John 11:1-6 (Dying For The Glory Of God)

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

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

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

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Today we enter into the final section of the Gospel of John, which is going to take us through to the very end of Jesus's life, to his death, burial, resurrection, until his final interactions with his disciples at the final verses of the

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Gospel of John. We are in the final section of this Gospel. Now what's interesting is the time distribution in this

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Gospel is very interesting. You've got one chapter dedicated to an infinite amount of years, which is in the beginning.

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You've got the next eight chapters dedicated to three years, and then you've got the next 12 chapters dedicated to one week.

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Time is interesting in this book. I would count it, or I would say that it sort of is like a three -act play.

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You've got the first act, which is talking about the beginning, obviously. You've got the second act, which is talking about the increasing rejection of Jesus.

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And then you've got the third act, which is talking about the victory of Christ and how he wins his greatest triumph battle and brings maximum glory to God.

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Now, just as a reminder, because it's been a while, it's been over two years and 66 sermons since we were in John chapter 1,

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I want us to go just a very quick overview of what this first act is all about.

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In John 1 .1, we peel back the curtains of eternity and we look back into the recesses of the infinite.

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We see in verses 1 through 2 that Christ in his eternity is living in perfect fellowship and harmony with the

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Father and with the Spirit. You have Christ there from all time. It says in John 1 .1

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through 2, in the beginning was the Word. And when John says in the beginning, there's a lot of theological significance there.

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But he's meaning before time, Christ was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the

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Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. So you have an eternal, glorious Christ right from the outset of John's gospel.

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Then John brings us to where space and time explodes upon the canvas. The curtain opens, the characters of the play are beginning to be seen.

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You've got the sun, the moon, and the stars hanging in the sky. You've got man and animals coming to life.

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John 1 .3 says all things came into being through him. That's through Jesus. And apart from him, nothing came into being that has come into being.

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Jesus now is not only the eternal Christ, he's the author of creation. He's the one who speaks creation into existence along with the

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Father. He's the one who kneels down and fashions Adam from the dust. You have

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Jesus there in John 1 .3 as the creator. John 1 .4 goes along now to what life is like in Eden.

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You see how time is flowing in the gospel of John very quickly. You've got the light shining upon creation.

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Jesus is the greatest light of all, and he is in relationship with Adam and Eve there in the beginning.

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John 1 .4 says in him was life, and that life was the light of men.

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Before the fall, Jesus was the sustaining power that held all of creation together.

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In him, all creation holds together for the glory of God. That was pre -fall creation.

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Verse 5, John tells us, he lurches us forward now to the fall. The fall of man where darkness for the very first time enters into creation.

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Before that, it was light. You had nighttime and daytime, but there was no such thing as spiritual darkness that was injected upon the canvas of creation until verse 5.

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Verse 5 says, the light, that's Jesus, shines in the darkness, which represents the deformed creation.

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And now that it's enslaved by sin, they don't comprehend the light any longer.

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Five verses. Five verses, we get infinity, eternal Christ, to creation, to the fall, and to now human inability to know

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God. And then the very next verse, John 1 .6, skips about 4 ,000 years, which is really not a lot if you think that it started in eternity.

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It skips the flood, it skips Tower of Babel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Egypt, Red Sea, Sinai, the

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Promised Land, the Davidic dynasty, the division of Israel and Judah. It skips the 400 years of silence, the exile, the return,

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Malachi. It skips all of that. And it goes to John. It says, there came a man sent from God and his name was

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John. So the story is wanting us to remember that all of the

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Old Testament can be categorized under one main theme. The light is shining in the world and the darkness did not comprehend it.

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From Genesis chapter 3 all the way to Malachi chapter 4, you have darkness that's descended upon the earth and human beings cannot, in their sin, comprehend the light.

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What else does John need to say? All of the Old Testament falls under that canopy and under that curse.

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Now the cure is going to come fairly quickly in this gospel as well.

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Verse 9 through 14 tells us what God is intending to do about the fall of man.

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He could leave human beings in their sin. He could leave us in our failure. He could leave us in our darkness and brokenness, but God decided to make a way for his people to come to faith in him and he's going to do that through his son

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Jesus Christ. This is what it says in verse 9 through 14. There was the true light, that's

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Jesus, coming into the world, enlightens every man. He was in the world and the world was made through him and the world did not know him.

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He came to his own. Those who were his own did not receive him, but as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name, who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

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And the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we saw his glory. Glory is of the only begotten of the father full of grace and truth.

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In our flesh we rebelled. In our flesh we cannot come back to God. We can't. We can't be born again by the will of man.

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We can't be born again by the will of flesh. It takes God working in our life and moving in our life in order to save us.

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That's what Jesus came to do. He came to come to his own people who would reject him. He came to die on the cross for his elect people and he came to bring them to new life, make them children of God for the glory of God.

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That's what Act 1 is all about. The whole gospel is in chapter 1. And if you had to have one chapter of the

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Bible, I said this two years ago when we were in this chapter, if you had to have one chapter of the Bible, John 1 is a great one to have.

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Every part of the redemption story is found in John 1. After that,

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Jesus is baptized according to scripture. He acts out his own nation's baptism in the

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Red Sea. He reenacts that. He reenacts their wilderness temptations when he's tempted by Satan. And then he comes and he begins assembling citizens for his new kingdom, his new

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Israel. And he begins gathering 12 disciples. Why do you think he gathered 12? There's 12 tribes of Israel.

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Jesus is remaking a new Israel with 12 disciples. And then the first thing that he does is he has a party, a wedding feast.

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Isn't it interesting the first thing that happens in heaven after the world has been ended is the marriage supper of the lamb.

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Jesus is acting out in flesh the marriage supper of the lamb, the inauguration of his kingdom.

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All of that is in Act 1. Now Act 2. Act 2 is going to lean into he came to his own and his own rejected him.

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Act 2 is about the rejection of Christ. He was rejected in Jerusalem in John chapter 2.

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He was rejected in Jerusalem in John chapter 5. He was rejected in Jerusalem in John chapter 7, 8, and 9.

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And he was rejected. They tried to murder him in John chapter 10. The synoptic gospels,

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Matthew, Mark, and Luke are telling the story of Jesus in Galilee. John is telling the story of Jesus in Jerusalem and he's showcasing that Jerusalem his own people will be the one that reject him.

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So just as a recap, Act 1 is about light coming into this world.

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Act 2 is about the light coming to his own and his own did not receive him. Now that brings us today to the final act of this great drama of John beginning in chapter 11.

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And I would call this act the triumph of his resurrection. The victory of Christ's death, the glory that's going to come through the darkest event that ever happened.

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Isn't that interesting? John says that light has come into the world. It looks like darkness overtakes him and then all of a sudden it breaks forth empty tomb.

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The light bursts forth in glory. The darkest day in human history was the day that God got the greatest amount of glory.

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That's what we're heading towards. Now, John 11 is a beautiful, beautiful chapter.

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I probably have said that in every chapter of John, but John 11 is unbelievable. So we need to take our time.

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This is the longest narrative in the gospel of John. It's 57 verses for one story.

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So we could try to rush through it and try to cover it all in one week. I can't do that.

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And I don't think we should do that. There's too much beautiful detail in this chapter for us to skip over it.

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The great bishop, Dr. J .C. Ryle of Liverpool, England said this about this chapter.

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The chapter we have now begun is one of the most remarkable in the

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New Testament. For grandeur and simplicity, for pathos and solemnity, nothing has ever been written like it.

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Nothing. What an astounding claim by Dr. Ryle. Nothing in history has been written like it and I would agree with Dr.

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Ryle on that, that we are standing before a great and glorious chapter in the life of Jesus and we have to take our time and we have to go through it and cover it well.

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Today, we're just going to cover six verses, but I will warn you that this is going to sound like two different sermons.

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Now, I promise you that it won't be the length of two normal Kendall sermons. I do want you to get home at some point.

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But it will be two sermons in the degree that I'm introducing John chapter 11. I'm introducing the final act of Jesus's life.

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So that needs to be dealt with. That needs to be covered. And then in the final moments of our time, we will look at the first six verses and we will pull out one beautiful theme that is in there.

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So the way we'll do this today is we will look at the grand design that Jesus or that John has for this gospel and we'll look at how all of these beautiful interconnected realities happen in this gospel and you will learn things today that you've probably never heard before.

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And my prayer is as you hear these things that they would not become fodder, an intellectual matter that stays up in your head, but they would trickle down into your heart and make you love

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Jesus more than you did before you came. That you would see something new in Christ and you would be caused to praise

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Christ for how beautiful he is. That's what my hope is. The second part is we will look at the sister's great dilemma.

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The great dilemma that Mary and Martha have and then finally we will look at our gospel duty.

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And we will be trying to answer one question in the end. How does one live and how does one die to the glory of God?

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Because there is a way that this passage tells us not just to live to the glory of God, but how do you die to the glory of God?

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So with that, let's turn to John 11 verses 1 through 6. The text says,

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Now there was a certain man who was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister

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Martha. It was the Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother

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Lazarus was sick. So the sister sent word to him saying, Lord, behold, he whom you love is sick.

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But when Jesus heard this, he said, this sickness is not to end in death, but for the glory of God, so that the

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Son of God may be glorified by it. Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister

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Mary and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was sick, he then stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

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Let us pray. Lord, there's so much beauty and just gems of things that you have done in this passage like a great tapestry, weaving all of them together in this chapter.

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Lord, I pray that as we go into sort of a structural analysis of John chapter 11,

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Lord, I pray that you would teach us things that we've never seen, never heard.

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Lord, I pray that you would lift our eyes to the heavens to declare how beautiful and awesome you are, that you could have authored such a majestic story as this.

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Lord, we praise you because we know that it's true. Lord, we praise you because we know that it foreshadows your own death and resurrection.

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And Lord, I pray that today we would find our place in this story, that like Lazarus, we would learn what it means to live to the glory of God.

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But also what it means to die to the glory of God. In Jesus' name we pray.

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Amen. John chapter 11, as we've said, is a wonderful climax to so much that's happening in the gospel of John.

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It's the beginning of a new section in the gospel of John, and at those crossroads, there's a lot that's happening.

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There's a lot that's happening that's going to bind the entire gospel together, and there's a lot that's happening that's going to bind all of human time together, if you can imagine.

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So what I want us to do is I want us to dive a little deeper into the structure of this passage so that we can see it.

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Now, I want to first admit that John is a lot of people's favorite gospel because it is so simple.

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John is not intending to write a philosophical treatise, you know, like Immanuel Kant, who can understand such things.

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I don't even think Immanuel Kant can understand it. Try reading the man. Jonathan Edwards in the Christian world, brilliant thinker.

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He's smarter than me. I can't understand a word that he's saying. John is trying to be understood. John is trying for us to know what this is saying.

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So he's writing in such a way that's simple. John's not using the high -browed Greek of Luke and Paul.

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In seminary, I remember what a break it was when we started translating the gospel of John. We were in Romans before that and one sentence could be seven or eight or nine verses and there are like 15 verbs that all point back and participles and everything else that all point back to a single verb.

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And we're writing these things out on a piece of paper and I had to staple like four pieces of paper to my one piece of paper so that I could graph out this entire sentence.

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And I'm like, Paul, did you ever hear of a period or a comma or something?

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John's not like that. He speaks in short sentences and very, very simple Greek. It's beautiful the way that he speaks so that it's almost as if he's speaking to a child.

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And in fact, in literate nations where children can read, this has become a favorite gospel among children and a favorite gospel of those who are children in the faith who are newborn

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Christians. The gospel of John has become a buttress of beginning the journey with Christ.

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But even in that, there's a deep profundity that's often missed in the gospel of John.

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There is a depth in the gospel of John that we have to take notice of and we have now for two years.

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John is the most theological of all the gospels. And if you wade down deep enough into the

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Johannine waters, that's just a smart way of saying John, then you'll see that it's also very complex.

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The gospel of John is like a small kiddie pool for a child where they can wade in and enjoy the water safely.

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And yet it's the Mariana Trench for the scholar and for the student of the Bible who can go into great depths and study and you cannot exhaust it.

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You can't. John said, if I were to write everything that I could have written, then it would take in all of the books in the world.

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Well, John, if you were to explain everything that the Holy Spirit authored through you in this book, it would take all of the books in the world.

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So therefore we have a lot of depth in this gospel and a great need for us to take it slowly.

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Now, the structure of the gospel of John, we're going to look at just things that apply to chapter 11 right now, and there's several things that intersect with chapter 11 that I think will be fascinating for us to explore.

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The first is the number seven. John employs the number seven in so many ways in the gospel, and that should not be news if you've been here at least since chapter one.

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Chapter one begins with, in the beginning, which reminds us of Genesis. And then

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Jesus walks his first seven days, which reminds us of the first seven days of creation.

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And then Jesus brings two people into his circle, like an Adam and an Eve. He's making a new community.

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That seven in the beginning chapters of the gospel reminds us that Jesus is the author of a new creation, and that Jesus is the true

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Sabbath, because the seventh day in the Old Testament was the Sabbath. So we get our rest from Jesus, we get new creation from Jesus.

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John loves sevens for this reason, because he can communicate so much theological truth by just communicating a simple number and showcasing it.

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The meaning of the number seven shows up all over the Bible as wholeness, shalom, perfection, peace, and completion.

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It is something that's perfect, that it needs no addition. That's why the week was patterned after the number seven, because it's a perfect rhythm for life.

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That's why there's seven feasts in the Old Testament, because it's a perfect rhythm for your year and how to worship and love your

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God. That's why there's three high holy feasts that are each seven days a piece, because God is triune and because he is infinite in his majesty, and we are called to complete devotion of God.

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Three sevens in those high holy feasts. The candelabra inside the holy place has seven arms coming off of it, because God is perfect in his dwelling place.

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The seven -fold spirit of God in the revelation is telling us that the spirit is infinite, full, and complete, and he will not struggle with seven churches, which represents all churches.

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The spirit is everywhere, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. You think about smaller things like narrative details where seven priests carried seven trumpets for seven days and marched seven times around the city of Jericho and completely and totally and perfectly annihilated it, all by the power of God.

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You think about in Revelation, seven trumpets, seven seals, and seven bowls, because God is bringing a perfect judgment against those who oppose him.

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These things are not coincidences. It's not a just so happens, whoopsie, we just have seven appearing all over the place.

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Seven is the number of perfection. Seven is the number that represents something it's intentional.

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Now, John, being a very schooled theologian, we should not be surprised when he employs this number.

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And John, also being a very subtle writer, we should not be surprised when he does this subtly, and he doesn't announce to us that he's doing it.

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John doesn't always tell us, hey, I'm going to give you seven things right here, and you need to pay attention to them.

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You have to dig, and you have to notice, and you have to look. You have to put on your scuba diving gear and go past the kiddie pool depth, and you have to look and see, oh,

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I've seen that before, and let me count that. That's an interesting thing to do in the gospel of John. You'll notice things.

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One thing we notice is that there's seven I am statements in the gospel of John.

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I am is the word for God, Yahweh. It's the word that was given to Moses at the burning bush.

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So Jesus in this gospel is seven times declaring that he is

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God. That's not coincidental. He's saying I am God seven times in a row.

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What do you think that means? He's saying I am infinitely, perfectly, completely, and totally

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God. He's declaring his divinity. He's saying I'm the bread of life that feeds you.

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I'm the light of the world that leads you. I'm the door that keeps you. I'm the good shepherd that greets you. I'm the resurrection that will free you, the way, the truth, and the life that guarantees you, and I'm the true vine that will never leave you because you are connected to me.

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He is proclaiming his divinity with a purpose of showing us how he is going to care for us and love us in our salvation.

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It's glorious. Now, how does this relate to John 11? John 11 is where one of those

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I am statements falls. John 11 is the one I am the resurrection and the life, which is a fascinating thing because he's proclaiming who he is.

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He's the resurrection and the life right before he resurrects and brings back to life his friend named

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Lazarus. This is the fourth of the I am statements, which I think is important because three doesn't have a natural center.

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So four sort of acts as a central point in the declaration of Jesus's divinity and in the declaration of his love for his people.

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So John 11 functions as a chapter that's in the center of his love and in the center of his proclamations of divinity.

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There will be more that come, but so far we're at the fourth. Now, John 11 is not only central to those things.

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It's also climactic. It means that there's another list of seven that happens in the gospel of John, and this list of seven ends in John chapter 11, which is a fascinating crossroads.

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This list is the list of seven sign miracles. Now, what do I mean by sign miracles?

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I mean that John has selected seven specific miracles that will function as signs that will showcase who

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Jesus is. Those signs are like billboards saying, I am God. I am divine.

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And each of them tell us something. We know that they're sign miracles first and foremost because John tells us that they are.

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John 2 11, the first sign miracle, it says this beginning of his signs

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Jesus did in Cana of Galilee and manifested his glory and his disciples believed in him.

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So when Jesus does a sign miracle, he's manifesting his glory. The purpose statement of the gospel of John is these things have been written so that you would believe.

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Jesus does these miracles so that the people who see them would believe in him and have life in his name.

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These are testimonies of Christ. John chapter 4 is another example where it tips us off to the fact that it's a sign.

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It says this is again a second sign that Jesus performs when he had come out of Judah or Judea into Galilee.

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Now, not every one of these miracles is so explicit. John is subtle. So sometimes they don't explicitly tell us that this is a sign miracle, but most of them do.

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But the point that I want you to see is that all of them are showcasing the glory of Christ. All of them are showing us and revealing to us who

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Jesus is and that testimony of miracles ends in John chapter 11.

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Just so we're familiar with them, there's seven of them. Water into wine. That's John 2 where he's showcasing that he's the divine creator.

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He heals the royal official's son, which shows that he has power over space and time. He didn't have to go to the official's son.

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He proclaimed it from a distance and it happened because he's God. The third is the healing of the paralytic in Jerusalem, showcasing that he is the divine physician and healer.

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The fourth is the feeding of the 5 ,000 in John chapter 6, showcasing that he's Yahweh, the one who feeds his people, the one who nourishes his people even with his own flesh.

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John 6 says, eat my flesh and drink my blood and you'll have life. He's saying I'm the one who nourishes my people.

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I'm God. He walks on the water as the fifth sign miracle, verse 16 through 24, showing that his sovereign rule even extends over the chaotic waters as his sovereign rule will extend to all the chaotic nations eventually.

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And then the sixth one is where he heals the blind man in John chapter 9, where the light of the world gives light to the eyes of the blind.

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Now these first six miracles dramatically showcase that Jesus is

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God. So now you've got 13 evidences so far of the divinity of Christ just in these two lists and I haven't got to the seventh one yet.

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But these miracles for the elect, for the people of God, they're there to encourage you, they're there to awaken you, they're there to show you that Jesus is the

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Christ. For those who are not God's people, they're there to harden their hearts.

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To cause them to reject Jesus. Is it any wonder that every time one of these miracles happens, the rejection against Christ grows hotter every time.

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The affection of his disciples grows deeper. The hatred of those who hate him grows fiercer.

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In Cana, they were confused by him. With the nobleman's son, they were seeking a sign instead of seeking him.

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So there was apathy. With the paralytic, he was betrayed by that man and then betrayed by the city.

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There's betrayal. See how it's increasing? When he fed the 5 ,000, they wanted to make him king because they so devalued his lordship as God, they thought that putting a rusty crown on his head would suffice.

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Idolatry. He walked on water. They left him and abandoned him. He healed the blind man.

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Now they want to stone him and kill him. Every one of these miracles is producing something.

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It's either producing love for God in the saints of God or it's producing hatred of God in those who are not his.

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And if you think about it, what a spiritual condition of the people who called themselves

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God's people that when God performs signs and wonders in their midst, they reject him.

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The seventh sign is where the rejection reaches its all -time high and it climaxes in fury against the sun.

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Scholars say that this miracle in John chapter 11 is the defining reason why they kill him.

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They picked up stones and anger in John 8 and John 5, but here in John 11, they're not going to pick up stones against him anymore.

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They're going to collude with Rome. You think about the Jews who hated the Romans, who hated and resented the fact that the

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Romans had occupied their land are now colluding with the ones they hate. It's an astounding thing.

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This sealed Jesus' fate, the resurrection of his friend, Lazarus. Now, I don't think it's any coincidence that because we're in the final section of John, this miracle says so much about so many things.

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For instance, the first miracle in this final section is a resurrection. The last miracle in this section is a resurrection, the resurrection of Christ.

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This miracle itself binds the Bible together in so many glorious ways. For instance, he says in verse 4, this sickness will not end in death.

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That's true for Lazarus, but it's also true for you and I. The sickness of sin does not produce death in us.

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Do you see how this chapter represents so much? The sickness of sin doesn't end in death for you and I, but our life now is made for the glory of God.

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We'll see more of that in a moment. The point is that this first resurrection of a friend is going to point forward to the resurrection of the

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Savior, which is going to point forward to the resurrection of his people who experience his resurrection through salvation.

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There's so much here. It's like a tapestry. You look at the front of the tapestry.

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If it's done well, it's beautiful. All the yarn is in the right place. It showcases a glorious picture.

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You turn it around in the back and it looks like chaos. All the strings are all over the place and it looks like a mangled mess.

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Well, if you look at just the surface level reading of the gospel of John, it's a beautiful picture well put together of all of these things.

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If you turn it around to the back side, if you dig a little bit deeper, there's strings and threads that are going all over the place that I want to show you just for a moment, just how some of these strings connect together in John chapter 11.

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For instance, this is his final miracle before he dies. It also relates to his first miracle, the very first miracle he did, which was at the wedding at Cana.

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These two things correlate together. Isn't it interesting? Jesus is the beginning and the end, the first and the last, and his first and last miracle correlate together in an astounding way.

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Think about it. The first miracle, he goes to a wedding. The second or the last miracle, he goes to a funeral.

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There's a contrast there. The first miracle, he shows up and there's singing and joy.

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The last miracle, when he raises Lazarus from the dead, there's weeping and sadness. Do you see the contrast there?

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The first miracle is when he shows up when a husband and wife have become one flesh, new flesh.

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With Lazarus, he shows up and there's dead flesh. Do you see the contrast? What does this teach us?

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That Jesus, even in the way that he accomplished his miracles, is showcasing his supremacy and his sovereignty over all things.

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He is the beginning and the end, and he's telling one story from beginning to end, even in the way it correlates.

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Think about this. He shows up at the wedding of Cana and there's a community there. He shows up at the tomb of Lazarus and there's a community there.

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He's showcasing that he is Lord over a people and that his miracles are going to point to something for his people.

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He's the one who's going to bind his people together. Weddings and funerals are the two things that really bring people together.

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Usually. They're the most communal events in our society. We go to weddings and we go to funerals, even though they're so different.

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One is happy, one is sad, one is joyful, one is where we weep with tears.

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And yet both of them are the two most poignant communal events and Jesus binds them together and says

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I'm Lord over all of it. I'm Lord over your happiest times and I'm Lord over your saddest times.

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I'm Lord over your new life and I'm Lord over your death. He was also summoned by women in both miracles, which is a fascinating thing.

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The first miracle he was summoned by a woman named Mary. That was his mother. And in that time that would have been a very interesting thing to summon someone if you're a woman because the times were different.

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A woman named Mary summoned him. In this miracle that we're talking about in John 11, he's also summoned by a woman and her name is also

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Mary. Isn't that a fascinating parallel between these two events? Jesus, even though his society did not value women and even in those days a woman could not share testimony and evidence in court,

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Jesus shows tender affection to these two Marys. He shows them love and affection and he listens to them and he does what they ask.

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One is family, one is friend, but both are heard. Both are heard by Christ.

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One of the things I love about the gospel is that the gospel changes the socioeconomic status of so many different groups of people.

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Women are raised up to being equal, co -heirs with Jesus, with their brothers.

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There's two different societies. There's the Old Testament society that pushed women down and then there's the modern society that elevates women over men.

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Both are flawed. The Bible gets it right and puts them side by side, rib to rib.

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That's interesting that God made Eve from the rib because she's equal to her husband, but different than her husband.

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Jesus, in the way that he loves and cares for women in the gospel, is elevating women to their proper place and that's beautiful.

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In both miracles, Jesus delays. When his mother says, we've run out of wine,

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Jesus says, what's that to me? My hour has not yet come. In this one, another

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Mary summons him and says, my brother's gonna die. And it says Jesus loves them and he didn't go right away.

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He delays in both of these miracles. Isn't that a fascinating parallel? He delayed with Lazarus and he delayed with Mary in the original miracle.

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He delayed for the glory of God. Both of those instances, it tells us that he delayed not because he was unloving, not because he was being curt or being aloof or whatever else, he delayed so that God could get glory from his actions.

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He delayed for the glory of God. Both of them talk about his hour. The miracle at the wedding of Cana, his hour had not yet come.

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The wedding at the tomb of Lazarus, his hour was here. The hour of his death had come.

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Both of them were done in a gathering, but one of them was public and one of them was private. The wedding was private for family only.

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The miracle of the tomb of Lazarus was public and it is in fact what sealed his death.

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Jesus knew when the Jews heard about what he had done, that they would go and alert the Jewish aristocracy, that they would set in motion the plan that would accomplish his death.

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Very different than the wedding in Cana, but there's a correlation there. There's a parallel. I think the point on why

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John does this so specifically is because he's saying that Jesus is Lord over everything.

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I think that's what he's trying to accomplish. He's Lord over our joy and he's Lord over our sadness. He's Lord over the weddings and the funerals.

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He's Lord over male and female. He's Lord over everything. These two events correlate on purpose to showcase the surpassing insurmountable supremacy of Jesus Christ.

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But they don't just correlate those two miracles. It also looks forward to his resurrection, but it also looks back in time in a typological way.

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Now at this point, we probably should move over. I've nerded out enough, but I can't. I say that because I can't.

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I want to be honest with you. This miracle looks forward to our future resurrection, but it also ties together the entire

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Old Testament. All of time is bound up in this miracle. Think about it. Adam. Adam was made by God in the garden.

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Breath of life came into him and the first thing he did was he sprung to life and he praised God. Jesus, standing before the tomb, commands

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Lazarus with his words, the breath of his own mouth. Lazarus springs to life and worships

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God. Lazarus is a type of Adam. Lazarus is experiencing an Adamic new creation.

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It's fascinating. There's also Moses typology. When I say typology,

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I mean it represents something. The little thing represents the bigger thing. Moses is the little thing. Jesus is the massive thing that it represents.

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Moses typology. We know from other books of the Bible that Moses was a deliverer. Jesus was a deliverer.

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Jesus and Moses both were in a city where all the baby boys were being murdered. Moses came out of Egypt.

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Jesus came out of Egypt. Both of them were savior figures. We understand this, but Jesus' typology in John 11 is fascinating.

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For instance, Moses' very first miracle was turning water into blood.

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Do you remember that in the Exodus? He turned the river Nile into blood. Jesus' first miracle is when he turned water into wine.

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One, water to blood, is a symbol of curse. One is a symbol of blessing. That Jesus will bring unending flowing wine, mirth, gladness, joy to the people, to the kingdom of God.

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These things are correlated. And Jesus' miracle is sweeter and better and more awesome than Moses'.

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Moses' final miracle was the death of the firstborn son of Pharaoh. What is Jesus' final miracle?

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The resurrection of the firstborn son named Lazarus. The first miracle of Moses and the last miracle of Moses are perfectly correlated to Jesus.

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And we're not supposed to look at that and say, there's something going on there. Why would God do that to correlate these miracles so well?

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I think it's because Jesus came as the true and better Moses. Moses' purpose was to free the people of God, to bring them through the waters, through the wilderness, into the promised land.

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What has Jesus done for us? He's freed us from sin. He's brought us through the waters of baptism, through the wilderness that we call life, en route to the promised land of heaven.

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Every bit of Jesus' story, Moses' story, is correlated together and it's even down into the fabric of the gospel.

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It's unbelievable. All of this.

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And there's more. But we'll stop there. All of this is showcasing the supremacy of Jesus Christ.

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From his first miracle to his last miracle. From his first words to his final words.

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Every bit of it. All these strings converge here in John 11. Now very briefly,

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I want us to look at the final six verses of this passage and I want us to talk about the sister's grievous dilemma.

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And I want us to talk about our gospel duty as people of God. So let's read the passage one more time.

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John 11, 1 through 6. Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and his sister

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Martha, and her sister Martha. And it was the Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother

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Lazarus was sick. So the sister sent word to him saying, Lord, behold, he whom you love is sick.

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But when Jesus heard this, he said, this sickness is not to end in death, but for the glory of God, so that the

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Son of God may be glorified by it. Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.

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So when he heard that he was sick, he then stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

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Everything we've learned so far is that Jesus is supreme, that Jesus is sovereign, that Jesus is in control.

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This will play out now in the way that he approaches Lazarus. It looks like Jesus is not in control, or it looks like he's not very loving.

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It almost reads like a Babylon Bee article, if you know what that is. Jesus loved

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Mary, didn't go. It's a striking feature in the narrative.

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These women were unmarried or widows because they were living with their brother. They had no father because they would have lived with their father had they had a father, so he must have died.

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They're living with their oldest brother, which meant that they were vulnerable. If their brother died, they would be poor.

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They would be totally dependent upon the community of people to take care of them. They would have been destitute in a sense.

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They would have not had a roof over their head. They would have not been able to defend themselves when they went to the market.

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They would have been vulnerable to say the least. So that's a dilemma that they're facing. That's an urgency.

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They love their brother, but also if you've ever been in a position where a loved one dying could not only cause you to be sad and broken over their death, but would also leave you in a completely different status than you were before.

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This is sort of what these sisters are facing. They're grieving their brother, but they're also grieving the new life that's going to be carved out for them as not only widows, but as women without the care of a man in that society.

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That's a grievous dilemma that they're going through. The second dilemma that they're going through is that the one that they thought was the most reliable, the most powerful, the most capable, the most trustworthy, the one that they put all of their faith and trust in delayed and didn't come.

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You can imagine conversations at the table. What are we going to do? Why didn't Jesus come? He said that he loved us.

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Why didn't he come? These are normal conversations that we would have. They even have these conversations with Jesus when he gets there.

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They say, if you would have been here, our brother wouldn't have died. These things are greatly discouraging to them.

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Jesus was at a great distance as well. So the odds were already not in their favor that he would have gotten there on time.

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He was miles and miles away in that region of the Jordan where John the

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Baptist was baptizing. It would have taken a healthy person a full day to walk from that town was also called

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Bethany. So it would have taken a full day to walk from that Bethany to the Bethany where Lazarus and Mary and Martha resided.

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So by the time the servant gets there, it's already been one day, the servant doesn't even know if his message is relevant.

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He left knowing that Lazarus was about to die. By the time he speaks to Jesus, he's not even sure if Lazarus is alive or not.

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It took him a whole day just to get to where Jesus was at. Jesus says, good, this sickness will not end in death.

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I'll be there soon. And he sends the servant back. He waits two days. That's now three days since he got the message.

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And then the one day travel means that he got there when the body had already been dead about four days.

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Now there's a really practical reason why Jesus did this and then there's the ultimate reason that Jesus did this.

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The ultimate reason is he did this for the glory of God. He did this not as a flippant miracle.

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He did this not as a way to mess with Mary and Martha's emotions. He did this for the glory of God so that God could get the glory and so that Christ could get the glory for this astounding miracle.

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But the practical reason that this was so important was because of a myth that was going on in the

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Jewish culture. They believed that if you died, your spirit hovered over your body for a couple days, two days.

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And it was possible for exorcists and people who practice medicine and everything else to resurrect you, to bring you back to life, to do something to wake you up in those first two days.

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But if you made it past those two days, you were toast. You were done. Jesus waits until double the time of this myth to showcase that he has power over life and death and that their silly mythology doesn't play out when it comes to the power of God.

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Think about why does Jesus stay in the grave three days? He didn't have to stay three days. He could have died one day, resurrected.

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Why does he stay three days? To again showcase that this silly myth that they believe two days and the spirit hovers and then after that, that person is gone.

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Jesus resurrects himself after the third day. What a beautiful miracle he's showing, showing how he is

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God. No one could do that but God. John 1, 4 or 11, 4 says, but when

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Jesus heard this, he said, this sickness shall not end in death, but for the glory of God, so the

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Son of God may be glorified by it. This leads to our final point we're going to consider today.

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Just barely getting into John chapter 11, one point that we're going to pull out and that is that when

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Jesus did this event for the glory of God, he intended on our life and our death to be for the glory of God.

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It applies even down to us. When you ask yourself the question, how do you live a life that glorifies

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God? How do you die a death that glorifies God? That's a tough question to ask because when we think of life, we think of being present and we think of death, we think of defeat.

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It says in the Bible that death is the final enemy that will be thrown in the lake of fire and that we look forward to the day where there is no more death because death is bad.

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But in this passage, Jesus is saying that death can accomplish something incredible, that death can accomplish something glorious.

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How do you die to the glory of God? That's what Jesus is getting at with all of the structure under this passage, with all of the beautiful interconnections and with the way that he's interacting with these sisters.

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How do you die to the glory of God? And again, that's hard because we think of glorying as an active thing.

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I go to church, I read my Bible, I study, I share the gospel. Those are ways that I can glorify

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God. We often don't think about how do we glorify God in our death.

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Well, the way that I would say that and the way that I would end is that you glorify

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God in your death by glorifying God in your life. A soldier on the battlefield is not glorious if they run away like a coward and they're shot by a stray arrow.

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That's not glorious. A soldier dies with great glory whenever they die valiantly, whenever they die swinging, whenever they die fighting.

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The way that we live to the glory of God is love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbors yourself.

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And the way that we die to the glory of God is by doing that to our final breath. If you live that way, you will glorify

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God in life and you will glorify God in death. The gospel account will go out in your life and the gospel account will go out in your death.

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Let's pray. Lord Jesus, I know we were just able to barely scratch the surface of John 11 today as we just looked at one thing.

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All the structure underneath it, all of the ways that you interacted with these two sisters, and Lord, I pray that we'll be able to come back again next week and even look more fully at these things and in the weeks ahead look more fully into these things.

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But God, in the one thing that we saw today, I pray that you would help us to see that and appreciate that.

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Lord, I pray that you would write that on our hearts that we live like Lazarus to the glory of God.

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And that, Lord, because now we've been made Christians through Christ and his gospel, through his death, burial, and resurrection on the cross, through his forgiveness of our sins and through his imparting of his righteousness, through the gospel,

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Lord, I pray that we would live a life worthy of the gospel. That we would live our lives in such a way that pleases

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Christ all the way up until the final moments. And Lord, like Lazarus, that we would depart from this earth glorifying

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God, ready to stand before you and praise you forever.

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You are glorious. You are worthy of our praise. And Lord, I pray that we would live our lives in such a way that magnifies you in everything.