Gospel in Life

Guest (Female): Welcome to the Gospel in Life podcast.

Guest (Male): John's Gospel recounts several of Jesus' miracles, from turning water into wine to healing a blind man. John says these miracles are signs pointing us to something greater. But what is it that we should see? In today's sermon, Tim Keller looks at one of these signs and what it reveals about who Jesus is and what he came to accomplish during his life on earth.

Guest (Male 2): Our scripture today is from John chapter 11 verses 18 through 44. Now Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.

"Lord," Martha said to Jesus, "if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha answered, "I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die, and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?"

"Yes, Lord," she replied, "I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world." After she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. "The teacher is here," she said, "and is asking for you." When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him.

When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house comforting her noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there. When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet. "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.

"Where have you laid him?" he asked. "Come and see, Lord," they replied. Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. "Take away the stone," he said.

"But Lord," said Martha, the sister of the dead man, "by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been in there four days." Then Jesus said, "Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, "Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me."

When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, "Take off the grave clothes and let him go." This is the word of the Lord.

Tim Keller: For the last couple of months, we've been looking in the Gospel of John at these accounts of Jesus' miraculous signs. John says there's quite a lot of miracles that Jesus did, but John particularly chose these seven miracles that he called signs because he believed that they particularly revealed who Jesus was and what he came to do.

The raising of Lazarus is the seventh, the climactic miracle of those signs, and probably the most famous. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were sisters and a brother, and Jesus especially loved them. In the very beginning of the account, the message that comes about Lazarus' sickness was, "Lord, the one that you love is sick." And down here in verse 36 it says, "Then the Jews said, 'See how he loved him!'" It was well known that he was very close to Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, and there was a particular friendship there, and it was a special love.

Jesus is away when Lazarus gets sick and is dead by the time Jesus gets there. Everyone is in mourning and everyone is grieving, and that's when the account begins. Let's see what we learn here under the two headings I've already mentioned: what we learn about who he is and about what Jesus came to do. His person and his work.

We learn about his person when he's with the sisters in the first part of the account, and we learn something about what he came to do in the second part when he's with Lazarus. First of all, who he is with the sisters. Now, Martha comes out and says, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." And then when Mary comes out, she says exactly the same words. "Lord, if you had been here," this is in verse 32, "my brother would not have died."

Two women in the very same situation, the same kind of grief, and they even use the same words, but Jesus' response to the two of them is radically different. One commentator I read said this is not fiction because no fiction writer would have ever imagined this kind of disjunction. It's absolutely counter-intuitive that two women grieving in the same way in the same situation saying the very same words would get two completely different responses.

With Martha, Jesus basically argues. He says, "I am the resurrection and the life. It's never too late. I'm here now." But with Mary, not only doesn't he argue, he doesn't say a thing. With Martha, in a sense, he stands against the flow of her heart. He resists her sorrow and calls her to hope. But with Mary, he just enters right into the sorrow, right into the flow of her heart. He's pulled in with her, and all he does is weep. He doesn't say a thing, just weeps. Just grieves with her.

What does this mean? It's counter-intuitive, but it's more than just something counter-intuitive. It's not just a counter-intuitive curiosity that some eyewitness remembered. I think it's a profound insight into who Jesus is. With Martha, he's claiming to be God, and with Mary, he's showing himself to be human. In other words, he's the God-man. The encounter with the women shows him to be the God-man.

With Martha, what does he say? Notice he doesn't say, "I have access to divine power and I can raise this man from the dead." He doesn't say, "I have access to divine power." He says, "I am the power that gives everything life." He says he's not just the resurrection. He says, "I'm the life. I am life. I am the source of all life." Only God is that. So with Martha, he's giving her a bracing response and he's in a sense arguing with her and standing against her and claiming to be God. But with Mary, he's showing himself to be human, to be God in the flesh.

He's showing himself to be God who is completely human because what we have here, in spite of the claim of deity, is a real man. Weak, weeping. His love for them pulls him into their devastation. And so along with the power of deity, we have got vulnerable humanity. He is a human being and therefore he feels the horror of death. If he was only deity, he would not feel the horror of death and the grief of losing love. And so there what we have is Jesus Christ, fully divine, fully human, the God-man.

At one level, this is mind-numbing. This is the doctrine of the hypostatic union, that he's fully God and fully man. What we could do if we wanted to is get out, say, Philippians 2 and parse every part of it and notice that Jesus Christ, though he was God, he emptied himself of his glory but not of his deity and assumed a human nature. We could go into all that. It is a little bit mind-numbing, but at a service of worship before the Lord's Supper, I would rather show you that even though it might numb your mind, the idea that Jesus is both fully God and fully man is exactly what your heart needs. It's exactly what it needs in two ways.

First of all, it shows him, because he's both God and man, to be the perfect wonderful counselor. He's the wonderful counselor. With Martha, he gives her a bracing response, he confronts her. With Mary, he just enters in and gives no advice at all and just supports her and just loves her and just grieves with her.

I'm a pastor, and so after all these years I've done a fair amount of counseling. All of us who do any kind of counseling, as time goes on, we come to recognize how severely limited we are, at least in the range of people that we can help. It's a kind of grief to anybody who's a counselor. There's a limited range of the people we can help.

Why? Some people need confrontation. Some people need nothing but support. Some people need what Jesus gives, the ministry of truth, which is what he gives to Martha. Sometimes people just need the ministry of tears, which is what he gives to Mary. And people need them sometimes at different times in their lives. And if you give confrontation to someone who needs support, or support to someone who needs confrontation, or if you give it to them at the time they need support and you give confrontation, or the time they need confrontation you give support, you harm them.

The problem is all of us human counselors are limited in how well we can do that. We have temperaments. We all have habitual temperaments. We tend more to truth or tend more to tears. And for various reasons, background, genetics, who knows what, there's a limited range of people that we really can help very well. But not Jesus, because he's infinitely high and infinitely low. He's deity and utterly human at once. And therefore he inhabits the entire spectrum of what people need. He always gives you exactly what you need because he's infinitely high and infinitely low and infinitely wise about how he deploys his highness and his lowness. He is the only perfect counselor. He's the only one that can give you exactly what you need when you need it if you look to him.

That's the reason why you've got a passage like this in Hebrews chapter 4. We do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Did you hear that? Tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.

There's the balance. On the one hand, he's not just a sinless God who doesn't know what it's like to go through what we have gone through, doesn't understand, has never felt the terror of life. So on the one hand, we don't just have a sinless God who hasn't experienced what we've experienced, but on the other hand we don't have somebody who's just like us, who's no better than us. How can someone like that help us? We have the wonderful counselor because he's infinitely high and infinitely low at once. The God-man.

But here's the other thing that our heart needs. Here's the other way in which his being both deity and humanity meets the need of our heart. He's an absolute beauty. Saint Augustine, maybe the greatest theological mind of all time, one of the things that was so brilliant that has reverberated through Christian theology and ministry ever since is his idea that the fundamental problem of the human heart is what he would call disordered loves. That means our loves are out of order. That's our problem.

And that means that if you love anything more than God, whatever that thing is, you will crush it through your expectations and it will break your heart. And so spouses learn that if they don't love God more than they love their spouse, they won't love their spouse well. If your spouse is your main source of love and meaning and hope, your main thing in life, then on the one hand it means that you will be too angry when your spouse messes up. Way too angry. You'll crush your spouse under your expectations. On the other hand, you'll be too afraid of your spouse's anger to confront and tell the truth. You will not be able to love your spouse well unless you love God more. Our loves are out of order.

Yesterday we had a singles conference right here, and that point was made in some various ways. Afterwards I stood down here and talked to people for a good hour after. I got a lot of good questions, but an awful lot of them were along this line. What they said is, "Okay, I'm supposed to love God more than anything else. All right, how do I do that? How in the world do I just love God more than all the other things that I love?"

And then I said something like, "Well, it's a process. You can't do it on your own." "Okay, fine, it's a process, but what is the process? Thank you very much, pastor, but tell me what do I do?" I'm not really sure I can remember what I said yesterday. I hope it was helpful to you if you're here, but as I was preparing for this today I realized, what will draw your heart out toward God? God is an abstraction, but Jesus Christ, especially Jesus Christ the God-man, is not.

Jonathan Edwards years ago preached and then wrote, published a sermon called "The Excellency of Jesus Christ." And it's based on the place in Revelation where it says that Jesus Christ is both a lion and a lamb. He is the lion who is a lamb, he's a lamb who is a lion. And his thesis is that Jesus Christ, because he's both God and man, combines diverse and usually opposite excellencies and glories in one person and therefore makes him of surpassing beauty.

It's because he's both. It's because he combines the highness and the lowness together and all the attributes that go with it that make him not an abstraction. God to some degree is an abstraction, but Jesus Christ is not, as you see him moving through the pages of the New Testament. Here's the way a couple of writers, I'm putting them together for you, put it like this. Despite his high claims, he is never pompous, and you never see him standing on his own dignity. He is tenderness without weakness, strength without harshness, humility without the slightest lack of confidence, unhesitating authority with a complete lack of self-absorption, unbending convictions without the slightest lack of approachability, power without insensitivity, enthusiasm without fanaticism, holiness without phariseeism, passion without prejudice. Nothing he does falls short. In fact, he is always surprising you and taking your breath away because he's incomparably better than you could have imagined for yourself. These are the surprises of perfection.

And I think Edwards is absolutely right. When you see those things brought together, the highness and the lowness, the power and the humility, the greatness with no pomposity, when you see them together, it's attraction. It attracts you. You feel it, do you not? You can't look at the sun directly without it burning out your eyes, so you have to look at it through a filter and then you can see the beauty of it. You can see the flames. When you look at Jesus Christ, you're looking at the glory of God through the filter of a human nature. And only there can you see the absolute beauty. And this will draw your heart out, and this will reorder your loves. It's his highness and his lowness, his deity and his humanity together that does that.

So first of all, we see who he is, the God-man, with Mary and Martha. But then he goes to the tomb to meet Lazarus, and here we learn something about what he came to do. What did he come to do? Well, the first thing he came to do we know he came to do is he came to fight for us. Because, and there is no translation that seems to be quite willing to take the plunge here, you see in verse 33 it says he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. And then verse 38 it says, "Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb."

Now, the Greek words here are words that generally mean angry. In fact, one of the words means, literally, to bellow like an animal. To roar like an animal. It says he's coming to the tomb angry, furious. B.B. Warfield, a rather austere older theologian who was at Princeton in the late 1800s and early 1900s, he wrote this about this text. He says, "Jesus advances to the tomb, not weak and sniveling, but as a champion preparing for conflict. John uncovers the heart of Jesus as he wins our salvation, not in cold unconcern, but with fiery wrath against our enemy."

Now, what's interesting is he's angry, and you ought to notice what he's not angry at. First of all, he's not angry at the family. He's not like one of Job's friends. He doesn't show up and say, "Well, I don't know why he died so young, but you must have done something bad." So he's not angry at the family. But here's what's interesting. He's just claimed to be deity. He doesn't just say, "I have the power to raise this man from the dead." "I am the source of all life. I am the power that gives everything life." He's just claimed to be God. But he's not mad at himself.

Here's suffering and evil and he's not mad at God. Why not? We talked about this last week, so we can't go into it again. He's not acting as if the human race doesn't deserve the world we have. Because when the human race turned away from the one who created us and the one who sustains us every second to say, "We're going to be our own masters, our own saviors, our own Lords," the world stopped working the way it should. Genesis 3, Romans 8, they tell us about this. The world doesn't work. Suffering, evil, death, disease, all the things that were not originally part of God's design are now here. So Jesus is not mad at them, and he's also not mad actually at himself or God or acting as if this world isn't what the human race deserves. But he is mad at death, and he is mad.

I like that. He's not a stoic. This isn't Greek stoicism saying, "Well, death is inevitable, you can't let it get to you." He's not even doing the evangelical Christian kind of stoicism. "I'm just praising the Lord. It's really hard, but I'm just trusting him." He's mad. He's mad at our enemy. He's raging against the dying of the light.

But here's the problem. If it's true that evil and suffering and death is actually the death sentence of the human race, it's a sentence on how we've been living, how can Jesus Christ do anything about this sentence if we deserve it? How can he destroy death without destroying us? It's what we deserve. And the answer is, this miracle shows not only that he came to fight for us, but also that he came to die for us. Now you say, well, where does it tell you about dying for you? Well, this is the turning point in the book of John. I said this is the climactic miracle of the miraculous signs, it's the seventh one. And John chapter 1 to 11 is all about Jesus' life, but starting here, John chapter 12 to the end is all about Jesus' death.

This is the turning point. This is the hinge. As Kathy was pointing out the other night that in a favorite movie of ours, "The Greatest Story Ever Told," that kind of epic about Jesus from 1965, even the filmmakers realized that it was at the resurrection of Lazarus, it all comes together. It's sort of the turning point in the movie. And before the gates of Jerusalem, there's three guys and one says, "A man was dead but now he lives." Another says, "I was crippled but now I walk. I was blind, now I see." It all comes together here, and then they decide they have to kill him.

In fact, if you read the rest of chapter 11, you immediately see what happened. This was too visible a miracle. This was too public, this was too decisive. And so verse 53, which we didn't read, says this: "From that day on, they decided to take his life." This is the thing that sealed his doom. It was too much. He'd gone too far. His enemies said, "Now he's got to die." This was the turning point.

And do you know what that means? You know that Jesus knew what he was doing. Jesus knew that the only way to get Lazarus out of the grave was to put himself into it. And therefore Jesus also knew that the only way to stop our funeral is to cause his own. He had to go to the cross. Jesus Christ knew that the only way that he was going to save us is if the inexorable jaws of death closed upon him like a vice and he experienced all the wrath of divine justice on sin, and he took what we deserve, and unless that happened, we could not be saved.

So when he said, "Lazarus, come out," he was signing his own death warrant, and he knew it. And these folks spoke better than they knew. "Behold how he loved him." See that? They just looked at his tears and they said, "See how he loved him. Look how Jesus loved him." But you and I can look at Jesus saying, "Lazarus, come forth," and say, "Behold how he loves us." He would do this for Lazarus. He's not just doing this for Lazarus. He's doing it for us.

All right, let me just leave you with four very practical implications and applications of this remarkable account. Four things. Number one, don't be mad at Jesus for your suffering. See, a lot of you are in pain right now and it's very easy to say, "Jesus, why are you letting this happen?" But Jesus is not mad at himself. He's mad at death, and he's come to do something about it. And out of all people, Albert Camus says this. He says, "The God-man suffers with patience. Evil and death can no longer be imputed to him since he suffers and dies." The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man only because in its shadows, the divinity ostensibly abandoned its traditional privilege, lived through to the end, despair included, the agony of death. Thus is explained the 'Lama Sabachthani,' My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me, and the frightful struggle of Christ in agony.

You know what he's saying? It is hard to know why God is letting you go through the evil and suffering you're going through right now. But when you see that Christianity is the only faith in which God actually comes down and involves himself in suffering so that someday he can end all suffering and evil without ending us, what this means is, though you do not know the particular reason for your suffering, you do know what the reason for your suffering is not. It's not that he doesn't love you. And so as Albert Camus said, and the Bible and Jesus and Albert Camus all agree, it must be right. Don't blame Jesus for your suffering.

Secondly, all love is going to entail suffering though. Jesus cannot save and love Lazarus without hurting himself. And of course, now Jesus is doing the ultimate salvation, therefore he's going through the ultimate suffering, but at all levels it works like this. All real love is a kind of sacrifice. All love is a substitutionary sacrifice. All real love entails you suffering, you dying in small ways so that others can live.

I mean, you see it at all levels. So for example, let me just think about parenting for a second. Little children come into your life. Now, if you want to, here's your privacy, your comfort, and your convenience. You could just make sure that you only spend as much time with your children and only do things for them that comport with your privacy, with your convenience, and with your comfort. In other words, you could just spend as much time with your children as suits you, in which case your children will grow up to be an absolute mess. They'll grow up needy, they'll grow up in trouble, they'll be all kinds of trouble. And therefore, it's them or you. You can kiss goodbye for many years your privacy, convenience, and comfort, and they'll grow up strong. Or else you can hold on to it and they'll grow up weak. So what's it going to be? You can weaken yourself so they'll become strong, or you can stay strong so they'll become weak. But don't you realize what's going on? You have to die that they may live, essentially. Die to some things.

But it's also true. Look, you may just have somebody in your network of friends, and he or she you don't particularly like them that much, but they're kind of in there. And suddenly they go through some horrible thing, some terrible thing is happening in their life. Oh, it's awful. And you know that if you show interest, they're going to glom on to you and want to talk about things and you're going to come out feeling so drained because all you're doing is listening to them, and on the other hand they're feeling better. They're coming up because somebody finally cares and is listening. Meanwhile, you're being drained. It's them or you. You can hold on to your convenience and privacy and comfort and then let just them die in their loneliness or solitude, or you can kiss that goodbye and you could help them come together. It's them or you. There is no way to love people without suffering. There's no way. To really love them without suffering. Jesus shows it at the macro level, but it happens at the micro level. So reconcile yourself to that because look what he did for you. If he did this for you, why couldn't you just do it in little ways for others? That's the essence of the Christian life.

Number three. If he really is this powerful and great and he's really done this for you, you need to take the limits off of your allegiance to him that you have on them. Let's be honest. All of us say, "Oh, I'm living for Jesus," but all of us have got limits to just what we're willing to do. Even if he was just this great, when I became a Christian in my early years, the kind of books I read like John Stott's "Basic Christianity," they always made this point, and other speakers always made this point. They said if you have just a prophet or a sage who gives you wisdom on what you should do, that's one thing. But when you have a God, when you have someone who says, "I'm God," and then says, "I've come to die for you," you can't respond to such a person mildly. You either have to run away as fast as you can or you have to give him absolutely everything because he deserves it. He deserves it twice. He deserves it once as your creator, he owns you, but then he deserves it doubly as your redeemer because he gave up everything for you. And if he's that great, you just shouldn't be sort of dialing him up every so often when you have a problem as one of your personal assistants or a consultant when you need him. No. You take all the limits off your allegiance and you live for him utterly.

And here's the last thing. Don't let the fear of death control you. You say, well, I don't think I'm afraid of death. All right, listen. Don't say, "Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, I've never gotten here, I've never gotten there, by now I should have had the career and I'll never have the career I wanted, I've never been here, I've never seen the Alps, I'll never have a family, I'll never be married." You know what that is? That's fear of death. Because death won't trump anything for you if you're in Jesus Christ.

Jesus says, "I am the life." It's all in me. Don't say, "Oh, I'm dying now and I'm never going to see the Alps." You don't think there's mountains in God? You don't think that in him there's majesty to an infinite degree greater than the things that you see when you see majestic mountains? You don't think that in God there's family, there's love, there's love infinitely greater than any spousal love? You're going to miss out on nothing. Nothing at all. Because he is the resurrection and the life. So don't let the fear of death either overtly or covertly or in any way cow you or control you.

The George Herbert poem "A Dialogue," in which Christian and Death are having a dialogue, the last interchange goes like this. Death says, "I'm going to crush you with my arms." And the Christian says, "Spare not, do thy worst. You shall but make me better than before, thou so much worse that thou shalt be no more." And so in one sense, at the first level, that's Jesus Christ talking. He says to death, "Come on, destroy me, and you'll only be destroying yourself." There's a whole book written called "The Death of Death in the Death of Christ." When death killed Jesus Christ, it basically signed its own death warrant. But now that's also you, the Christian. If you're in Jesus Christ and you see death coming at you, you can say, "Spare not, do thy worst," meaning, the worst thing you could possibly do to me is the best thing that you could do to me. You may think you're going to unmake me, you're only going to make me. You think you're going to make me worse, you're only going to make me better. Because what Jesus Christ says is, "I'm the resurrection, I'm the life, I am rebirth, I am life, and don't be afraid, I've overcome the universe."

Let's pray. Father, keep us from being afraid of death at any level. Keep us from putting limits on our allegiance to you. Prevent us also from blaming you for our suffering. In all these ways, work in our hearts and lives through this tremendous display of what you did for us. Lord Jesus Christ, you emptied yourself of your glory and you assumed a human nature and you became the God-man, and then you went to the cross for us. And because of that, we can live life with confidence. We also have to live life in submission to you. And we pray that all these great things that could be ours if we truly appropriate by faith what you've done for us would be ours to your glory and to our joy. And we pray that you'd help us now as we do the Lord's Supper to work these things into our hearts at a new level. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

Guest (Female): Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It's our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it helps you apply the Gospel to your life and share it with others. For more helpful resources from Tim Keller, visit gospelinlife.com. There you can subscribe to the Life in the Gospel quarterly journal. When you do, you will also receive free articles, sermons, devotionals, and other great Gospel-centered resources. Again, it's all at gospelinlife.com. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X. Today's sermon was recorded in 2014. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017, while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.