Believe and You Shall See the Glory of God

John 11 and the Prayer for Illumination

Once again, if you will turn your Bibles, please, with me to the Gospel of John chapter 11. The Gospel of John chapter 11. Before we look to the Word of God, let us ask Him to bless our time together.

Once again, our gracious Heavenly Father, we confess that without your Spirit we can do nothing. And so as we looked at this text this morning, as we were challenged by Jesus' words, do you believe this?

Lord, as we have pondered those words, may we press on in this text and learn more about our Lord's interaction, His purposes prior to the raising of Lazarus, that great demonstration of His power and might.

May we understand what this means for us today. Make application of it under the guidance of your Spirit, we pray in Christ's name. So we began this morning pointing out that we have yet another new bulletin insert.

I hope that you got yours. Some of you are starting a collection, I realize. That makes me feel good. It takes a little extra work to do that. So we are continuing on in P45. We are still in John chapter 11.

And as true good Reformed Baptists this morning, we didn't get very far. We sort of did maybe two and a quarter verses, somewhere along those lines. But we are in the meat of the matter. Specifically, we focused, especially this morning, upon Jesus' question of Martha, do you believe this?

Specifically in reference to Jesus' claim to be the resurrection, the life, and the fact that the one believing in Him will never die, and everyone living and believing in Him will never die forever. And do you believe this?

And the centrality of Christ and all these aspects came out. And we noticed that the confessional response that was given to Jesus in verse 27, Yes, Lord, I have believed that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one coming into the world, certainly would be striking in light of the fact that here you have one of the sisters of a family to whom Jesus very clearly is very closely attached, and yet the content of her confession is a very deep confession, much more than what we would find from any of the apostles.

I mean, Peter gets fairly close in his famous confession, Matthew chapter 16, but here you have the Son of God, the Christ, the one coming into the world. One recognizes that when you pick up most commentaries written today, there are going to be people saying, Well, certainly this is just John putting words in her mouth, so on and so forth.

There wasn't anyone during Jesus' ministry that could have possibly ever had such an understanding. But again, it seems to me that if Jesus is who he is, that it would have been very important for him to reveal himself to these individuals in such a way that they would have a proper foundation and basis for what they're going to experience here.

Because this is, we know what's coming. We know what's going to happen here. But this is much more than just a story. When you think about what really took place and the impact that we've had upon every one of these individuals, not just Lazarus, but Mary and Martha as well, and the disciples, it is an incredible experience that they went through.

And she shows a tremendous insight into who Jesus is, which also helps to explain why she says,. And anything that you ask of God, I know that he will hear you when she first speaks with him. And so, having said these things, this part of the conversation having taken place, now Mary is brought into the picture.

And when she is summoned, it is obviously one of the great inquiries as to why was it, did she stay in the home? Why did she stay in the house when she was told earlier that Jesus had come? And just as it is speculation to try to read into the words of Martha, some kind of mild rebuke or complaint in regards to Jesus coming after the death of Lazarus, in the same way, we do see in each time that Mary and Martha are introduced to us, a difference in the sisters.

Mary and Martha’s Different Responses to Jesus

They are not the same people. And I always find that to be interesting. I am thankful that the church is filled with people of different kinds. I'm glad we all don't look alike and think alike. And I'm very glad that we don't behave in the exact same way.

That would be a really, really boring church. There's no two ways about it. And God uses our differences and our uniquenesses. Sometimes we try to press everybody into the same mold, I will admit, but the reality is that he's made each of us to differ and he uses us with our different gifts and our different talents and our different personalities.

And Mary and Martha are very different from one another. And one reacts immediately and rushes to him and there's the conversation and the expression of faith. That's not how Mary is. And so she goes and she basically sort of whispers to Mary.

Martha whispers to Mary, the teacher is here and he's calling for you. And when she heard it, she got up quickly and was coming to him. And so why didn't she go before? I don't know. But once there is that indication to her that he specifically desires to speak to her, then she goes up quickly, she gets up quickly and goes to him.

Now Jesus, as we are told in verse 30, had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha met him. Now exactly where that would be, we cannot tell. What direction, for example, what road or whatever it is that Jesus was approaching Bethany on.

And of course, the tomb would probably not be in the city in Virens. It would be outside, obviously. You're not going to bury someone right within the village itself. There wouldn't be caves and things like that available.

And so we're not exactly sure where this takes place. But instead, Jesus has basically stopped his progress toward probably the home itself. And Martha has gone to get Mary. Verse 31 says,. Then the Jews who were with her in the house and consoling her, when they saw that Mary got up quickly and went out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there.

So once again, as we mentioned last week, how you deal with death and how you mourn and how you demonstrate your grief, very, very different around the world. And very often it is an extremely cultural thing.

And as I mentioned last week, I would have a hard time as a Scotsman in most Middle Eastern settings when the wailing and the very public demonstration of grief takes place. Probably, I'll be honest with you, it's probably physically better for the expression of these things than it is to bottle it all up like Scotsmen do and end up dying a lot earlier, probably.

But the reality is that this was a very public thing. And so a lot of us would just want to be left alone. We wouldn't want to have all these, I mean, certainly guests in the home and things like that.

This would be very difficult for most of us. So even though Martha calls Mary secretly or quietly, and when she goes out, the people that are there, and these aren't just the professional mourners that you see, for example, in the raising of Jairus' daughter.

There does really seem to be an indication that Lazarus and his family were well-known amongst the Jews. And so these are individuals who have come that were there to console her. And when they saw her get up quickly and run out, it would not be a strange thing for her to go to the tomb and there to weep there.

So that's what they assume is taking place. They have not heard the word that Jesus is coming. So when Mary, therefore, when Mary came where Jesus was, so we're not at the tomb at this point. Martha knows where this is.

This is where they've met. And so she saw him and fell at his feet. And you just wonder how many times since the death of Lazarus, Mary and Martha, in their grief and in their weeping, had said to one another, Only if the Lord had been here.

Only if Jesus had come. Only if he had been here. Because the first words from both of them, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And you'll notice that the response is not what Jesus said initially to Martha.

Your brother will rise again. Instead, this is a different situation, because the meeting with Martha is pretty much personal. When Jesus, therefore, saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled.

And so, whereas with Martha, there was the opportunity for preparation, there was the opportunity for proclamation, now in this situation, that opportunity is not there. And so you don't have the same conversation taking place.

You don't have the same revelation of who Jesus is in this context. And it does remind us that we are given different kinds of opportunities in our own lives. I know that I've had many opportunities of very bold witness, and then other opportunities where, like in this situation, how is Jesus supposed to have the conversation he had with Martha, with Mary, with all these weeping individuals around?

Even if Martha had been weeping when she came, Jesus can calm her down because you don't have all the stuff going on around you. But now you have a crowd. And there are some times that the dynamics of the situation are going to change how you engage in a proclamation of truth.

The Incarnation and the Emotional Life of Christ

But more than that, I think it's vitally important that even though we know, we've gotten the indication right at the beginning of the chapter, Jesus knows what he's going to do. He knows what Lazarus' situation is.

He has supernatural knowledge of his death. He's already proclaimed to the disciples, we're going to wake him. It's so easy for us, because Jesus is so unique, to think of him primarily in his exalted state.

And as a result, to look especially at him in the Gospel of John, and see him as just this superhero character just walking through the midst of all the circumstances and just exercising supernatural power to just make everything right.

And the problem with that perspective is it overlooks the many places where the apostle John makes sure we realize that we're not going to fall into that, well, if we're listening to him anyways, we shouldn't fall into that trap of turning Jesus into someone whose feet never touch the ground.

In John chapter 4, for example, he sits down at the well. He's weary. He's tired. He's been walking. He's thirsty. Here in John chapter 11, we are given somewhat of an insight into the reality of the Lord's emotional life.

The tendency is to think that if you know exactly what's going to happen, then you don't have to worry about anything. You're not really troubled by anything. But that's not the case. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit, was very troubled.

He was not just standing above it all, looking down upon it. Oh, these little people. They'll be fine soon when I raise Lazarus. He is deeply moved in spirit. He enters into their grief here in the presence of death, in the presence of separation, and all the things that that brings.

He is not some cold, cool, calculating super God. He's the incarnate Word. And if He truly is the Word made flesh, you'd have to be some really hard-hearted individual to encounter these weeping individuals and just smile at it or not be moved by it.

You truly have to question the very incarnation itself if there is not some reaction on His part at this point. There are those who are troubled when they see Jesus' response in this way. But what it shows us is that Jesus truly was the God-man.

If He took on that true human nature this morning in Sunday school, we read through the statement of the Council of Chalcedon from 451 on the hypostatic union. And, oh, it seems so complicated. And for many people, it seems so removed from anything that's important.

But actually, when you think about it, this is a text that informed that kind of definition. Because if Jesus was not the God-man, if, for example, and we talked about a number of the errors that people were making and how this definition sought to correct these errors, one of those errors was the idea that the human aspect of Christ was basically removed.

He had a physical body, but the rational soul, what makes man man on that level, that was gone and just replaced by the logos. So it was just sort of a zombie body being indwelt by the logos. Well, if that was the case, there wouldn't be any reason or even any way for Him to be deeply moved and spirit and troubled and things like this.

And it also demonstrates that what happens in time, so many people struggle with the sovereignty of God. If God has decreed whatsoever comes to pass, then how can God truly enter into the sufferings of His people, these descriptions of God in the Psalter as the eagle gathering us?

And how can God really comfort us? And what can this comfort really mean if everything is just all planned out in the first place? And there just can't be any reality to it because we can't experience things like that.

We are temporal beings. We're time-bound beings. We can't control the next second of our lives. And so it's very easy for people to have difficulty understanding how it is that the God of the Bible, or here the Jesus of the Gospel of John, who is going to raise Lazarus, how can He really enter into the feelings of these individuals who don't know what's coming, but He does?

Well, He truly became the God-man. He was a true man. And when people ask me, I had it happen, I think it was either in Ukraine or the Czech Republic, I forget which one it was, but someone asked me the question, how do you respond when someone asks you, doesn't a belief in the sovereignty of God just make us all puppets?

What's your normal response to that? My normal response to that is, the strongest refutation I know of that is the incarnation of Jesus Christ. For God to enter into His own creation, not just for a brief number of hours, but for years, and to do what Jesus did, and to engage in the activities, engage in the interactions, the friendships that He developed, means that what happens in time is meaningful to God.

And we only show ourselves to be extremely foolish and extremely arrogant when we demand that somehow God demonstrate that He exists within the parameters of our understanding, rather than our allowing the Word of God to determine what the proper parameters for His existence truly are.

And so I think it's very important that we recognize that Jesus was touched by what He saw. I've said many times, I never found out what the magical words were when I was a hospital chaplain. Some of you have been around here long enough, only a few of you, to remember that early on, when we first came here, coming up on not too far away from three decades ago, shortly after that, I had to go to work at what back then was called Thunderbird Samaritan Hospital as a chaplain.

And that was some of the most difficult work that I ever did, and I've mentioned it to you a number of times before. And I never figured out what the magical words were, because every situation was different, and I just never found any way of presenting a certain fixed equation to people that actually seemed proper.

But the other thing that I discovered was, if you cry around me, I will probably cry too. I'm just not one of those folks that can just simply, you know, has that iron constitution. I hate to admit it, but there are certain movies that make me cry too.

And I'm not going to tell you which ones, because you might invite me over to watch them just to see how it works. But, yeah, I never figured that part out. I never figured out how to be that stoic, super strong person when you're in the presence of death, when good grief, when the hospital staff themselves are weeping and crying.

It's pretty hard to avoid that, hard to enter into the emotion of the time. And I don't feel too badly about that, because as we're going to see, Jesus himself did that. And so when he sees the deep emotion, instead of the same kind of conversation that he has with Martha, he's deeply moved in spirit, he's troubled, and he says, where have you laid him?

They said to him, Lord, come and see. And so there obviously is going to be a distance that they're going to have to go. And so we see in our mind's eye this group as they head toward the tomb, and we have that shortest verse in English, not the shortest verse in the New Testament in the original language, but Jesus wept.

As you see this mourning group, and this would have been something you would have seen a lot of, because remember, people back then saw a whole lot more death than we generally see today. And so there would have been very common to see a group of mourners going to the place of internment.

Not something that would be unusual. And yet there is the teacher from Galilee. There is the one who has opened blind eyes. There is the one who has cleansed the lepers. And he's not walking stoically and untouched and unmoved in the midst.

He likewise weeps. You might say, well, don't we weep out of ignorance? Well, sometimes. But I know I learned in the hospital, anyone who is old enough to love is old enough to grieve. Anyone old enough to love is old enough to grieve.

And Christians grieve. We just don't grieve without hope as the rest of the world does. There are many good things that you can identify in Stoicism. You know, the Apostle Paul, play the man, stand firm, hold fast.

That's great. Paul wept. Paul wept. And Jesus wept. Now, would he have had more reason than the people around him? Yes. In the sense that he recognizes the tremendous impact of sin and death. He sees, he knows better than anyone else what is truly going on in the hearts and minds of those around him.

And he weeps. He weeps as they go to the tomb. Even when he is about to demonstrate his power, he doesn't do so as this cold, heartless deity, just sort of floating above the human experience. So they go, Jesus weeps.

And when they see him entering in, so the Jews were saying, see how he loved him. See how he loved him. This was an external demonstration. They saw that, but yet, there are still those. But some of them said, could not this man who opened the eyes, the blind man, have kept this man also from dying?

I wonder if Jesus heard that. Well, certainly he was aware of it. It is truly amazing to me how there are some people who even in the presence of suffering, in the presence of sadness, cannot help but giving vent to their anger and to their pettiness and to their selfishness.

I've seen some of that this week on the political scene. Representative shot in that attack, and yet there are people that just can't help, even as the man fights for his life to take some shots. It's disgusting, but nothing new about it at all.

And of course, one of the astounding things to think about, is I have to wonder if some of these who said, could not this man who opened the eyes, the blind, have kept this man also from dying, in just a matter of moments, are going to see that man alive again, and yet they will not believe.

Think about that. Think about that. They won't believe. When people ask me very often, wouldn't you have a much broader ministry if you weren't one of those Calvinists? If you just sort of didn't mention it, just put off the side, there'd be so many doors open to you and things like that.

Yeah. The problem is, it's texts like this that absolutely make no sense unless you recognize God's sovereignty in the matter of salvation. Because I can hardly think of a place where it is demonstrated more clearly and more fully that it is absolutely dependent upon the work of the Spirit of God to open a man's heart or mind to understand the truth.

In John chapter 11. I mean, if it's up to me to come up with arguments and be persuasive, maybe dress the right way and do my hair, oh never mind. Pastor Frye do his hair the right way to get people to listen and to put them in the right mood and just do all the things to try to convince somebody.

Look, if you can stand outside this event and see a man raised from the dead and then stand there and go, what are we going to do about this guy? This is a problem. You want the very depth of religious blindness?

You want the unpardonable sin to the nth degree? That's what you're going to see here. And I just wonder how many of these, but some of them said, were the very ones who later on are going to be going, we've got to find some way of dealing with this guy.

The Glory of God, Faith, and Spiritual Blindness

So Jesus, again, being deeply moved within, and yeah, I don't know if he heard it or just knew they were saying it, but it would deeply, if it had moved him when Martha said it, and then when Mary says it with tears, but then when it's, it's one thing when they say it.

It hurts even more when it's said in a nasty, unbelieving fashion. So Jesus, again, being deeply moved within, came to the tomb. Now it was a cave and a stone was lying against it. And we've all seen, I remember, I'm awful glad, I'll be honest with you, I'm awful glad that in my independent fundamentalist Baptist church, when I was a kid, we had something called flannelgraph.

Roxy said it before I did. My eyesight's getting much better. Flannelgraph. And I remember my mom and, you know, you'd set up that easel type thing and you'd put the flannel thing over it and you'd have the little, was there something on the back that made them sticky?

I don't know. So we all know what the tomb was supposed to look like. Now, I'm not sure how many, you know, really convenient tombs there are like that all over the place. You know, it probably wasn't all that glamorous a place.

I mean, sure, Lazarus, they seemed to be people of substance, so it wasn't the poor man's place or anything like that. But, you know, I wonder if someday, I mean, we could go to Israel and they'll show you the place.

And they'll sell you replicas in the whole nine yards, T-shirts, Lazarus's tomb, you know, the whole nine yards. But I'm not really sure we know exactly where that was. But, you know, it's got to be one of those caves around there, so I suppose.

But you come and can you imagine what it, you've got to try to picture this scene because they come to this cave and a stone's lying against it, and that's the way it should be. And we've learned a lot about Jewish burial traditions over the past hundred years.

These bone boxes that have been discovered, they're called ossuaries. Fascinating area of study. And it's actually really helped confirm the accuracy of the New Testament because they would scratch the names of people.

It's given us a huge database of names from the first century. And lo and behold, the New Testament matches it perfectly. I wonder how that happened. Well, maybe because it was written back then. But anyway, they would bury the bodies for a certain period of time.

And then they would reopen those tombs once the body had decayed and they would place the bones into these ossuaries. That's how they, you know, they would have these slabs where the body was laid, but then once the body had decayed, they would come in and they would collect the bones and they'd put the bones in the ossuary and sometimes they'd put more than one person into a single ossuary, sort of a family type thing.

And so, you know, they understood. We mentioned last week about the four days and they understood the process of bodily decay and so on and so forth. And that's why you have this very, you know, Jesus said, remove the stone.

Martha, the sister of the sea, said to him, Lord, by this time there will be a stench for he has been dead four days. If you were writing this for effect, if you were just making this up, would you include that?

I think, is it the King James says he stinketh? Is that what the King James says? Okay, you know. That's a nice, straightforward, literal rendering, I suppose. Sort of King James-ish. But if you were trying to present Jesus the superhero story here, this is not how you would do it.

And what it demonstrates is, Martha, your brother will rise again. Yes, I know, in the end time. And yes, I know you're the resurrection of life, but could we not open the tomb because by now he stinketh?

And so Martha's thinking very practically. Not overly theologically, but very practically. And so, I just find it a fascinating statement that places it so much. Not only does it really show the character of Martha and the consistency of that character.

And not only does it place it in history, but it places it within the context of, yeah, that would certainly be sort of the first thought across my mind. Because Jesus has not stood out there and said, Okay, now everyone stand back.

I'm about to raise a dead man. Now remove the thing. Instead, he just comes up and says, remove the stone. Now, how many people are going to be standing around going, that's really inappropriate. That's completely wrong.

What are you doing? What are you thinking? And so her response makes sense. It makes all sorts of sense. But Jesus said to her, did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?

Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God? Well, he didn't use those exact words, did he? Well, we don't know. Maybe he did. It's not like we have an exhaustive account. It's not like a court reporter was standing there when Jesus was talking with Martha.

Maybe he did. But the point is, he reminds her of the fact that he is more than anyone else there. Even more than the disciples. Unless the disciples were privy to the conversation with Martha. Not really said.

We're not really told one way or the other. They were with him, so maybe they did. So if they were there and they heard everything he said to Martha, and hadn't sort of stepped back and stayed away out of respect, then they too would have as much information because Jesus said, I'm going to wake him.

But they were confused. Remember Thomas's, remember Eeyore's words? Let us go that we may die with him. Did they even fully understand? So Jesus says to her, did I not say to you that if you believe? Remember the one believing?

The one believing in me? The one living and believing in me? Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God? And so what's going to happen, happens for a specific reason. And that is the demonstration of the glory of God.

Now, you might go, well wait a minute. Didn't we at the beginning of chapter 11, didn't Jesus say, it is good that I wasn't there, so that you might believe? Exactly. So in other words, in one event, you have multiple purposes.

God has the purpose in establishing and grounding the faith of the disciples. But clearly, you likewise have the demonstration of the glory of God. And yet, it's going to be the glorification of the Father and the Son.

All in the same event, God is working his decree in such a way that he brings about his own glory, the demonstration of the power of Jesus Christ, the grounding of the faith of the disciples, and as we've noted, though the text doesn't direct us to specifics about this, certainly we cannot help but think about what Mary and Martha and Lazarus experienced as a result of all this as well, and the grounding of their faith in the same way.

And so what do we learn from that? Well, it's not something that we don't already know, but it needs to be something that we are reminded of over and over again. And that is, when God does things in our lives, very often it is for our sanctification, it is for our being conformed to the image of Christ, it is for us to see the foolishness of our pet sin, that temptation we're always falling into.

There is a purpose that we can find in light of the application of his law to our life and our growth and the knowledge of Christ and holiness and sanctification and putting to death the flesh and all of those things, but it's always also for his own glory.

Yes, God's working in your life. God's patiently dealing with you over and over again in the same areas. It's for his glory. It's easy for us to talk on the grand scale, and you know, when you think about it, all you've got to do is look at Ephesians 1, and it's all to the praise of his glorious grace.

Well, that's true. It is all to the praise of his glorious grace. But that has to filter all the way down to the everyday as well. And what Jesus says to Martha is, if you believe, you will see the glory of God.

Now, you might say, yeah, this is a specific situation. I mean, they really got to see the glory of God. They got to see someone rise from the dead. We get to see people rise from spiritual death all the time.

We get to see the glory of God in that way, in a way that they had yet to see, in the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, what we're going to see in the day of Pentecost, the work of the church. Wow, we see Gentiles coming to worship the God of Israel all the time.

They had probably hardly ever seen anything like that. And so it's easy for us to go, yeah, boy, they saw the glory of God. And it's sad that we have so many in our world today that limit the glory of God to some kind of showy external affair.

It's a great deal of joy, my friends, to realize that when you see the Spirit of God making the Word of God to come alive in people's hearts, when you see your own growth in holiness and the growth in holiness and sanctification of those around you, you are seeing the glory of God.

And it certainly should be our prayer that God would give us eyes to be able to see what's glorious in His sight rather than what would be glorious in man's sight. It's so easy for us to look at what God's doing and go, I just don't see much.

I don't see what's going on. It's such a hard time we live in. But if you have spiritually trained eyes, when you see someone persevering in the faith in the midst of difficulty, that should be something that shows you the very glory of God.

That's a tremendous encouragement to us. And so, yes, we're going to have to stop right before. We're going to have to leave poor Lazarus in the tomb, the poor guy. You know what's coming. I know what's coming.

But you can't rush through something like that. Instead, we finish by basically praying, Lord, we want to see the glory of God. Make us to believe. Let's pray together. Indeed, that is our prayer. Heavenly Father, we want to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

We want to have eyes to see as He builds His church, as He sanctifies His people. We want to see the glory of God. Teach us to recognize what it is and teach us to see it for what it is, that we might be encouraged, that we might indeed be better servants of Yours.

We pray in Christ's name. Amen.