John 11:17-27 (The Death of Death)

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the

Word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who

Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you.

One of the most beautiful facts about God is that he's a storytelling God. He not only made the world, but he made the world in such a way that he could tell the story through his creatures, his people, a all -sufficient, inspired, inerrant story of how the cosmos was created for his glory from start to finish.

And if you've noticed, almost every story that we tell follows the grand narrative of God's story.

We begin in this idyllic situation where things are going great, but then all of a sudden the serpent problem comes into the just problem,

I guess is a good word to say, comes into the scene, and there's a fall that happens, and then there's tension that happens, and the hero emerges from the beginning of the story, and he starts on this quest to redeem and to save.

He loves me. To redeem and to save the people, and then at the end you have this sort of salvation, sort of redemption moment.

All stories follow this sort of arc. You think about movies, you think about even our lives.

Our lives sort of follow this mark, like with conflict we have this wonderful moment where everything is fine, and then that person comes and ruins everything, just like the serpent, and we call that drama.

Drama is a storytelling word, if you think about it, because we're storytelling people, even in our conflicts.

We make ourselves out to be the hero of every story, don't we? And we make the person who's opposing us the villain.

Think about children. Children think in stories. Children love stories. They want you to tell them stories.

They want to watch stories. I remember when the movie, what was the movie with Elsa and Anna, what's the name of it?

Frozen. I can't even say the word anymore. I watched it so many times back before Disney tanked.

We're storytelling people, even in our death. Even in our death, we're telling stories about that person, who they were, how they came about.

You go to a funeral, you listen to stories about them. You go to cemeteries, even cemeteries are some of the places that we don't think about, but they tell vivid stories.

Now, maybe not now, today, because cemeteries have sort of fallen out of out of vogue in this country, and I think there's several reasons for that.

Number one, cemeteries in New England were always connected to churches, and because the downfall of religion, downfall of Christianity has sort of happened in this part of the world, and the cultures become secular, the idea is like, why do

I need to be in a cemetery? You couple that with the fact that most horror movies begin there. Pet Cemetery was there, that alone.

You think about the fact that they're overly expensive. They tie up land for years and years and years, and then you think about the fact that it's just easier to have your ashes spread on some beach in New England.

Well, you can see why cemeteries have sort of fallen out of vogue, but it's not always the way that things were.

Actually, this is a really weird thing about me. I love going to old cemeteries, and I love looking at like the the gravestones and learning about the early culture, like in Charleston and Savannah and in Boston and up in some of the northern parts of this country, like in Maine, and there's all kinds of wonderful cemeteries.

Did you know that cemeteries got their founding, their start in Medieval Europe, where they had mass graves.

They would, after the person had sufficiently decomposed, they would dig them up, just like in the Bible. They would put them in ossuaries, and they would allow them to decay that way.

It wasn't until around the time of America, maybe just a little bit before, that cemeteries, burying individual families in individual graves, actually became a thing.

It's not a thing all throughout history, even. It's sort of a new thing. I guess they came to this big country, they had plenty of land, and they said, huh, let's bury our dead here, instead of trying to save the land and save their stuff.

In early New England, I think one of the most fascinating things is that important people were not just buried in the cemetery, important people were buried in the church.

Under the pulpit. Did you know that? If you go to Newburyport, and you go to an old

Presbyterian church up there called Old South Church, I have no idea what's Old South, it's as far north as you can go, but that's what it's called.

Now it's a PCUSA church. They don't, I don't even think they could spell the gospel, but back...

Sorry, it's true. But a couple hundred years ago, a man named

George Whitefield preached the gospel there. George Whitefield, his last sermon actually, he was a friend of the pastor of this church, his last sermon was preached there while he was deathly sick.

He was transported to the house next door where he laid to rest his final time, and because he was such an influential preacher, because he loved the gospel so much, they buried him under the pulpit.

You can go there today if they'll let you in and they'll let you do it, and you go into the basement, you go past the boiler, you go past some cones that say, caution wet here, or whatever that thing says, you go past the mop, you go past the broom, and then there's this big thing that looks like a brick oven where you would cook pizza in, you open it up, and there's a monument there to George Whitefield.

Underneath the pulpit. Now that's fascinating because they're telling a story. They're saying this man that was gripped by the gospel is buried under the pulpit that he last preached in.

This man who loved the Word of God and who preached it with tenacity and with fire is right underneath where the

Word of God is opened, right above him. That's a beautiful story. Other stories involved,

I've learned these things along the way just by bumping into other people who are interested in graveyards. I know it's a weird thing.

But did you know that if you're in a church, a faithful church, a couple hundred years ago, you would be buried in a particular direction?

You wouldn't be buried facing the west or the north, you'd be buried facing the east. Why? Because that's where the rising sun comes from.

So if you're a Christian, you're waiting on the resurrection, you're buried facing the east towards the rising sun.

There's also all kinds of art that are on these these tombs as well or these gravestones.

You can see this thing they call the the deadhead. It sounds really morbid, doesn't it?

Deadhead's a skull with angel wings off to the side of it that represents resurrection. In my death,

I will rise. There's one tomb that I saw where it was the deadhead skull with the jaw actually dislocated and moved several inches down because why?

It just so happens on that day in Charleston, I ran into a scholar of graveyards out of all the possible things that I could bump into.

And he had written a book on the topic and he said this one is peculiar because this person wasn't liked in the community.

This person was a gossip. So she is silenced forever.

Her jaw doesn't work anymore. That was the symbolism that they were trying to say is now she can't gossip about us no more.

Isn't that funny? We tell stories in our death. There's so many more that I can mention.

If you're interested in things like that, you can talk to me about it later. But my only point to bring that up is that all through life we're telling stories and we often tell stories about our death.

And that's certainly true in John chapter 11 as we learned. The way that they buried people in John chapter 11 and in the

Jewish culture told a story about the resurrection. It told a story about the dignity of human life and that two -stage burial process that we talked about last week told the story of the hope that they have in resurrection.

They were not hoping like Pharaoh to bumble around in eternity with dried withered skin that looked like beef jerky.

No, that's funny. They were hoping for the resurrection where they'd be given a new body by the

Lord on the last day. So they buried people consistent with that story. In fact, the

Bible actually has a lot to say about the topic of death and it contributes a lot to the story of what the

Bible thinks death means. So today, a little bit out of place,

I decided to go back into the Old Testament scriptures to look at what they thought about death. What thoughts did they have about what it meant to die?

What did they think death actually meant? What was it? And we're gonna look at today three things. Number one, death is a curse.

They overwhelmingly believed that in the Old Testament. Number two, death was the cause for our craving for future glory.

So death was not the end. They were craving something in addition to that. And then finally, we'll end with the fact that death is at the very center of the gospel that you and I believe.

Death is at the center. So as we look at those three things, turn with me to John chapter 11, 17 through 27, as we do a biblical theology of death.

It's a really scary topic, I know. John chapter 11, 17 through 27.

So when Jesus came, he found that he had already been in the tomb for four days. That's Lazarus.

Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, and many of the Jews had come to Mary and Martha to console them concerning their brother.

Martha, therefore, whom she heard that Jesus was coming, went to meet him. But Mary stayed at the house.

Martha then said to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Even now,

I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you. And Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again.

Then Martha said, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. And Jesus said to her,

I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.

Do you believe this? She said to him, yes, Lord, I have believed that you are the Christ, the

Son of God, even he who comes into the world. Lord Jesus, death and taxes, they say, are the things that are guaranteed in this life.

Lord, we know that death is inevitable. We know that because of our sin, all of us in this room are going to die.

The question is not if, the question is when. But Lord, I pray that by going back into your scriptures, that we would find hope and peace and joy and comfort in your gospel.

That is the power of God. That if believed by us, we will live forever.

We will have a living hope, as Peter says, that we will know the resurrection and the life who is

Christ. Lord, I pray that we would see the truths in your scripture, that we would love your scripture, and we would cling to it as our only hope.

In Christ's name, Amen. Now, when you're studying a passage in scripture, there's many different ways that you can go about trying to understand the meaning of the text.

You can break out your Greek lexicon, and you can do word studies, and you can try to figure out what's the meaning of this word and that word.

I did that. The word dead means dead, so we've covered that topic. There's other tools that you can use.

There's tools like grammar, and how does the syntax of the sentence actually work out, or the logic?

It's called semantic structural analysis, where you try to figure out what's the inherent logic of a text. You do that a lot with Paul, because Paul has paragraph -length sentences, and you're like, which verb is the main verb?

Because there's 15 verbs. That's really helpful with Paul. Another thing you can do, though, is you can look at how many words are in the paragraph and which word shows up the most.

So, all you do is you just go to the web, you go to the internet, and you find one of these generators.

You put in the words, and it tells you which words show up the most, and in this passage, one of the words that shows up the most is death.

Dying, he sleeps, in the tomb, rising, all these are concepts that are talking about death, which means that death itself is looming over this narrative.

That death itself is what everyone in that crowd would have been thinking about. Now, we know that this is not just any crowd.

This is a crowd of Jewish people who had the Jewish Old Testament Scriptures, and their thoughts would have been inherently defined by the

Old Testament Bible, which is why we need to, if we want to understand what they were hearing

Jesus say, and if we want to understand what Jesus is speaking into, we need to know what the Old Testament says about death.

And I think when we see that, when Jesus says, I'm the resurrection and the life, it will become even more meaningful than it does even today.

So let's begin with the curse. Death is a curse. We remember in the very beginning in Genesis 3, where our sin,

Adam's sin, our federal representatives sinned, and all of us fell because of that original sin.

It caused us to not only die physically, but to die spiritually.

As we've talked about in the last couple weeks, there's two kinds of death that the Bible describes. There's a spiritual death, which happened instantly when

Adam fell, and there's a physical death, which happened gradually over time. Adam lived to be over 900 years old, so it happened pretty gradually.

Next generation, next generation, eventually you get to where it says in Abraham that man's life will be limited to 120 years.

But make no mistake, it's inevitable that man will die. That woman will die. Deuteronomy 32, 39, talking about the inevitability of death, this is

God speaking, says this, There's no God besides me.

It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded, and it is

I who heal, and there is no one who can deliver from my hand. This is an interesting passage because how often do we hear people say that I'm sick, and God didn't do this.

Maybe the devil did this. Maybe some other thing did this, but this passage says it is

I who have wounded. God takes responsibility in his sovereignty for life and death.

As Hebrews says, it's appointed for all men, all women, to die. Our death is not outside of the sovereignty of God.

He's in control of our life and in our death. There's not a single person in this room who will live a single nanosecond beyond what the will of God has appointed for you.

And there's not a single person who will cheat death by avoiding it in some way. God is in control of even those details.

Death is inevitable. There's no one who can escape, it says. No one can be delivered from his hand.

And we know that it's inevitable because of the fall, because of our sin. We also know, as the psalmist says, that death is entering into a place of silence, which is a fascinating thing.

If you're telling a story, that's a very vivid metaphor, the place or the realm of silence. It says in Psalm 115, 17,

The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any who go down into silence. Now, that's an obvious statement.

Unless you just buried someone wrongly. That actually did happen in medieval Europe. They would tie a string to a person's toe and then out from the grave, they would tie a bell so that if someone started wiggling, they were a dead ringer.

That was where that phrase came from. But barring burying someone inappropriately, when we die, we go into a place of silence.

That's common sense. That's obvious. I don't have to teach anyone that. The reason that it's important in Scripture, though, is because the

Scriptures are mourning that fact, that we're going down into a place of silence.

We were created by God to hear noises. We were created by God to hear children laughing and crying.

We were created by God to hear waterfalls. That are roaring in the background. Waves that are crashing on the ocean.

We were created by God to hear the sounds of a spouse who tells us that they love us.

We were created by God to hear the sound of birds chirping in the spring. We were created by God to hear all of these wonderful noises.

It's not natural to be without sound. It's a part of the curse. So when you go down into death, the psalmist is mourning that you're going into a place where there is no sound.

He's saying that's a big deal, and it's a result of the fall. You're also going down into a place of muteness.

Being mute and you can't speak. That's also a big deal to the psalmist. Not because he expects that people who are buried are going to be speaking to one another.

Everyone knows that's common sense. He's saying think about how awful it is that when you go down into the grave your physical lips can no longer praise

God. That's what he's alluding to. We can no longer sing songs to the one who created us.

We can no longer worship him with our lips. We can no longer. Our physical body, when it expires and it's buried in the ground, our soul goes to be with the

Lord. We know that from the Bible, but our physical body, our lips, are no longer praising

God when we're buried in the grave. And he says that's an awful thing. It's all through the Psalms. Psalm 6, 5.

There's no mention of you, God, in death. And Sheol, who will give you thanks.

He's weeping over this fact that when we die, the praises of God are off our lips, physically speaking, physically speaking.

Psalm 39, 30, verse 9. What profit is there in my blood if I go down to the pit?

Will the dust praise you? Will it declare your faithfulness? Psalm 88, 10 through 11.

Will you perform wonders for the dead? Will the departed spirits rise up and praise you?

Will your loving kindness be declared in the grave, your faithfulness and abaddon? Isaiah picks up on the same theme.

It's not just the Psalms. Isaiah says for Sheol, the realm of the dead in the Old Testament, cannot thank you.

Death cannot praise you. Those who go down to the pit cannot hope for your faithfulness. It is a big deal that we die because of our sin.

We get so used to it that we sinned against God and the curse is death, or we get so focused on the fact like our world today that that I'm going to wear, you know, however many masks

I'm going to get, however many boosters. And I'm not making fun of that. I'm just saying that we live in a world that is trying not to die.

And they're going to be sadly mistaken when it comes. It is a big deal that we die when we can't hear and when we can't speak the praises of almighty

God. It's also the place of darkness.

The Bible says the benediction is the most prolific, joy filled, ecstatic phrase in the entire

Old Testament. It's one of the one of the high marks of the Old Testament.

It's in Numbers 6, 24 through 26, and it teaches us as people what it means to be blessed by God.

This is what it says. The Lord bless you and the Lord keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and to be gracious to you.

The Lord lift up his countenance on you and give you peace. To be blessed, dear brothers and sisters, to be in the center of the blessings of God is to have

God's face shining upon you in brilliant, paralyzingly blissful, protonic light.

So what is the curse? The curse is the opposite. The fulfillment of the curse is separation, distance from God and darkness.

Look at what Job says about these things. Would he not let my few days alone?

He's complaining here. Withdraw from me that I may have a little cheer before I go and I shall not return to the land of darkness and deep shadow, the land of utter gloom as darkness itself of deep shadow without order and which shines in the darkness.

There's so much going on in this phrase. He's saying that the heavy hand of God is upon him and he's asking for the

Lord to depart because he knows in his death he's going down to a land of utter gloom.

He compares it to a land, to a realm, to a sort of existence that is happening for the dead.

Very poetic language. I think the most fascinating thing in here that he says is a land of deep shadow without order.

If you think about the creation, creation is God ordering the chaos.

It's him bringing everything that he created into perfect, beautiful symmetry, design and order.

So to be blessed is to live in the place that God has ordered and that God has fashioned according to his purposes.

To go down into death is to go down into the place where chaos has overtaken you.

Heavy, heavy language. Psalm 18 or sorry, 88, 12 says,

Will your wonders be made known in the darkness and your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness.

We often like to think that we're going to be remembered when we die. We're going to be forgotten.

Every single one of us, a hundred years from now, no one will remember our name.

The psalmist is saying that in death we go down into a place of forgetfulness, a place where the earth absorbs our body to dust, where the worms feed on us, where we maybe possibly help fertilize a new tree.

But it's a land of forgetfulness in the sense that in our own power and our own strength, we'll be forgotten.

We'll get to the hope in a minute. But this is what the psalmist is describing it as. Says that they're in a place of no return.

Job says this in 7, 8 through 10, The eye of him who sees me will behold me no longer.

Your, what's it say? I have a hole punch right where it is. Your eyes. I didn't mean to break it up like that, but I mean,

I literally can't read that word. Your eyes will be on me, but I will not be.

When a cloud vanishes, it is gone. What a bleak picture when a cloud vanishes, it's gone.

Our life is but a mist. So he who goes down to Sheol does not come up.

He will not return again to his house, nor will his place know him any longer.

Have you ever thought about that? Death is sad, but it's sad for many reasons.

It's sad, not just because the person is gone. Job says the place that they leave behind forgets them.

Have you ever been in a house where someone's died? You can tell that it's empty. I remember my grandpa was the funniest, most lively person that I've ever met.

He was a riot at 60 something years old. He would scream at the top of his lungs for my grandma, just to hear her yell back, and then he would laugh about it because it would scare her.

He would run down this little hallway that we have at like almost full speed in his sixties, just to make me chuckle.

We would go outside and we would, we would shoot slingshots together, throw knives, he would take me to work when

I was sick. I loved my grandpa.

He brought so much life to my home. I lived with my grandma and grandpa from the time I was about nine years old till when

I joined the army. And I remember a few years ago when my grandpa died, he died after my grandma.

So there was no one left in the house. There was not a plate that was moved. There was not a piece of furniture that moved more than an inch.

The whole house was exactly the way that I remembered it when I was a kid, but it was different. That place had forgotten my grandpa.

That place died a little when my grandpa died. It was palpable. I could feel it.

Isn't that interesting that there's a connection that our life is so valuable to God that it even affects our surroundings.

When Adam sinned, the trees didn't sin, the ground didn't sin, but yet they fell too.

There's an intrinsic connection that God has made. We are the leaders of creation. Creation suffers when we suffer.

That's what it says. Romans nine or Romans eight. It says creation's groaning because of the fall.

When we die, we leave a hole even in our place that we lived.

Job 16, 22 says, for when a few years are passed, I shall go the way of no return.

This is about a physical body. This is not about spiritual. We know that when we die, our soul goes to be with Christ in heaven.

We know that from the New Testament. We know that, but we're talking about the body. We're not talking about the immutable soul that goes to be with Christ.

We're talking about the mutable body that lies in the ground waiting for the resurrection.

You think about the immaterial mind. Our mind can be weighed, our brain can be weighed, can be touched, it can be observed, it can be photographed, but what about your thoughts?

Your thoughts are yours. The daydreams that you have, the dreams that you have, the memories that you have, those are gone.

When you die. I remember my brother over breakfast one day told me that the thing that he missed most about his father was the loss of information because when his father died, all the memories that he hadn't committed to memory that his father had died with him.

I remember my grandpa, I thought he was joking. He told me one day, he said,

I've lived a pretty interesting life, Kendall. He just was a funny guy.

And he said, I want you to write my biography. Because I think a lot of people would want to read it. And I would have wanted to read it because I don't have those memories anymore.

I'm sorry, I just, I didn't even plan to say that. It just, death is painful.

And it leaves a hole and things are lost. Job says he goes down to the way of no return.

In our flesh, that is where we go. Look at how the psalmist says it in Psalm 146 .6.

His spirit departs. He returns to the earth. To that very day, his thoughts perish.

You see, our spirit, our soul animates our physical body like batteries animate a remote control or like a power cord animates a television.

It's just a shell without the spirit. It's just a shell without the soul. Death separates our body, the physical body from our soul.

And it lays lifeless in the ground. Ecclesiastes 12 .7 says, then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to the

God who gave it. Again, we know that when we die, our loved ones are with God who are in Christ, and we know that all over the scriptures.

But there's a loss that happens. There's a hole that's left. There's a yearning, and God doesn't want to end the story that way.

It's not enough for us to just have our spirits in heaven. God writes a story where he's going to resurrect our bodies as well.

God writes a story where he's going to give us new bodies and a new soul animated together. We're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, but the story is not complete the way that it is right now.

That's my point. Death plunges us into silent, muted darkness by our own power and strength.

We can't come back from it. We can't. Jesus Christ, the only man who ever raised himself from the dead.

You and I can't do that. For the Christian, death is temporary.

For the unbeliever, death is the place of eternal judgment. The Bible talks about that too.

Isaiah 26, 14, in talking about the death of the wicked, this is what he says.

The dead will not live. The departed spirits will not rise. Therefore, you will punish.

You have punished and destroyed them, and you have wiped out all remembrance of them. Again, death is a curse for all people, but death of the wicked, the death of those who don't know

God, the death of those who are not in Christ is a tragedy. Because they're forever alienated from God, never to rise with Christ in his kingdom, never to live in his city, the new

Jerusalem, never to be in any place other than ongoing suffering and torment.

Isaiah ends his book in chapter 66, 24 this way. This is a passage that's talking about eternity.

And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me.

That's God. For their worms shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be in abhorrence to all flesh.

For the unbeliever, their only existence is as permanent, abominable abhorrence in the nostrils of our

God, where the worm will feast forever and where the fire will never quench.

Death is a curse. I hope that we've seen that. Death is not something that we can continue to pretend like it doesn't exist.

Don't we live that way? I'm young. It's not going to happen to me.

I'm going to live my life, I'm going to do whatever I want. And yet you look at the heaping pile of dead bodies that Isaiah visions there with men and women from every tribe and tongue and nation who thought it wouldn't happen to them, and it did.

Death is a place of silence. It's a land of muted speech. It's a darkened realm, a realm of no return.

It's a lot of things. But for the Christian, for the believer, death is a reason that we have hope.

As ironic as that sounds, death is a place where we have absolute hope. And I want to share with you the hope now that the

Bible talks about when it comes to the death of the righteous. Isaiah 57, one through two says the righteous man perishes.

No man takes it to heart and devout men are taken away. We die just like the wicked. For the righteous man is taken away from evil.

He enters into peace and they rest in their beds. Each one who is rocked in his upright way.

So for the unregenerate unbeliever, death is a tragedy. They're waiting on the resurrection of the dead so that they can be plunged into the lake of fire forever.

That is that is an awful existence. But for the righteous, death is a blessing.

Paul says that we live for Christ and we die as gain. How can death be gain when all of the stuff that we just read?

How can death be gain? Because first and foremost, it separates us from this pagan world that we're living in.

Our physical bodies no longer in this place of fallenness and brokenness and curse and people who hate

God. In several different centuries, men and women were burned to death for their faith. That's evil.

And in their death, they went joyfully to their burning stake. They went joyfully to their to their gallows because they knew that death was a blessing for the believer and the fact that it separates them from the evil that is in this world.

And they also know, obviously, that their spirit is with God forever.

Death begins a rest for us that will never end, a peace that will never end, a hope that will never end, a joy that will grow deeper and better.

For death for the righteous is a blessing. Death to the righteous is a place where we can hope for the future resurrection.

It's not just a place of rest. It's not just a place of tranquility where our body lies in the ground for a while.

Death is a place for us to hope, says in Psalm 49, 15. But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.

You think about the beauty of this passage. Before Jesus came, David is saying, I'm getting,

I'm going to die. But God will bring me back. God will redeem me. God will pull me out of the depths.

David, even without understanding exactly who Christ is through the power of the Holy Spirit, knew that our bodies are going to be raised, that we were not made to be disembodied souls that live in heaven and float around on spiritual clouds with harps.

We were made to live with God in a body where we serve him physically.

That's better than the vision of the shaman angels on these little clouds and fluffy toilet paper.

It just is. Psalm 73, 24.

With your counsel, you will guide me and afterward you will receive me to glory. David's saying, for my life,

I want my life to be known by this. I know I'm going to die, but I want my life to be known as a man who follows after the counsel of God every day of my life.

When it's your time, when you're ready, you'll receive me into glory. What a life. A Christian can live that way.

You hear stories of men like Bonhoeffer who sang hymns on his way to die. You hear stories about the

Puritans who were persecuted, who cried out and said, I pray that you, Lord, forgive them for what they're doing.

And then they sing hymns of praise as they were burning to death. Christian is the only person who can do that.

Because death doesn't end anything for us. We know we're going to be received by our Father into heaven. A good

God is going to call us back. Job 19, 26.

Even after my skin is destroyed, yet my flesh, I shall see

God. I shall see God. Think about Job. We tend to think of Job as being depressed, sort of a killjoy.

What a hopeful statement. What a hopeful statement. Even though I wither, even though I'm like a worm right now, even though I'm crying out for death,

I know that I'm going to see God because I know my God loves me and knows me.

Psalm 16, 10. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, nor will you allow your

Holy One to undergo decay. We know that that eschatologically refers to Christ and his resurrection, but he's the first fruits of a resurrection.

All of us have been made holy in him. So he's going to bring all of us out and none of us were going to experience permanent decay, permanent destruction.

Isaiah 25, 8. He will swallow up death for all time, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all of our faces, and he will remove the reproach of his people for all the earth.

The Lord has spoken. If you're tempted to think otherwise, it says the

Lord God has spoken. The God who never tells lies, the God who's always truthful, the

God who loves you is saying that death is going to be swallowed up. It's one of the enemies that Christ himself is going to put under his feet, and you and I are going to live in him.

We've broken God's covenant a thousand, 10 ,000 million times, and yet because of his unbelievable mercy and grace, we'll be with him.

We'll see God. Do you remember the benediction? Let his face shine upon you.

We will see God because of our faith in Christ. We will see his face, his shining, regal, beautiful, kingly face because of his grace and his grace alone.

There's so much that we could say. Look at Samuel, 1 Samuel 2, 6.

The Lord kills and makes alive. He brings down to Sheol and he raises up. That's true. But look at Isaiah 26, 19.

Your dead will live. Your dead will live. Their corpses will rise. You who lie in the dust awake for shouts of joy.

For your due is as the due of the dawn, and the earth will give birth to the departed spirits.

We have a hope for the resurrection, even if you don't look at the New Testament. That we know that because of the coming

Christ, that the dead will rise. We know it. Look at Daniel 12, 2. Many of those who sleep in the dust and the ground will awake to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.

For those of you who are in Christ, your body will not lie in the ground forever.

It will be raised for those of you who are not in Christ. I pray that the

Holy Spirit would bring these passages and the urgency of these passages to your heart.

And I pray that God would work on you in a way that would cause you to cry out, Dear God, rescue me right along with the rest of these believers.

We ask ourselves the question, when did this resurrection begin? Well, it began in Ezekiel 37 when he prophesied about it.

He said, therefore, God says, therefore prophesy and say to them, thus says the Lord God. Behold, I will open your graves and I will cause you to come up out of your graves, my people, and I will bring you into the land of Israel.

And then you will know that I am the Lord when I have opened up your graves and caused you to come up out of the graves.

My people, I will put my spirit within you and you will come to life and I will place you on your own land.

Then you will know that I am the Lord and I've spoken and I've done it, declares the Lord. Do you know this has already been fulfilled?

It's not an end times passage. This passage already happened. When Jesus was hanging on the cross, the graves opened up in Matthew 27 and the saints of old came out.

We look at the three Old Testament raisings that we saw last week from Elijah and Elisha and the soldier. We look at the three

New Testament raisings where Jesus raises these three people from the dead. They're all foreshadowing the bodily resurrection that's going to come in Christ.

He demonstrated us to it. He demonstrated us that he's going to do it by raising all of these different people to show us that we are going to be raised.

That resurrection happens when you become a Christian, when your soul is purchased by Jesus Christ and you're awakened into new life.

And that resurrection is going to happen at the end of time when Jesus calls you to himself.

Look at what Isaiah 49 verse six says. Is it too small a thing?

I love when God says that. I love when God says that. No, is it too small a thing that you,

Jesus, he's talking about should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob.

That's true Israel and to restore the preserved ones of Israel. I will also make you a light to the nations so that my salvation may reach the ends of the earth.

Is that too small a thing for God to do to raise up people from every tribe, tongue and nation? Listen, this has implications.

We live like this world is getting worse and we live like everything's getting ready to go to hell in a handbasket.

As my grandma used to say, is it too small a thing that Jesus can save the world?

Is it too small a thing that he can raise up people from every tribe, tongue and nation Is it too small a thing that he can put every single one of his enemies under his feet?

Is it too small a thing that he can save you? No. We're talking about the

God who's infinite in all power and glory. Who we will meet. The Bible tells us about when we'll meet

Jesus. You're either going to be alive when he comes or you're going to be dead when he comes.

But that doesn't matter because you're going to see him when he comes. This is what it says in 1 Thessalonians 4, 13 through 18.

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope.

For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.

Paul's not even willing to say that they died. Our death is so temporary that he calls it sleep. Isn't that interesting?

For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the

Lord will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout and with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God and the dead in Christ will rise.

And then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with him in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so shall we always be with the

Lord. Therefore, comfort one another with these words. I remember a debate that my wife and I got into about whether we should bury the dead or whether we should cremate the dead.

I think she was on the right side of this debate, by the way. This was early in my thinking. And I said, why would you burn the body?

You know, how's God going to put it back together? I think I said that. This is a long time ago.

You think about it. The apostle Paul, his body through molecules in the earth is still in Rome.

Peter, his body decayed in Rome. It's still there. It became dust, integrated itself with the earth.

But is it too small a thing for God to call forth Paul and every single atom and electron and every single cell be reanimated by God?

Is that too small a thing for our God? It's too small a thing for us who die to be put back together in a glorious new body.

I don't know how God's going to do it. I have no idea how he's going to do that, but it's not too small a thing for it to happen for him to call us up with him so that we will always be with him.

We can have confidence in this. This is the last thing we're going to say. We can have confidence in this because the gospel is centered around a grave.

Clearly, it was that important to God to showcase that he was going to come to a grave to win us back.

Isaiah 53, 9. His grave was assigned with the wicked man, yet he was with a rich man in his death because he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Jesus died like we should have died. In a death that we should have died. In a grave that we should have been buried in.

On a cross that bore our name. He died in a way that we deserved. Why? So that he could go down into the grave to pull us out.

Look at what John 5, 28 through 29 says. Do not marvel at this for an hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and will come forth those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life and those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.

That day is coming. But when Jesus looks at Martha and he says in John 11 that I am the resurrection and the life, he intends on letting us know that he went down into the grave to rescue us.

He went down into the grave to resurrect you and I. If you're a Christian, I want you to cling to the gospel hope that the gospel begins in a tomb because Jesus isn't going to keep us dead forever.

Isn't that a beautiful hope? And in our life, because it says he's the resurrection and the life.

He doesn't just say he's the resurrection of the dead. He says I'm the resurrection and the life. When we're raised, we will have the most glorious, beautiful, unimaginable, eternal life with our

King. Where politics don't matter. Where backaches don't frustrate us.

Where everything that afflicts us is gone and the only thing that's worth looking at is Christ.

That's what he's prepared for those who love him and are called according to his purpose. If you're not in Christ today, that story, that glorious story does not yet apply to you.

I'm I'm urging you. I know God is sovereign over salvation. I know God elects those who are saved.

I know those things. But I don't know who's in this room that's elect and who's not. I'm urging you to to beg the

Lord for salvation. If you are not saved, I'm urging you to wake up from your slumber.

I'm urging you to not face death without the Lord Jesus Christ. Wake up, old sleeper.

Hear the gospel. Repent and believe. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you that your gospel will save.

And it saves everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord. Lord, there's no reason to face this future destruction and death without Jesus.

And Lord, we know that only by your spirit can we come to you and call upon you.

And we know that only by your election and your choosing that you you drag us to yourself. Lord, we know that.

But God, also we plead for our brothers and sisters who don't know Jesus in this room and Lord for our brothers and sisters and families and aunts and uncles and everyone else who don't know

Jesus in our life. And Lord, we plead for those who we work with and those who were who are our neighbors who don't know

Jesus, Lord, that they would not face. Death. Separated from you.

Lord, for those of us who know Christ, I pray that we would not live. As though this world is a gloomy, dark, awful place.

Lord, I pray that we would live as people who are getting ready to be with you. Lord, I pray that we would live with the expectation of a hyperactive two year old on Christmas morning.

Every day of our life. Because what we have in store for us is so much better.

Lord, let us live with that kind of joy. And Lord, convict the hearts in this room of those who need it.