Dead Man Walking | Dave Sloop

Good morning, everyone. Hope you are well. My name is Dave. For those of you that I've not had the privilege of meeting, I'm one of our pastors here, and just delighted to be together this morning.

We're in John's gospel yet again, in chapter 11 yet again. This is, I think, our fourth week. We will be in this chapter one week more. Tim will close it out next week. And with that, we will close out what is known as the book of signs.

I thought that it would be worth doing a little refresher on John's purpose in showing us signs. We talked about this a lot at the beginning of this series. In fact, his very purpose in writing the book is clearly highlighted in John chapter 20 in verses thirty and thirty-one, in which John says this:

Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, but these are written. These seven signs, which happened in these 11 chapters. These were written that you may believe that he is the Christ, the son of God, that by believing in him, you might have life in his name. — John 20:30-31

I want you to notice this pattern. First of all, he said these are signs. They're not just miracles. They're not just displays of his power. They are pointing to something. They're not just wonders to behold. They are that, but they're more. They are windows through which we are to look and see something. They are signs pointing. They signify that he is, John says, the Christ, the son of God.

But John also tells us that by believing in him, that our belief is always going to turn into something else. It's not just static information that we give mental assent to. Belief in John's gospel always moves. It becomes believing. It is active. It is a verb. We believe, and our belief becomes believing. And he says, that we might have life in his name. There is a sign which leads to believing, which for John, it leads to life. There's a change.

This word, belief, it is used 98 times. Other than the word father, it is the most used word in John's gospel. And John chapter 11 is the chapter that uses this word the most. There is no chapter in John's gospel that uses it more. In fact, in verses 15 to 48, it is the most concentrated use of this word. Five of those times, it is directed at one person. You wanna guess who it is? Martha.

The key to understanding this chapter, or rather this passage that we're looking at today, at least the way that I'm gonna teach it, is by understanding Jesus' conversation with Martha in this chapter because he's after her belief. And according to John chapter twenty thirty and thirty-one, he's after your belief and my belief too. A belief that leads to something, namely, life. That our belief in him would lead to a receiving of life, that we would have it, that it would be perpetual, that we'd be receiving something from him perpetually because of a belief that we have. It's meant to produce something. It's meant to transform us and change us.

Just recently, I was on a flight. It was a long flight. And I don't know about you. This is kind of a tragedy that I'm even gonna share this, but sometimes when we get on a flight, unless we pay for it, we are, for a time, disconnected from the world outside. There is no cell phone signal. There is no WiFi. And every once in a while, if it's a long flight, eventually I will cave and I'll pay the $15 or whatever it is to be able to have WiFi for a couple of hours, which is funny because essentially, what I want to be able to do is text and check my email. The two very things I don't want to do when I'm at home. But for some reason, when I get on the plane, I think I really need to know if something's happening out there, someone might need me, and so I always pay.

So a couple hours into this flight, I finally break down, and I'm like, I'm just gonna pay. And as I navigate to the WiFi packages, and I'm about to pay, I see this little blue banner at the top that says, "Now free WiFi for all AA Advantage members." And I thought, praise God, I am an Advantage member. And I log in and I get free WiFi so that all my friends could text me. No one needed me, but I was available just in case.

But here is the point. Sometimes we have access to benefits that we're entitled to, that we just don't know about. And I think this describes much of the Christian life. It certainly describes our key character in this text, Martha, who believed all the right stuff, but she had a hard time dragging her belief into the present.

We're gonna take a look at this sign and what John wants us to believe about him so that it would change our life today. Not someday in the future, now.

So let's look at this sign together starting in verse 38, and I would like to encourage you. I do not have slides because I would like for you to read through this with me. Maybe you have a Bible app on your phone, or maybe you just want to open up one of those pew bibles. There's only seven verses, and we're just going to slowly walk through them together, and I think it will be to your benefit to be looking.

In verse 38, here's what we read:

Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave and a stone lay against it. — John 11:38

I mentioned this last week, but John says here a word, and he tells you that he said it last week. He says, once again, Jesus deeply moved. And what we learned about that particular word is that it does not mean tender compassion. Jesus is tender and compassionate, but this word in particular means angry. Jesus sees death. He is staring as it were into the face of the enemy, what Paul calls the last enemy that he came to conquer.

John Calvin, in his exposition on this particular passage, would say Jesus shows up to the tomb that day like a champion prepared for conflict. He's angry. He means to go to battle, and he means to win against death, and he will. He comes to the tomb, and he describes it as a cave with a stone that lay across the entrance. I want you to imagine for a second what it must feel like on the other side of that tomb. It would have been a place of tremendous darkness, loneliness. It was a place of death.

Spiritual Darkness and Death

And I want you to consider, because I think this is part of what John wants us to see in this miracle. It's part of what this sign points to: what was a physical reality for Lazarus is a spiritual reality for every single person on planet Earth apart from Jesus Christ. Lazarus was in bondage to darkness and death, and so are you spiritually, and so am I if Christ does not get ahold of me. I'm in darkness.

In fact, that's exactly what Paul would call it in Colossians chapter one when he says:

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Our inheritance that is ours by right is which he says in the same passage that he's qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. — Colossians 1

We are in darkness. He's transferred us to the kingdom of his son, which is a kingdom of light. But we are also dead spiritually. As he would say in Ephesians chapter two:

As for you, you were dead in the sins and trespasses in which you used to walk. — Ephesians 2

Which means you had no ability, no inclination. You had no desire or ability to understand and digest and discern spiritual truth because you're in darkness. You did not understand. You were dead. You had no will to love him, to follow him. On your own, you never would nor could you.

Darkness and death. That is our spiritual reality if Jesus Christ doesn't get ahold of our heart, which is interesting because I want you to notice something that I had never noticed before. And I'm not sure that John intends this, but it's an interesting correlation if he did.

He says in verse 39, "Take away the stone." And when I was studying this this week, I just wrote down, "I will take away your heart of stone, and I will give you a heart of flesh." And as I thought about it more, I thought, you know what? This is in Ezekiel chapter 36. It is the new covenant. It is what God promises to do one day for those who would become his children. He says:

I will take away your heart of stone. I will give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit in you and cause you to obey me. — Ezekiel 36

Because in your flesh and in your brokenness and in your darkness and in your death, you cannot, you will not, you would not, you could not. And so I will effect a change in you, put a spirit in you, and cause you to obey.

And then as I thought about it more, Ezekiel chapter 37 comes right after 36, believe it or not. And in that chapter, it is known as the Valley of the Dry Bones, where God leads Ezekiel to see a valley, a field of bones, and he said, "Prophesy to the bones," and the bones come together, and the muscles come on the bones, and the skin comes on the bones, but the bones and the skin, the bodies are just dead. And he says, "Son of man, can these bones live?" To which Ezekiel responds, "Sovereign Lord, only you know." And God says to Ezekiel, "Prophesy to the breath." That Hebrew word is ruach, which means spirit. It's the same word used for Holy Spirit. And the breath comes, and it indwells these people, these bodies, and they get up, and they're alive.

Take away the stone. Lazarus, come out. Ezekiel 37: take away their heart of stone, bodies get up. And then I thought, in John chapter 10, what happens? Jesus is depicted, self-proclaimed. He is the fulfillment of the good shepherd. Do you remember where that passage comes from? Ezekiel 34.

He is the fulfillment of Ezekiel's good shepherd who brings about Ezekiel's new covenant in chapter 36, and he will bring about the resurrection from the dead, both spiritually and physically. I don't know for a fact that John means all these references to come together like this, but such is the word of God. It is so fun to read it and discover buried treasure there.

But I want you to listen. Martha's not too excited about this. She says, "But Lord." Let me just read this verbatim. Jesus said, "Take away the stone," and then Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days."

Death has a stench to it, does it not? We have some birds that are dead in our chimney right now, and I can promise you, if you go to my living room, you will smell death. And you instantly know something is off about this. This is not right. When you see death up close, there's something in you instinctively that knows this is not how it ought to be.

And whenever we say this is not how it ought to be, there's something intuitive in us that knows that there's a way it should be. And you're right about that, by the way, because eternity—God has set eternity in the hearts of men. And when you taste or smell or experience or look at death, or you see grief on the faces of those whom death has stolen from, you know this is not right. It is not natural, which is why Jesus is angry about it.

Martha resists Jesus' desire to send light and life into a place of darkness and death. And the question is, why? What is she resisting here? It's her brother, after all, that's in the tomb. Jesus responds to her, and he says this: "Martha, did I not tell you? If you believe, you will see the glory of God."

I want to unpack this with you. We're going to stay here for just a little bit. He says, "Martha, did I not tell you?"—meaning he's referencing a conversation that they have had. Where did he speak to Martha? In verse 25 to 27, do you remember what he said to her? The first thing out of her mouth is, "If you'd been here, my brother wouldn't have died." And Jesus says to her:

"Your brother will rise again. I know he'll rise at the last day. I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet he will live again. And he who lives and believes in me will never die." — John 11:23-26

I want to unpack what that means because in this instance—this isn't always the case, but in this instance—John attaches an "I am" statement to the sign. He also does this with the feeding of the 5,000: "I am the bread of life." He does this with the healing of the blind man: "I am the light of the world." He tells you what he means by it.

Whenever you see an "I am" statement, it is Jesus saying, "This is who I am." And there's always attached to it an invitation for you to receive something from him because of who he is. "I am the bread of life—come to me and eat." "I am the light of the world—come to me to see." "I am the resurrection and the life—come to me for life."

He says, "I am the resurrection. I am the life." They are connected, but they are distinct. In fact, when he says, "I am the resurrection," what he means by that is I am the one who will bring about a bodily resurrection. It is a day that is coming. He references it in John chapter five. He said:

"Do not marvel at this. One day, at the voice of the Son of Man, dead people will come out of the tombs at the sound of my voice." — John 5:28-29

That's who I am. But the resurrection, which is coming, would not be necessary if it were not for the fall. He is life. You could say that the resurrection is a subset of his claim to be life.

At the beginning of John's gospel:

"In him was life, and this life was the light of men." — John 1:4

I told you last week that in 1 John—shocker—in that book, life, eternal life, is both something that he gives and an attribute of his character. He gives us eternal life. It's what he promises to us. It's a gift. We can expect to receive it from him. But also, one of the last sentences in 1 John chapter five is:

"He is the true God and eternal life." — 1 John 5:20

It is what he gives. It is who he is. He is the resurrection. He is the life.

But let me tell you something else about his "I am" statements. When he says "I am," he's also saying "I am God." No question. That's why John has him doing this seven times in his gospel. Seven is the number of completion or wholeness. He is fully God. And when he says "I am," he is pointing—just like his signs point—these "I am" statements point to the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses and said:

"I am that I am." — Exodus 3:14

But I want you to notice something about that title. It is the perpetual present tense: "I am." And what Martha needs to know, and what Jesus is after her for, is that she would know that who he is, he always is. And specifically, I am right now, Martha. This is who I am. I am that I am that I am.

Martha is struggling. "If you believe, Martha, did I not tell you?"

At the end of that little conversation in verse 27, he says, do you believe this? She says, I do. You are the Christ, son of God, who is to come into the world. But he also says, did I not tell you if you believe, you would see the glory of God? And a thinking person asks this question, when did he tell Martha that if she believed she would see the glory of God?

Now commentators disagree about this, but I want to tell you the conclusion that I have arrived at, and you can go study for yourself. Jesus says, I told you this, Martha. There is a place in this chapter where he attaches the glory of God to what he's about to do with Lazarus. Do you know what it is? Verse four. He says, when the messenger arrives and he's with his disciples and says, the sisters have sent to you, the one that you love, Lazarus, is sick. And Jesus responds in the presence of his disciples and this messenger. This illness does not end in death. Go tell Mary and Martha. The messenger who brought the word to Jesus brings the word back to Mary and Martha, and I think that this explains so much.

It explains their consistent disappointment with Jesus. When they said, if you'd been here, my brother wouldn't have died, they weren't just expressing disappointment in something they thought he might have done. They were expressing disappointment in what he said he would do. This will not end in death, Mary. It will not end in death, Martha, but it did. And they were disillusioned, they were disappointed, they were confused.

They felt just like the disciples on the road to Emmaus who were walking, and the resurrected Christ comes up beside them. And he says, what are you talking about? And they say to him, are you the only one in Jerusalem that does not know what has happened with Jesus of Nazareth? I'm just going to cherry pick this one part. They say, we thought he was the one to redeem Israel, but something happened. He was crucified, and they determined we were wrong.

What would Jesus have said to them? What would he have said to Martha? I made the promise. You just didn't wait long enough. Martha, do you know what she did? She said, I know my brother will rise again in the last day. She over spiritualized Jesus' response to her. She pushed the promise out into the future thinking it did not have a present context, and we do the same thing all the time.

See, Jesus wants her to know, I am the resurrection and the life. I made you a promise I have yet to fulfill, and I'm asking you, Martha, believe now. Did I tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God? And, by the way, here is what belief is for Jesus. It's Martha, you gotta put a hand on the stone because your belief always leads to your behavior. It is not just giving mental assent. It is having a life that accords with what you say that you believe. And if you really believed what I was about to do, that this is not just some future promise, you would live different, Martha. You would go push that stone out of the way as fast as you possibly could because you have no idea. You're about to see something that you could not possibly fathom.

Belief and Present Reality

How do we do this? Let me just give you a few examples. We do it with our sin. We know that the Bible says things like:

Be holy because he is holy.

Jesus, in fact, said:

Be perfect because your heavenly father is perfect.

Peter would very much echo the same sentiment. So would John in his epistle. We also know that he said things like:

Anybody that says they're without sin is a liar and the truth is not in him.

But don't miss what he says right after that:

No one who abides in him keeps on sinning, and no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.

But what many of us do is we push that off into the future because our present struggle with sin makes us think, there better be something else going on here, and there is. Listen. I'm not trying to replace one for the other, but what I am telling you is that they're both true. And what we ought not do is what so many of us are tempted to do, which is to look at chapters in the Bible like Romans 7 and say, good. Paul struggled too. Therefore, I can exhale. The Christian life is a life of struggle. I'm not negating that. But what we don't often do is keep reading because at the end of that chapter, he says:

Thanks be to God. Who has delivered me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And all of chapter 8 is about the conquering life of the spirit filled believer. Here's just a couple highlights of what Paul will say in that chapter:

The same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, and you now have a power to put to death the misdeeds of the body by the spirit that lives in you.

Be perfect? Really? Paul says, yeah. And then he would say this, I'm not saying I've already attained it, obtained it, but there's one thing I do. Forgetting what is behind. We stop there.

Just forget what is behind. Paul doesn't stop there. He says, I strive towards what is ahead, to lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has laid hold of me. He laid hold of you to make you holy. We should take comfort in the fact that the Christian life is struggle and that there is evidence in the scriptures to give us, to take the pressure off a little bit. But we should not go too far in the other direction and stop making holiness and perfection the goal. Paul never did.

In fact, all of Philippians chapter three is Paul saying, I've lost everything. I give it all I trade it all in. Why? So that I can know him. And the power of his resurrection and sharing in the fellowship of his suffering. What is his suffering? It is death to self.

Here's another one we push into the future. Jesus said:

Abide in me. And what will be the product of abiding in me? A joy that you could not fathom. I've told you this so that my joy will be in you and your joy would be full.

Find me one person on planet earth that does not want full joy. The problem is, not that we don't want it, but that we're looking at all the wrong places. Jesus says, joy comes from abiding. But our present experience, for some of us, we don't experience the joy, and so we think, okay, he must be talking about the future. We'll just push that out and we'll stop trying.

Jesus is saying to Martha and he's saying to you and me:

I am the resurrection and the life.

There is power now. Why don't we experience it more?

Let's keep reading. Jesus will say a prayer, and then he's going to say these words:

Lazarus, come out.

Can you imagine having been there? All the people standing around, looking into that tomb, wondering.

The dead man, the man who had died, came out, his hands and his feet, bound with linen strips and his face wrapped with cloth. Jesus said to them, Unbind him and let him go.

Martha is the person in John's gospel. She is the chief confessor of who Christ is. In the synoptics, who is it? It's Peter.

You are the Christ, the son of the living God. Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah. Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you.

In John's gospel, it is Martha.

You're the Christ, the son of God who was to come into the world.

He gives her the seat of honor. Tim taught us about that a couple of weeks ago. But isn't it interesting that in both the synoptics and in John's gospel, the chief confessor almost immediately shows how limited their understanding of that confession is. In the same passage where Peter says, you're the Christ, right after that, Jesus says, I'm gonna die, and he says, no, you're not. And Jesus says, get behind me, Satan.

What happens here?

I am the resurrection and the life. You are the Christ, the son of God who was to come into the world. Take away the stone.

And Martha says: Lord, there's a bad odor.

Jesus gives a rebuke to both. His rebuke to Martha here is a little bit softer, but it is a rebuke nonetheless. He is after her belief.

Believe me now.

Why don't we experience his power more? I'll tell you why. The picture of obedience, shockingly, in this passage—you know who it is? Lazarus. Have you noticed twice John referred to him as the dead man? What's up with that?

Jesus calls him by name. Why is John trying to strip this man's identity away? I think there's two reasons. Number one, John wants you to know even death obeys this man. He is the son of God. He is the Christ. He is the one that will bring about the literal bodily resurrection one day.

But there's another thing going on here. Martha struggles to obey even though she knows everything. Lazarus obeys perfectly. Why? Because he's dead. He hears no other voice, no other instinct or impulse but to respond to the voice of the one who has now remade him.

And if you are God's child, he has remade you. Paul says:

I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

See, are you someone like Martha who struggles to believe? It's because there's too much self in you and in me.

Diagnostic Tests for Self

Let me give you just a few diagnostic tests for you to try on when you get home today. Are you someone who is easily irritated, easily offended? You struggle when you do not get your way. If somebody else gets credit for something you feel like you did, you feel like you need to make sure they know. It was me.

Do you know who that is? That is yourself. And to the degree that our self is enlarged, our experience of the life of the son of God will be limited.

This is why Paul, he just gave away everything. And do you know that Paul, just like Jesus, had so much of the spirit of God flowing through him that just like Jesus, people touched garments of Paul and were healed. Was Paul divine? Absolutely not. But he, like Jesus, was an empty vessel.

Remember Philippians two: Jesus became nothing so that the spirit of God, which Jesus had without measure, could flow through him.

If we aren't experiencing power, the present tense, I am power of the resurrection and the life of Jesus, it is because our self, the self life, is getting in the way. There is more available for us to the degree that we would be willing to just die. And every time you see little evidence of yourself, do like Paul in Philippians chapter three and just trade it in, believing with simple trust and obedience that he is better, and that what he offers is better.

Jesus said to Martha, did I not tell you if you believe you would see? What might he say to you in whatever area you might be struggling to see his resurrection power manifest. I think he would say, did I not tell you if you believe, you will see the glory of God in that area of your life? That I will show myself to be all that I say that I am right there if you would but stop exerting your self energy. Die.

Jesus said, if anybody wants to come after me, he has to deny himself. You gotta take this cross, and he's gonna follow me. He has got to empty himself.

See, Paul said in that beautiful chapter in Philippians three where he trades in everything that he might gain Christ. Everything that was his by right, he counted it rubbish that he might gain Christ. And in verse 10, he says, I wanna know him. And then he defines what knowing him is by saying by knowing the power of his resurrection. The power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings. What were his sufferings? Death.

One Final Thought

Jesus said to Martha, and in the presence of his disciples, this illness does not end in death. It is for the glory of God that the son of God might be glorified through it.

In John's gospel, what is the chief glorification of the son of God? It is his cross. It is the hour for the son of God to be glorified. John here says that the son of God would be glorified through Lazarus' resurrection. And I do think he means, he will show himself to be the lord of life. But I also know that it's true that by raising Lazarus from the dead, he secured his own fate. As Tim Keller put it, to interrupt Lazarus' funeral was to summon his own. In order for Lazarus to come out, Jesus had to go in. He had to die in order that Lazarus might live.

But can I tell you something? And I want you to hear this. If you hear nothing else, hear this. Jesus had to die in order that Lazarus might live. But listen, you have to die in order that his life might be manifest in you. The reason we don't taste his joy, the reason we don't experience victory over sin is because of self. And if you would be willing to die, you would watch power, joy, even in the face of your suffering overcome you. Let us die that he might live.

Prayer

Father, we need you. We thank you for the cross. We thank you for what it accomplished for us that we could never have accomplished on our own. We thank you for the spirit of God who is alive, just as alive as you were in the day of Paul, certainly in the day of Jesus. Lord, it is your desire to come and fill hearts, to dwell for real in them, and to be a power, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, that, of course, would give us victory over our sin to the degree that we were willing to lay down our life. God, help us to do it. We need your strength. It is in Christ's name that we pray. Amen.