John 11:37-44

Thank you, music ministers.

You have your Bibles.

Or you can look upon the screen.

Up and with me to the gospel of John chapter 11.

I said is,

Every one of these texts, especially now at the beginning of

Hebrews, is very, very thick.

This one is really great.

It's so great.

And I really just really want to make

it as best I can for you, and as understandable as

I can, and explain it as well as I can.

So it just is, it's taking me more time than usual

to prepare, uh, these sermons.

So we flip flop back and forth.

We're back in John 11.

If you can remember the last time we were here, we worked

our way up through verse 36,

And guess what?

We're finally gonna get Lazarus out the tomb today.

He'd been in there for what, three sermons, I think, is it?

And, uh, so now we're getting him out, and let's

read 1st our text in verses 37

to 44.

We'll start by doing that.

But some of them said, Could

not this man who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man also from dying?

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?

So they remove 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.

Now, throughout the

text of this Gospel of John, we

repeatedly discover John's

constant intention to demonstrate

the deity of Jesus, the

Godhood of Jesus, the fact that Jesus is God.

Remember, anytime I use that word deity, that's

what I mean, the godhood of Jesus.

And constantly as we've worked our way through these verses,

John is always pointing to

the works of Jesus as the proof that he is God.

And in the gospel of John, there are seven

major miracles

that John uses to point this reality out.

Out of literally thousands that he could have picked from,

because John tells us that the books of all

the world couldn't contain everything that

Jesus did.

So John's just giving us highlights, right?

But none of the miracles that John picked to

write in his gospel.

is more powerful, more compelling

and memorable than the raising of

his friend, Lazarus, from the dead.

What we see here is, divine,

creative, supernatural power

that belongs only to God.

Understand that.

Only God is the creator.

Christ is the creator.

God creates in Genesis 1 in the beginning, God

created the heavens and the earth.

Christ creates in John 1,

All things came into being through him, Christ,

and apart from him, nothing came into being that has come into being.

Jesus is God.

Only God, only God,

can do what Jesus did at the tomb of Lazarus that day.

Only divine power can

stop the progress of decay on

a dead body.

Only divine power reverses

rigor mortis.

Only God can pour new life into

rotted organs and start back

up a bloodless,

decomposing heart that now is

beating and pumping fresh new blood

into now, every new fresh

new organ and limb.

Think of it.

Sightless, decomposed

eyes, on Lazarus,

were given new tissue, and new nerves,

and new vision in this miracle.

A non functioning, decomposed

mass of brain tissue

was recreated to be able to

think, and move,

and feel, and speak.

It's staggering.

God only kind of power that we're talking about here.

It's truly ludicrous to imagine that

people have that kind of power.

As I said before.

There are folks who claim to have seen it happen in our day.

There are fake faith healers who claim

to have that type of power.

But you always hear the story is in somewhat far off

place.

Nobody had a camera and none of the supposed

accounts have ever been close to being verified.

that people have raised people from the dead in our modern day.

Now, we've covered in detail the

first 36 verses of this chapter, and today's we come to verse 37.

We're actually going to get to the resurrection.

of Lazarus itself.

And as usual, in the Bible,

the account itself is very brief.

There's no pathological description that you're going to get here

from scripture.

There's no attempt to, like,

describe any of the phenomena that's going on here at

this scene, about Lazarus's body,

about the tomb, the account is short, it's

direct, it's to the point, as the Bible usually is.

I want you to remember, there's a lot of people here.

There's a lot of people around this tomb.

Jesus asked them to roll the stone away when Lazarus

comes out of the grave, he asks them to unwrap him,

and as you go through the story,

you realize that this

is something that Jesus always does.

He always used people to

do what people can do.

They can't raise him from the dead.

Nobody there at the site could, but

they could unwrap him.

They can't steal him away from the clutches of death,

but they could roll the stone away.

And isn't that exactly the

way the kingdom of God works in this world?

God does what only God can do,

and then, at the same time, he enlists us

to be involved with what he can do, like

only God can regenerate a person.

You and I can't do that.

But, at the same time, when he does that, he

uses us to get the message of the gospel

combined with the power of the Spirit to

bring a person into his kingdom.

So we get this remarkable, wonderful exercise

of being like Ed Lacey used to say, oh, a mission with God.

and bringing people into the family.

And so, again, as we've seen before, this, this

stunning, overwhelming miracle

of resurrection is, with

words, it's really just understated.

as often it is in this text.

There's no fanfare here at this scene.

There's no angels that show up.

trumpet blast, and it's, and it's not even dramatically

drawn out as it happened.

Jesus just says 2 words.

He says, the name of the man and a verb

in the Greek, a command,

That it.

That's all you get.

And in that statement with a name and a verb,

there is unleash before that crowd, the

same exact power that created the universe.

Same person.

Same power.

This miracle confirms the statement,

Look at what Jesus made in verse 25.

It confirms this statement where he said, I

am the resurrection and

the life.

He made clear back in chapter 5, that God has given to

me the power of judgment and resurrection, and I will raise all

the debt of all the ages to final judgment.

Jesus makes statements on spiritual reality, and

then he demonstrates those in a physical way.

He said, I am the resurrection.

And guess what?

Here's a resurrection to prove it.

We saw earlier in John where he said, I am the bread of

life, and then he created a huge meal to prove that he's the bread of life.

He also said, I am the light of the world, and then

he healed blind eyes to prove it.

So let's look at the miracle.

I want you to think back, remember, when Jesus

had arrived, Lazarus had already been dead for four days.

Lazarus's sisters, Mary and Martha,

are very broken hearted.

When Martha hears that Jesus is coming, remember, she runs

out of the house to go to meet him, but Mary,

a bit more pensive, different in her personality.

She stays at home.

She's still sad, crying with the rest of the

mourners in the house, and Jesus has a conversation with

Martha, in which he declares himself

to be the resurrection in the life, and

then he looks at Martha,

and he asks for Mary.

And Martha goes back to the house.

And secretly, she tells Mary,

hey, Jesus, he's out there.

He's calling for you.

And she got right up, right, as any of us would.

And she went right to him, Along with all the

other people in the house, following right behind her, but

remember, they think that she just got up,

'cause they didn't hear what her sister said, they

think that she got up to go to the tomb to

mourn directly at the tomb, so all the people in

the house followed her to where Jesus was, and

when Mary greets Jesus,

They're not quite at the sight of the tomb just yet.

And when Jesus sees her weeping, and

then the rest of the people that are behind her, and they're all weeping

and mourning for Lazarus.

Look what it says in verse 33.

What happened?

Verse 33, Jesus, he was deeply moved

in spirit, and was troubled.

So imagine a picture.

The not of the tomb, they're in between.

Mary comes up.

The people come up.

They're all weeping.

Jesus sees this, weeping, and then he

is deeply moved in spirit and troubled.

If you recall from last time, the

language in the Greek in those phrases.

is extremely strong,

very, very expressive,

Now, he's lost his friend, right?

Lazarus is his friend.

He feels the sadness of the sisters here,

because he was friends with them too.

But if you remember from last time, what I told you, far

more than that, who's standing

in front of these people is the only God

man who exists who will ever exist.

There's only one.

And the wording there is reflecting that

he's feeling the weight of sin and death upon

the whole human race, in

a way that only he could.

So that's what we're talking about.

He was deeply moved in spirit and trouble, by all

of that, including Lazarus, including the sisters,

including the people.

He's...

Think of it this way.

He's feeling the emotion of what every family in

human history, experiences, and the loss of their loved ones.

All of them.

At the same time.

As a result of what?

Sin.

Sin is the common denominator in the loss of all of our family members.

He's feeling all of that in a way that only he could as

the god man, and he also knows,

there's unbelievers around him

here, in this crowd, who are all

going to die, one day, and

most of them are going to step out into eternity,

knowing only the eternal wrath of God.

forever.

So he's also feeling the weight of that reality.

So Jesus here is feeling the

full impact of sin

on the whole human race, and it's very,

very overwhelming to him as the god man.

It's a massive burden for him to bear

that, again, no one else ever

born or ever will be born could possibly conceive

of feeling that same feeling.

And that's why the language is so strong,

he is deeply moved in spirit and troubled.

Only he could feel that.

So much so.

that he, at that moment, he

burst out in tears.

Loud crying.

He can't restrain it.

Look at verse 35, the shortest verse in the Bible,

Jesus wept.

Strong language.

Uncontrollable couldn't at the moment,

all of the things I've said to you, closing

in on him, and it just caused him to burst out.

in loud weeping.

In fact, it stood out so much so from

the rest of the mourners in that crowd.

I want you to look at verse 36, the people say, See how he loved.

That's how much Jesus' crying stood out when he

wept loudly and couldn't contain it,

above all the other people who were crying.

Of course, they have no idea

of the totality for the reasons that he was crying.

They're just crying about Lazarus.

He's crying about the whole situation.

Mankind, sin, death, hell, everything.

And that brings us to verse 37.

Then our first point for today, which is the perplexity.

If the case is that Jesus is

so devastated, and so shattered, and so broken,

he is in this condition that he's in right here at

the graveside, then what about the question

that's asked next in verse 37, look at it.

But some of them said, Could

not this man who opened the eyes of the blind man have

kept this man also from dying?

That's a fair question, right?

For sure, the word has circulated

by now, certainly there are people who have been there

for four days, they knew that the messenger had

been sent to Jesus at the very time that Lazarus was

sick, and they knew that he didn't come right away.

They knew that.

They knew he waited two days.

A day for the messenger to get there.

Jesus waits two days.

Then it takes a day for Jesus to get there, four days.

And these folks knew that.

So, if he loved Lazarus, as much as it

looks like he did, and

if he had the power to heal, like he did with the man born

blind, who sat at the gate, beautiful, who was a stranger

to him, and everybody knew that story by now, in the whole area,

if he had the power to do that, surely

he could have healed Lazarus.

So,

Why didn't he come when they called him?

There's a perplexity here.

And think about it.

It's an understandable perplexity from

their point of view, right?

It would have been to ours, too.

But, of course, from Jesus' viewpoint.

He operates perfectly within the Father's purpose.

He knows exactly what's going on.

The timing is absolutely perfection.

And isn't that very instructive for you and for me?

When things don't seem to make sense that happen to us.

From our perspective, it's always good to look

at examples like this, and remember the totality

of God's purposes are not always

made known to us.

Let me say that again.

The totality of God's purposes are

not always made known to us.

It doesn't mean he's not working all things together for our good and his glory.

It doesn't mean that.

But we just need to try to remember that when

we are perplexed.

Just stick Ephesians one in your mind.

He works all things after the council of his own will,

all things, every circumstance of in in your life and mine.

You need to remember that.

In fact, listen to what Job 3313

asked this question.

You may not remember this from Job.

Job says, Why do you complain against

him that he does not give an

account of all his doings?

Why are you complaining that he don't explain everything to you when bad things happen?

Because the reality is, he doesn't have to.

He's not obligated to explain everything to you when things

are going haywire.

He's not.

He's God.

You're not.

I'm not.

He doesn't have to tell us to plan.

Guess what?

He doesn't have to tell us the duration of the plan, either.

Sometimes the plan takes a long time.

Later, in John 13, 7, on another occasion with the disciples,

Jesus said this, look at it.

What I do, you do not realize now.

But you will understand hereafter.

Jesus knows exactly what

he is doing at all times.

There's never a moment that he does it know what he's doing.

He already knows in this particular situation that

this is all for the glory of God.

He knows there's a resurrection that's fixing to happen.

He knows that is the plan, but they don't.

And they are naturally perplexed.

And that leads us next to our second point.

The problem, verse 38.

Starts out with, so Jesus, again, being deeply

moved within.

And it's so interesting to learn about these Greek words.

This is a different word than the word for deeply moved in verse 33.

And also different from the word troubled in that verse 2.

Here in 38, deeply

moved within is an odd word in

the Greek, but it makes sense.

Let me tell you what it actually literally means.

It means to snort like a horse.

That's what it means.

More specifically, like when a horse gets agitated,

and he lets out a fierce snort, it

sometimes translated, shuddered,

shuddered, like a

kind of a total shaking, MacArthur

says it's a strange word to use, but

it signifies the fact that

a shattering, shuddering emotion

has gripped Jesus in this moment.

That's what it means.

And indignation over death and sin,

and all of its sorrows, and all of its realities,

which are both temporal and eternal, as we saw last time.

He's standing in the presence of the reality

of death.

And with some kind of physical release, maybe

a shudder, maybe a gasp,

we really don't know exactly, he

releases the agony that he feels,

again, being deeply moved within.

And then Jesus next says this.

It says this in verse 38.

He came to the tomb.

That's where he's at when he comes to the tomb, with this

shuddering, shaking, deeply moved within.

That's his frame of mind as he approaches this tomb.

Now, it was a cave, and a stone

was lying against it.

And as often in that part of the world, in those caves,

they would put slits in the walls, because

the stone was soft enough for them to be able to

do that, and then that's where they would lay the bodies in

the flat parts that they made inside the

walls of the cave.

And they didn't have a door to the entrance, so what would they do?

They would put a large circular stone that

would be rolled over, just like with the tomb of Jesus, the same thing.

So that is where Jesus says come to, and here comes the problem, in verse 39.

Jesus said, Remove the stone.

Now, the stone served a purpose.

It kept the animals out, and any

grave robbers who might have wanted to come steal what may have been in

there, sometimes they were buried with valuables and things, but

it also kept the stink in.

Okay?

Because remember, the Jews didn't embalm.

They just stuck them in there, they wrapped the

body, and they put some spices on it.

And I'm not going to go over those details that I did last time.

You heard them once.

That was enough, if you feel like you need to hear them, go back and watch the

last time I was in John.

But after four days, let me tell you something, those spices had no effect.

whatsoever.

I don't care how many pounds you put on top of a dead body after four days.

You don't really smell the spices.

And by the way, this was located outside the village.

It was some distance away from the village, not only for the obvious

reason, but also, the Book of Numbers was

clear, if you touch a dead body in the Jewish

Old Testament law, you were ceremonially unclean

for seven days, if you touch

a dead body, so the Jews didn't

want to get anywhere near a dead body.

So this is off away from the village where they live.

So Martha...

Let me tell you, right at this moment, she's

not real eager for that stone to be moved away for her dead brothers up in there.

And next in verse 39.

It says, Martha, the sister of the deceased, said

to him, Lord, by this time, there will

be a stench, I love the King James, he

stinketh, for he has been dead

for days.

Now, she, let's agree with this.

She's naturally doubting, right?

I mean, even though he told her back in verse 23,

your brother will rise again.

Remember what she said to him?

She said, Well, if you had been here, he wouldn't have died.

Both sisters gave that same speech before, obviously,

they had been talking about it between themselves, so they both gave the same speech.

When he said, Your brother were wise again, you remember what she said?

Well, Jesus, I know that he's gonna rise in the resurrection

at the last day, and he says, I'm not talking about that.

Virtually, what he's saying is, I'm talking about right now.

Look next, verse 40.

Jesus said to her, Did I not say to you that

if you believe, you will see the glory of God?

This isn't something, future.

This isn't at the last day.

You're fixing to see this.

You said you were a believer.

Now, listen, try to put yourself in her shoes.

Yes, she's confessed to believing Jesus is the Son of God,

Messiah, the one who came down from heaven, but let me tell you, think about it.

That's a big leap from that confession

coming from an ordinary woman to seeing an

actual corpse that's been dead four days, come

out of a grave.

I mean, we can kind of understand this, right?

Can you?

I can.

I mean, we'd like to think, well, if we had been there, we'd have risen

to great heights of faith, and never had a question about

it, but really put yourself in that position.

Put yourself at any funeral you've ever been to.

And being told the person in the cast is fixing to get up, come out the casket.

And you're like, All right, bro.

I'm waiting.

Right?

Huh?

That's where we'd be.

Of course, after the fact, we

can see she's got her thoughts on the corpse and not on Christ.

And what Christ said.

But in a moment, just think about all the things that

must have been going through her head.

Can this really happen?

Can he really do this?

I sure don't want any unnecessary desecration to take

place to the body.

I don't want anybody touching it.

We'd be unclean.

And what happens if he tries this and it all goes wrong?

And he don't come out.

What about that?

Wouldnt you be thinking that?

I would.

I get that.

But then the king says, have you forgotten what I promised you?

So that's the promise.

We've seen the perplexity, the problem.

He's so far gone.

Now the promise, again in verse 40.

Jesus said to her, Did I not say to you,

that if you believe you will see the glory of God?

And what does he mean you will see the glory of God?

Well, God's glory was manifested in a number of ways throughout

the history of the Old Testament, remember?

The Shekinah glory in the garden?

In the wilderness, in the pillar of fire, in the cloud,

in the tabernacle,

God's glory came down in the holy of holies, in

the New Testament, the glory of God came in the body, in the

person of Jesus Christ, and some of them on the Mount of Transfiguration,

saw the glory of God shining literally out of the person of Christ, right?

And God is going to put his glory on display here by

miracle power, not as a shining

light, but his glory is

going to be seen in

life itself, before these people.

The full display of his invisible

perfection, his invisible powers, the

fullness of his attributes, are going to be put

on display.

He's going to show his glory right

here, not in light, but in life.

Life from the dead.

And Jesus says, if you believe, you

go see the glory.

Get your eyes off the corpse.

Get your eyes on Christ.

Wait to see the glory revealed,

and we need to live in that kind of expectancy, don't we?

Looking for miracles?

We're not looking for these outward

miracles where, you know, you

see somebody's foot grow, and it's just a trick on TV.

But I can tell you this, for sure.

When I look back and think about the providential working of God in my life,

Man, have I seen plenty of God's glory on display.

And every Christian in here can say the same thing, with me.

You want to know what an amazing display

of the glory of God is now in

our time, the amazing providence of God,

by which he orders every single

circumstance and event in your life, leading

up to salvation, and every day thereafter.

think of the complexity of it all.

It's really more staggering that if he interrupted

natural law and did a single miracle outwardly

like the parting of the Red Sea.

What am I talking about?

How many miracles does it take every day to

create in complex reality, out of

all kind of decisions and contingencies

and non miraculous events of human decisions?

He does that every day in our life?

You're part of it right here in this worship service.

You're here for a reason.

He got you here on purpose today.

Our whole lives are a display of God's glory.

Every minute.

Let me say this to you.

If you really knew, in

detail, in great detail.

what all I've been through, and what all I've

done in my life, if you could see, like, the movie

of all the details of all of it, what

I do now in preaching every Sunday would make no

natural sense to you whatsoever.

You'd be horrified.

I can promise you.

And that's why there's no other explanation than the

glory of God on display because

it's certainly not the glory of me on display.

Okay?

And so if we are believers, and

we're looking for the glory of God on display in our lives, we'll see it.

You're looking for it.

You'll recognize it.

You will see God working in his purposes, and

that is what Jesus is calling on Martha

to look for here.

So, we've seen the perplexity, the problem, the promise,

and now here comes the prayer.

Versus 41 to 42.

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.

He says, Father, I thank you that you've heard me.

He didn't have to say that to the Father.

The Father knows the relationship with the Son.

He's not asking the Father to do anything.

There's not a petition here that he's asking for.

Some people miss that, and they say, well, he's asking the Father

to give him the power.

No, he didn't.

They didn't ask him that.

Read it again.

He didn't ask for anything.

He says, I thank you that you heard me.

I knew that you always hear me, just

like Romans 8, as the Holy Spirit always prays according

to the will of God, so the Son always prays according to the will of God.

He knows what God will do.

He knows it's for his own glory.

That's the issue here.

He says, look, I'm not saying this out loud,

for your sake, I'm saying this for the people around

me in order that they might believe that you sent me.

That's the point.

And again, the whole point always, in this gospel of John, is

that we understand by these miraculous works

that Jesus has come to this world as

God incarnate.

John wants us to get that.

If you can't get there, you don't need to go any further in

believing Christianity if you don't believe that.

You're stuck right there.

And you can be sure that

when Jesus set his mind to say something.

that he wanted every person in a large crowd to hear.

You can be sure that he spoke loudly.

Never has there ever been a preacher's voice, like Jesus.

Never.

Father, I thank you that you have heard me.

I knew that you always hear me.

Everybody heard that very clearly, every syllable.

I don't care how many people it was.

But for these people here, standing around.

For their sake, I've said it.

We're in agreement on this display

of power and glory that they

might believe that you have sent me.

And let me tell you, every single one of these

people in this particular crowd know that only God creates.

I mean, there are no evolutionists in 1st century Israel,

none.

OK?

No atheist.

They all believe in God.

They believe in the true God, the creator God, they

know he made everything, the fact that Jesus can give life.

It's very clear evidence that he is, in fact, God.

So Jesus is praying, in a sense, publicly,

for the benefit of the people, not for the benefit of God,

who is, of course, already in perfect agreement with what he's about to do.

If he hadn't said those words so everybody could hear, the

crowd would not have been able to give God in Christ the

appropriate amount of glory for this event.

So that's why he said it so loudly and so clearly.

They weren't going to be able to attribute this, what

was fixing to happen to any other power,

and that leads us to our last point of the day, the power.

Verse 43.

When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud

voice.

Lazarus, come forth.

Now, think about what I just said.

If we're sure his prayer was loud enough for all the people to hear.

When the Bible goes out of its way to say he

cried out with a loud voice, then you know, this is a

whole nother level.

Lazarus, come forth, was at top level.

In fact, you want to know how it literally reads in the Greek.

He yelled in a loud voice with a loud voice.

That's what it means, literally, in the Greek, how it's spelled out.

That double statement used in Greek is just emphasizing the

strength of his voice with these words.

Never was a statement ever uttered in human history like that statement.

Again, Jesus was a preacher.

He was a preacher.

He taught every day open air, no pulpit, Mike, like I have.

He could speak to crowds of 20,000 people at

a time, and they could hear him.

There's been great preachers down through history, George Whitfield.

We can name a few that could open air, preach, a bunch of people down through

history, but nobody ever did it like Jesus.

Nobody, no preacher ever liked Jesus.

And the way he set this up, there's

no possibility of

attaching this miracle to

anything other than his words.

That's how he sets this up.

There's no other way.

No possibility of attaching this miracle to

anything other than his will, and considering

his prayer openly that he publicly prayed, the

Father's will, with them two being in perfect agreement,

nobody can create out of nothing, except God.

And so this resurrection comes as a immediate

response to the words

of King Jesus, the words.

He says two things, Lazarus, come

forth, and the miracle happens.

Unparalleled power.

Nobody else could do this.

Nobody in the past, nobody in the present, nobody in the future.

So much past that he will

raise all the day of all the ages.

at some time in the future of

every human being who's ever lived, every

single one of them, and every single one of them,

knee, are gonna bow, and every one

of them tongues is gonna confess that Jesus Christ is God

to the glory of God, the Father, Jesus Christ is Lord.

Some have said, well, If

he had just said, come forth, and not

Lazarus' name, that would have been the final resurrection right there.

Because everybody would come out.

So he had to limit it.

Lazarus.

The rest of you stay where you are.

Now, at the moment that he

says, Lazarus,

before he even gets to come forth, can

you imagine the pounding hearts in the crowd

at that moment?

Roll the stone away, Lazarus?

I mean, the people had to be on the edge of their seat, right?

Standing.

Can you picture all of those people immediately

after giving the command, come

forth, trying to stretch their next to

look into the darkness of that tomb, huh?

Can you imagine that?

And then verse 44?

Talk about an understatement.

The man who had died came forth.

That's it.

That's all we get.

It's so often in the Bible, so matter of

fact, so simple, so straightforward, but

this is God, let me remind you.

And for him,

Resurrection is easy for God.

It's completely easy for him.

The man who died.

and had been dead for four days, came out

of that tomb.

Now, let's get practical for a minute.

It couldn't have been easy for him to come out.

It's incredible to think about.

He's in there dead.

And all of a sudden, I don't know, because it doesn't

tell us, how this works.

But all of a sudden, he's just hit with life.

And the power of creation just started to surge

in his body while he's in that tomb.

Look what it says next.

He came forth, bound hand

and foot with wrappings,

and his face was wrapped around

with a cloth, like the mummy.

Now, how do you come out?

With all of that on you?

How do you do that?

Was he hopping?

How did he get out of there?

Tim has a theory.

Tim shared with me.

Tim's theory is, he floated out, because

his legs was wrapped.

But I have to agree with Calvin here.

Calvin says where scripture doesn't speak, neither should we.

So scripture doesn't say anything, right?

So I stop where scripture spot.

I don't know.

You don't know because scripture doesn't give us the exact detail.

All I can tell you as the preacher is, Lazarus came forth.

Look, a mommy.

A literal mummy, because them Jews wrapped them up tight, okay?

But here's what I do know exactly.

I do know that he had the

power, now that he's alive, to be exactly

where God wanted him to be at that moment.

That's what I do know.

He came out.

Let me tell you, that grave had been plundered.

The king of terror's death yielded up.

It's lawful captive right there.

Oh, grave, where is your victory?

Oh, death?

Where is your thing?

Not today, death.

Not today.

Captivity was led captive.

And Jesus is standing there as

the conqueror of death, as

he one day will be in totality.

Revelation 1 says he has the keys to unlock death in

Hades, and he unlocked it for this man that day.

And one day, he's going to unlock it for every person.

So Lazarus comes out all wrapped up like the mummy,

maybe each leg was wrapped, I don't know what's going on, and then the people.

Just!

Imagine the people standing there seeing this.

They had to be absolutely stunned

out of their minds as this

package is standing at the front door of the tomb here.

I'm sure some of them were frightened out of their minds.

Absolutely terrified.

No question in my mind.

And then Jesus, lastly, in verse 44.

Unbind him, and let him go.

That's how we get.

I mean, there's no explanation of anything, but there didn't need to be.

If God wanted to give us more explanation of all the details of this, he would have.

He said, hey, here's all y'all need.

Now, just my way my mind works.

I think it would have been interesting to volunteer for

this assignment to be the first one to

unwrap and see what was under them rapids.

I think I would have wanted that job.

Let's look what's under here.

And remember, Jesus used people

to do after

he's doing, doing, only what he can do.

And so, as we close, let's just get a quick preview of what's

next in verse 45.

Therefore, many of the Jews who came to Mary and saw

what he had done, believed in him.

Yeah, think?

Huh?

I mean, come on.

How could you not?

Being?

That's the whole point of this?

But then verse 46?

But some of them went to the Pharisees, and

told them the things which Jesus had done.

They report an actual resurrection

from the dead to Jesus' enemies

who wanted very much to

murder him.

And what happens next means you have to come back next time we're

in John to find out.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for this amazing account of Jesus.

Thank