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The fifth I AM proclamation recorded in John’s gospel precedes the miraculous resurrection of Jesus’s friend Lazarus of Bethany. It is a response to Lazarus’s sister Martha after she laments the fact that He was not around to prevent the death in the first place. In this assertion of deity connected to the act of resurrection and the existence of life itself, the Lord makes clear that He is the source of both.

Several days earlier Jesus received word that Lazarus had become critically ill. He did not immediately go to His friend but chose to wait an extra two days before travel, saying to the disciples “this sickness is not to end in death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it.” The delay insures that Lazarus not only will have died by the time He arrives, but also that his body will have begun decomposition. Surely only the intervention of God could restore one from such a state, and this is exactly what Jesus intended to display when He arrived.

As usual the disciples do not pick up on what He is telling them and are instead focused on the danger involved with returning to Judea, where the religious establishment remains set on killing Him. Jesus reminds them that it is still not the appointed time of his death, and that until that time He is obligated to do the Father’s work. He walks in the day, under the providential care of the Almighty, and will not stumble. To that end, He plans to go to Judea to deal with Lazarus’s death and in the process perform a massive sign that will validate the faith of His followers. The disciples, loyal but still clueless, resignedly follow.

As they approach the village Martha heads out to meet Jesus, having been informed that He was finally arriving. As is her manner, she chastises Him for His absence but does concede her belief that God will grant whatever He asks of Him. The Lord assures her that Lazarus will live again, and Martha seems to take that to mean the resurrection of all believers in the last day. Like the other disciples, her perception and faith has a limit; she still does not comprehend exactly who she is talking to, and obviously feels there are restraints on what He can do. Surely even the Christ cannot restore life to a man after four days.

When Jesus then tells her that He is the resurrection and the life, He makes plain that He is not just a prophet who can petition God effectively and channel the occasional miracle. He is, rather, the eternal Logos—the Word of God incarnate—by and through whom all life exists, physical and spiritual. He is the everlasting life. As the One who created all living things out of nothing, He is not only capable of raising the dead, He is the power of resurrection itself.

His proclamation connects life with true belief, highlighting the fact that physical death carries with it no punitive sentence for the believer. When Jesus says that everyone who believes in Him will never die, He is talking about being saved from spiritual death. Man was created with an eternal soul which endures after he physically dies. For one to experience what scripture calls the second death means for them to be eternally separated from God's grace in a place of torment after they die, the unending penalty for sin. To believe in Christ is to experience the spiritual resurrection that spares a person from the second death and delivers them into the everlasting fellowship of God. He is that resurrection because it is only by and through Him that it is possible.

The life (Gk. zoe) He represents is the eternal life of God. After physical death, the believer’s soul is sustained in the presence of God, to be united with a glorified version of their physical body at the second coming of Christ, reign with Him, and reside in a state of perpetual blessedness in His presence forever. This is the life of God, and the exact future that is promised to every Christian believer.

The tears Jesus sheds when confronted with the family’s grief are the source of much speculation, and a common conclusion is that His weeping is not just for their loss, but for the whole of faithless humanity and its wretched state. Ultimately it is the scourge of sin that brought death into the world, separates man from God, and condemns multitudes for eternity. There is no more distressing truth than that. It is not His wish for any to perish, but God is just, and the wage of sin is death. Still, mercy is graciously
extended, but only a relative few will repent and trust in Jesus as the resurrection and the life.

Jesus has the stone rolled away from the tomb despite Martha’s protest that the body is too far gone. Just as God called the physical universe into being, Jesus calls his friend from the grave. He speaks it and it is done. Exactly how it happens defies human comprehension, but such are the ways of God. The text says that many of the Jews had come up from Jerusalem to comfort and mourn with the family, and while few likely could process what was taking place before their eyes, many believed in Him on that day.

There were two other documented occasions in which Jesus raised the dead that may have been known to those in attendance: the resurrections of the widow’s son and the
daughter of Jairus. However both of those instances are understood to have taken place very shortly after death, allowing room perhaps for an unbelieving person to argue that they were not actually dead but had swooned due to their afflictions and then suddenly and coincidentally rebounded. Lazarus on the other hand was quite deceased, way beyond retrieval by any reasonable assessment, and after four days his physical condition would certainly bear witness to it. Yet here he comes reeling out of the tomb as his body miraculously regenerates. Unwrap him, says the Lord. John MacArthur notes:

They can’t raise him from the dead, but they can unwrap him. They can’t steal him out of the clutches of the king of terrors, death, but they can roll the stone away, and that’s how the kingdom of God works in the world. God does what only God can do, but what you can do and what I can do, He always enlists us to be involved in, and that’s how we work in the kingdom, and we see that here.*

Beyond the demonstration of Jesus’s credentials to everyone there, the resurrection of Lazarus was an act that strengthened the faith of the believers who witnessed it, empowering them further to go forth and do the work of preaching the gospel and building disciples. These are the things that people can do, things employed by God to achieve His plan for man’s salvation.

Through the illustration of Lazarus, Jesus shows that death is not the end. Everyone will experience resurrection after they depart bodily from this world—some will be resurrected to eternal life and others to eternal torment. The difference comes down to what a person believes and puts their trust in. Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life because very simply, He is the solitary source and the very existence of both. God must execute His holy justice, yet He has extended mercy to humanity through the Christ who paid in full our previously insurmountable debt of sin. It is through faith in Jesus alone that any are delivered from the just sentence of everlasting destruction and to the believer’s reward, the infinite life of God.

Next: The Way, The Truth, and the Life

Quotation reference:
* MacArthur, John F.; I Am the Resurrection and the Life, Part 2; sermon, Sept. 21, 2014

 

 

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Most scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB)

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