Hurry Up, Lord!

John 11 (Please read this chapter first)

Most of us who read the Bible with any regularity are probably familiar with the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. I want to look at this for a few minutes, because there are a lot of things here I need to be reminded of frequently, and you probably need to be reminded of them as well. I say, “reminded of them” rather than “learn them” because things that we need to be reminded of are things we already know, but for some reason we lose sight of them. We need to be recalibrated. At least, I know I do!

There is so much packed into this chapter that I could probably write a whole book, but for now, there are a few key elements I want to focus on specifically right now.

Lazarus was sick. His sisters sent word to Jesus. “Lord, the one you love is sick”. Let me give you a little inside scoop. We don’t need to inform God of what is going on, as if He doesn’t know! God knows what we are going through even though at times our feelings and emotions fool us into thinking that He does not. Just because we “feel” a certain way, doesn’t mean that is the way things really are. Sometimes our feelings get in the way of our faith. I am not saying we should deny our feelings, and live as stoics, but we should not be enslaved to them either. God created our emotions, our feelings, but they should serve us, we should not serve them.

Now look at what Jesus says to those the sisters had sent to Him. “This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Notice, He is not speaking these words to Mary and Martha, but to the ones that they had sent to Him. The sisters did not have this inside scoop until later. Sometimes God gives the answer we are looking for to someone else before He gives it to us. We should be willing to listen. We should be teachable.

Jesus knew what was going to happen next, so He didn’t freak out and get into a rush. He stayed where He was for two more days. We are so unlike this most of the time, aren’t we? We learn of something like this, and it seems like everything inside of us is screaming “Do something!” It is hard to wait, especially when you are experiencing something as serious as this. The next time you find yourself getting into a panic, stop and ask yourself, “Do I need to stop and think this through before just going into reactionary mode?’ Believe me, I am speaking to myself right now, as well as hoping someone else reads this and benefits from it. Sometimes the darkest things we walk through in our lives (for the sisters, the untimely death of their brother) are the very things God has orchestrated to bring about His will, the Glory of His name. I know I struggle with this at times. I can know in my head that God is working all things together for good, but sometimes I just don’t like the circumstances. I just want things to be “fixed”.

Then Jesus announces to His disciples that He is going to lead them back into Judea. They reminded Jesus, as if He had forgotten, that they had just been there and the Jews had tried to stone Him. Why go back there? Sometimes God sends us right back to the place we fear, or the place we say we would never go because we have experienced something bad in that place before. I remember when I left a job I had been working for 16 years, to move on to a better job, I thought to myself when I left that I would never go back to that place. 12 years later, after the job I moved to ended, I was job hunting, and God lead me back to the same place I had left. I worked there six more years. It seemed really akward to go back, but it worked out okay for a while. Never say never!
Moses is a prime example of this. A Hebrew child, raised as an Egyptian. As soon as he got old enough, and got into some trouble for killing an Egyptian, Moses fled Egypt, only to be sent right back there later in his life to confront the Pharaoh.

Look at Jesus’ response: “Aren’t there 12 hours in a day?” Jesus answered. “If anyone walks during the day, he doesn’t stumble, because he sees the light of this world. If anyone walks during the night, he does stumble, because the light is not in him.”

This seems like an odd response at first glance. He does not appear to be answering their immediate question. Basically, I believe He is saying this: We don’t have to fear when God is with us. Jesus is the light of the world. If they walk back to Judea with Jesus, they are walking back into a place that they feared. But, they are walking back with God at their sides. That makes all the difference! God does not empower us to avoid difficult circumstances. He walks with us into them and through them.

The thing we see next is that Jesus intentionally stayed away for the two days in order to give Lazarus time to die. He intended for him to die, rather than rushing to him to heal him because He had a bigger objective in mind. He would demonstrate to the world that He has the power of life and death. This can only be attributed to God. This is one of the many instances where Jesus demonstrates that He is, in fact, God, Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, come in the flesh. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but that is the conclusion we are supposed to come to. Have you noticed that is the way God usually speaks to us? He doesn’t hit us over the head with the answer. He does not give us a fill in the blank sheet, and then give us the answers. He demonstrates something to us, and then He leaves it up to us to come to the conclusion. That is because when we come to the conclusion, we own it. I have learned from raising children that the best way to teach them something important is not to preach it to them. If you say, “You should do this” or “You shouldn’t do that”, most of the time they do the opposite. But if you influence them in a subtle way, and make them come to the conclusion themselves, it is usually much more effective, and it accomplishes the purpose you wanted it to. God calls us to love Him with our heart, soul, mind and strength. When we come to the conclusion, based on what God has demonstrated to us, we are loving Him with our minds. A good story always leaves you with some unanswered questions. It is supposed to. It makes you think. It makes you own the conclusions you come to without providing easy, pat answers. It makes you struggle mentally, and in that struggle, you grow.

When Jesus and His disciples finally got to where Mary, Martha and Lazarus were, Lazarus had already been dead for four days. So, Jesus’ waiting, upon initially hearing of Lazarus’s illness, and then the trip back took what must have seemed to Mary and Martha like an eternity. At the least, it would have been a four-day wait, if Lazarus had died immediately after word was brought to Jesus, but it was probably a longer period of time.

As soon as Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet Him. But Mary remained seated in the house. Then Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Yet even now I know that whatever You ask from God, God will give You.”

We might say it something like this: “God, if You had been with me I would not have this cancer. God, if You had been here, I would not have lost my job. God, if You had been here, I would not be in divorce court today”. Well, you get the picture. Those kinds of statements are an accusation against God’s goodness, and we are all tempted to make them at times. I have found myself at times uttering the words, “God, why is this taking so long?”

Think about this with me for a moment. When something bad happens in our lives, what is the first thing we want? We want the problem fixed! We are all like this. I know I am. Martha’s brother was sick. She wanted him cured. That is normal. She wanted the problem solved. When you lose a job, what is the first thing you think? I need to find a job! There are bills to pay. Without money coming in, the bills do not get paid, and we get into trouble fast! When you get really sick or have some complicated health problem, do you just think “Well, this is nice. Let’s just wait and see what God is going to do.” Probably not. You want to get well, fast. You want things to get back to normal. But, I have lived long enough to see that, usually when things get shaken up radically, God is up to something. There is a bigger picture that I am usually not seeing at the time because I get too wrapped up in wanting to end the immediate crisis.

“Your brother will rise again,” Jesus told her. Martha said, “I know that 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, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die-ever. Do you believe this?” “Yes, Lord,” she told Him, “I believe You are the Messiah, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to believe something in the purely theoretical, abstract sense when the thing is not actually affecting your life? When it is not in your face? “I love the human race” (theoretical, abstract). “That smelly homeless man (who, by the way is a member of the aforementioned human race) is ruining our lunch hanging around and asking for a handout!” (In your face). Martha believed in the resurrection in the theoretical sense. At some abstract, undefinable point in the future, it will happen. Then Jesus, if you will pardon the expression, gets in her face. “The resurrection is standing right in front of you.” One of the most ironic things about the New Testament message is that the Hebrew people (the Jews) had longingly awaited their Messiah, and then when He came, and was right there in front of them, they did not even recognize or acknowledge Him. They didn’t get it. It is easy for us to look back at them with contempt, their inability to perceive what seemed obvious, but if we were in their place, we would probably have done the same thing. Many times we cannot see what is right in front of us. Take a book when you are reading it, and then put it about a half of an inch from your face. You can’t read it! It is too close! We already have the explanation of what all this meant. The answers have been given to us. They, on the other hand, were living through it. They had not been given the answers ahead of time. How easy it is for us to look at others with contempt and think, “Why don’t they get it?” Let’s not be too hasty in condemning the dull-witted Jews.

The next thing we see is a little comical. A bit of sisterly manipulation on the part of Martha. “The Teacher is here, and He is calling for you” Martha tells Mary. We have not read anywhere up to this point that Jesus called for Mary. Maybe He did, maybe He didn’t. If He did, it is not recorded. Martha had already confronted Jesus with a bit of an accusation, and it is probably bothering her that her sister is not acting the same way. We have already seen this behavior demonstrated in Luke 10: 38-42. Jesus had come to the home of Martha and Mary. Martha was scurrying about, while Mary sat at Jesus’ feet. Here also, Martha brings a bit of an accusation against Jesus, and basically accuses her sister of being lazy, so her manipulative words to her sister here are not surprising. Well, it worked, because after hearing that, Mary came to Jesus with the same words, “If You had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Next, we see one of the few recorded instances of Jesus getting angry. One of the most quoted and shortest verses in the Bible is “Jesus wept”, but before He wept He got angry. Anger is an emotion. Does it surprise you to learn that God experiences emotions? God is not some neutral power force that controls the universe, He is a person! Not a person in the sense that we are, constrained by space and time, but in essence, a person, with feelings, just as we are. It is not a sin to experience anger. Anger is an emotion over which we have no control. We have not come equipped with an anti-anger button in our minds that we can just flip on and off like a light switch. It is, however a sin to act in anger the wrong way. It is a sin to be controlled by anger to the point that it makes you do wrong things. What made Jesus angry? Was it Mary’s giving into her sister’s manipulation and bringing an accusation against Him? Was it the pretention and hypocrisy of the Jews who followed Mary around acting if they cared with their demonstrations of grief? Was it their lack of faith after they had witnessed Jesus already performing many miracles? I suspect it was a combination of all these things.

It seems that Jesus is getting a little fed up with them at this point. He goes to the tomb and tells them to remove the stone. Here comes Martha again, chiming in to correct Him. How many of us just want to tell her to “Shut up”? “Lord, he already stinks. It’s been four days.” To which Jesus replied, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” Then Jesus gives the command, and the dead man is raised back to life!

Think about this for a minute. What is the one thing that the natural man dreads and fears more than anything? Death! It doesn’t get any worse, in our human way of thinking. Death is the end. Or so we think. People will endure horrific things in the effort to survive. If you are still alive, or so we think, there is still hope. If you are dead, it is over.

So, the next time you are experiencing something in your life that seems unbearable, come back to this chapter in John. Reread it. Chew on it. Let its rich truths sink in. Come back to it again and again. When everything in your human nature is screaming out, “God, why is this taking so long?”, let it remind you that is the way God works most of the time. I could probably give literally hundreds of Scriptures to demonstrate this point. God makes us wait for His time. Apart from perfection is love, the one character trait that God desires to burn into us is patients. And often, it is the hardest things to learn, because the World’s System that we live in does NOT operate that way.

Let this chapter in Scripture remind you that, no matter how bad things “seem”, nothing is beyond God’s redemption, not even that dreaded enemy, death. Let this chapter in Scripture remind you that when you feel like bringing an accusation against God, that He does not care, or He is not involved, that your feelings are wrong!

Come back to it, again and again. My life on this earth is not over, so I know that I will be coming back to it. I need it, and I will never stop needing it. Lord, give me patience, and give it to me right now! Hurry up, I need it bad!