our sin upon himself when he died on the cross so that we can be presented as stainless before our Creator, our Father. Jesus IS the serpent crusher!
Once again though, the story is still not complete. Jesus did not stay dead. He did not stay in the grave! We know he proved what he said when he told Martha “I am the resurrection and the life”; because he did that very thing! He triumphed over death by coming back to life. This is what ‘resurrection’ literally means. After three days in the grave, there were multiple eye-witnesses who testified to the fact that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to them. Those eye-witnesses were so sure of what they saw, that they wrote it all down, told everyone and even ended up dying themselves for their testimony. We may not be eye witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection, but through God’s word, and the Holy Spirit confirming within us, we experience the resurrection power of Jesus too! Yes, we have that same power at work within us! It is a mind-blowing thought!
But back to Martha. She does not yet know any of this! Jesus said to her “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” Wow! What a mindset shift it must have been for Martha, and how she is put on the spot! “Do you believe this massive truth that I’ve just presented to you Martha? That I can fulfil and embody an idea like the future resurrection within my very person? And that resurrection power over death is not just something for the distant future but is available to you now?” I wonder if Martha hesitated or paused as she had to let all of this sink in. I think I would have. Martha’s answer nicely takes us to my next point.
Secondly, why does Jesus say he is the resurrection and the life? He is revealing who he is as God’s Son, the Messiah. I think Martha’s answer to Jesus putting her on the spot is just beautiful. Even if her brain is bamboozled by what Jesus has just said (I know mine would have been), she affirms the truth that she knows and believes “Yes, Lord…I believe you are the Christ, (or Messiah) the Son of God, who was to come into the world”. What a statement of faith! Martha had it bang on here. Even if her head was hurting from trying to understand how Jesus could possibly be the resurrection in the midst of her grief, she goes back to what she knows. Jesus, in all he has said and done in the past few years, has proved himself to Martha to be the son of God. She believes he is the one all the Jews had been hoping would come to save their people and the one who had been prophesied for hundreds of years; after all that is what Messiah means – the chosen or anointed one.
You know, John had a real heart for revealing who Jesus was to his readers. Take a look at the goal he had for himself in writing his gospel. John 20: 31 says “But these (recorded miraculous signs) are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name”. That’s why John includes the prayer Jesus prays to his Father by the open tomb before he commands Lazarus to come out; “Father I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me”. He is clearly saying ‘I have been sent by my Father’. Yes! He’s God’s Son!
Martha had it spot on because this claim Jesus was making could only be possible if he was God. I listened to a great talk Tim Keller did at Oxford University’s CU as part of their outreach week on ‘Who is Jesus?’. Tim used this very chapter to demonstrate how Jesus was both fully man and fully God. Even in his different responses to the sisters; it is not random that Jesus reveals his humanity as he enters Mary’s grief and openly weeps with her but speaks the truth clearly and frankly with Martha, letting her know that only through him can true and lasting life be found. He is showing his humanity and his deity. In raising Lazarus from the dead, but ultimately in rising from the dead himself, Jesus demonstrated that all his previous claims to be God were credible. Only God could have this power. Sam Alberry says it nice and succinctly “the resurrection confirms who Jesus says he is; the Christ, the Saviour and the author of life.”
BREAKOUT – There are many people who have claimed to be God across the centuries. In the light of the resurrection, how is Jesus different and how does that strengthen your faith in him?
Thirdly, when Jesus said I am the resurrection and the life, this gives us hope for the future; the hope of eternal life. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is totally unique. Yes, Lazarus had been raised to life, but that was only in order for him to die once again. No, Jesus physically died but three days later he came to life; this time never to die again! As Moody puts it, Jesus ushers in a new era that we follow on from as his followers. This is great news for us! Let’s take a quick look at 1 Corinthians 15 to understand this idea better; I like to read it in the New Living translation so that I can get my head around it as it is pretty complicated, but there is a phenomenal truth in there!
Read 1 Corinthians 15:20-23 (NLT)
This passage is showing that just as death came into the world when Adam sinned, so new life comes through the resurrection of Jesus. Now, if I’ve heard rumours about something, I like to have hard evidence to back up the rumour if I’m to then believe it; I’m sure you do too. Here we have living proof that we will live eternally! We know God created us with eternity set into our hearts. He has also provided the Scriptures; eye-witness accounts of Jesus doing what he said he’d do! Dying in our place, dying the death we deserved to die, but then stomping on death and triumphing over it on that resurrection Sunday! In doing that, Jesus became the forerunner for us; he is the proof of our eventual resurrection to eternal life. He’s done it first, we follow. This does not mean we will never physically die, rather it means we will not face the spiritual death we spoke of before; the ‘separation-from-God-forever death’. Instead, we will be with our Father forever. That is what Jesus meant when he said to Martha “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (v25 and 26). As John Piper said; so powerful, so complete is Jesus’ defeat of death that he speaks of it as if Christians no longer experience it! I know I already knew this truth, but really meditating on it has brought me so much assurance! Because of what Jesus has done, death becomes just a door, a gateway to something so much better than our limited minds can imagine. An eternal inheritance beyond anything we could dream and unsurpassed joy forevermore in the presence of our Saviour! (Eph 1:11; Psalm 16:11)
I don’t think we often dwell on the life that is to come, not as individuals or in our conversations with other believers or even as a church. We are very taken up with the here-and-now. And there isn’t anything wrong with ‘being present in the moment’ but we must be careful not to put our hope in the wrong place. What does Jesus mean in saying he is the life? Is that for now or for later? Well, both! John is very clear from the beginning of his book, that life is not merely the absence of death or just a state of existence. Right back at the beginning of his book, where we started with Sharon, John spells out what life is: “In him (that is Jesus) was life, and that life was the light of mankind” (John 1:4). This is what Jesus is offering when he says “I am the resurrection and the life”; life that is in God, enjoying His presence, his forgiveness, and his empowering to achieve His purposes for us. This is the life Jesus says he gives us when he says in John 10:10 that he has come to give us “life to the full”. Jesus himself is life, and if we are in him, we have that life now.
So, how do we live in response to all this? How does Jesus saying ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’ impact us? In studying for this, I have asked myself as Jesus asked Martha “do I believe this?”. I know that in the past when I’ve been struggling with a panic attack or have my head full of worry that my latest physical symptom is actually a hidden cancer, I have found it very hard to grasp the resurrection power of Jesus or feel like I am living my life ‘to the full’. I have felt like a failure in the belief-department! But Martha has taught me so much. When Jesus asks her the pointed question “do you believe this?” after he’s just told her he is the resurrection and the life, she doesn’t say “well, I know it but I’m not feeling it right now” or “yes, but, but, but…my beloved brother Lazarus is dead!”. No, she responds in faith. You see, believing is not an ‘act-of-the-will’ but a response. Martha’s response shows a fixed and settled faith, especially verse 27 where she says “I believe…”. She is using the perfect tense, effectively saying “I have believed and, despite these circumstances, I continue to believe”. She is such an example to me here. Jesus presents the truth, she responds in faith. We have the whole of Scripture revealing to us the power of Christ’s triumphant victory over death through his resurrection; we have a choice to respond. It must be a pretty important point; Jesus mentions ‘believe’ 8 times in this chapter! He really wants us to believe. When we say “I believe” like Martha, we are not saying “I must believe, I must believe” or “I’m not believing hard enough”. That is missing the point. Hollie sent me a great article by Ron Frost about what it means to believe; he put it beautifully “to believe is a response… it is to be awakened, having the eyes of our hearts opened, rather than a task to do”. And the Holy Spirit is the one who brings about this awakening in us. He opens our eyes to see that Jesus is and should be central to our lives and everything we do, say and think. And when we struggle, we can still rest completely in the knowledge that faith; that attitude of trust and confidence, is a gift given by God. It is not in our own efforts! What a relief. In my struggling, it is totally okay to cry out like the father of the demon-possessed boy who said to Jesus “I DO believe! Help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) and Jesus poured out his love and compassion.
A word of warning though; we must be careful that our belief is more than just acknowledgement. Scripture tells us that even the devil and his demons believe Jesus is the Son of God; they acknowledge who he is. It doesn’t help them! No, the Holy Spirit helps us go further. As our response to what Jesus has done for us in triumphing over death and giving us new life in him, we delight in him, embrace him and make him the treasure and Lord of our lives by surrendering completely to him. This is truly what it means to respond to Jesus and believe. Examine your response to his offer of eternal life today. Have you responded?
BREAKOUT – How do you respond to Jesus? How does the truth about Jesus shape your life?
You know, our enemy the Devil has literally been flinging everything and the kitchen sink at me; he does not want the truth that Jesus is the resurrection and the life proclaimed publicly and he also wants me to stay stuck in my fear. But knowing Jesus has fought the fight that I never could, and truly come out of the battle victorious has enabled me to face up to the fear of death. There are some fantastic verses that have really encouraged me as I’ve studied for this evening. The writer to the Hebrews said “Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying (and I want to add ‘rising to new life’ here) could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying” (Hebrews 2:14-15). I have been one of those slaves! But, thank you Lord for your victory, because I have been set free!! Because of Jesus’ victory, we can have courage and hope and steadfast assurance in the face of death. Now, I’m not saying that I have all this nailed now. Even whilst writing this and since, I have felt the cold fingers of fear grip my insides. But! I am determined to fight. What does our loving Father want for his children? He wants us to talk to him, to ask him for help. So we follow the pattern Jesus set for us in speaking to his Father like he did in garden of Gethsemane. We ask Him to increase in us the desire to finally see Him in his glory. We ask him to decrease the hold that the fear of death has on us due to the unbelief in our hearts. And we ask Him to give us such faith and longing to be with Christ that we no longer wish to live as long as possible here, but only long enough to faithfully finish the course He has allotted to us. So now I pray! Every time I feel the fear, I speak truth. You know, the famous verses “where O death is your victory? Where o death is your sting?” have a new meaning to me now. Because Jesus is the resurrection and the life, death has no victory and no power over us. Because Jesus is the resurrection and the life, death has lost its sting and for me that is the fear. Praise the LORD!