Glory from the Grave | The Gospels | John 11:38–44
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Welcome to 10-Minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work.
I'm Jeff Parrott.
How does fear of death shape our deepest desires and fears?
The most significant areas of life seem to meet us at the intersection of our greatest desires and our greatest fears. They confront us with what we want most deeply and what we protect most dearly. At a fundamental level, the thing that all of us desire, the reality that we want most deeply, is life itself. not mere existence, but flourishing. We want that abundant life that comes from the author of life. Now, if that abundant life is our greatest foundational desire, then our greatest foundational fear is the loss of that life. And so people strive to protect themselves from the distorting reality of death. The author, Andy Crouch, describes how this fear of death impacts the entire trajectory of our lives in his book, Strong and Weak.
He writes this, "'There is something deep in the human heart that knows that the last enemy to be conquered is death.'" Death is the last enemy, not just because it takes life, but because the fear of death prevents life. The fear of loss has robbed our world of more life and more flourishing than any actual loss we could ever suffer. Now, Crouch's point is piercing here. The fear of death prevents life. It robs us. It steals the abundant, flourishing life we were made for, even before death itself arrives on our doorstep. Death uses fear to famish the life we're meant to have with God and with each other. And that's why so many people desire so deeply to keep their youth, to keep their ability, their intellect, their significance, and go to great lengths to protect themselves against the loss of those realities.
Even those of us who seem very active and very alive can be in a kind of anxious survival mode, swimming against the raging current of death's dominion. At the intersection of our desires and fears, death is a force that invades. Confronting its power makes even the most robust person feel desperate, and then exhausted, and then hopeless. Is there any good news for us in the domain of death? This is one of the questions that's pressing into our hearts and minds as we journey through John's gospel account. And it's the question that's addressed head on in our passage today in John chapter 11, verses 38 through 44. Here we are brought to the junction of our greatest desire and our greatest fear, and we discover the one who is greater than anything we could have imagined on our own.
In this discovery, we find salvation for the desperate, relief for the exhausted, and hope for the hopeless. As we approach God's word together, let's pause and ask for his grace to move through our time. Heavenly Father, we do thank you for the gift of life and breath today. And we thank you for the gift of your word. We bring before you every part of our lived experience here and now. We bring before you our joys and our sorrows, our anxiety and our excitement. our calendars and our contingencies, all of these things that are flooding our lives today, we bring them before you. We ask you to meet us in this space. Jesus, help us abide in you as we engage with your truth. Holy Spirit, we ask you to move in and through this time in John's gospel account.
As we read your living word, may it read us and restore us to new, abundant, flourishing life with you. In Jesus' name, amen. Our passage today comes in the middle of a dramatic encounter in John. A beloved friend of Jesus named Lazarus has died. The loss of his life is met with the mourning of his sisters, Mary and Martha, and the weeping of Jesus himself. The loss of Lazarus is a powerful reminder that our lives and our world are not the way they should be. The abundance of life has been stolen by that dominion of death. Verse 38 begins with Jesus approaching this tomb of Lazarus, deeply moved at the loss of life before him. Now, how does Jesus respond to the dominion of death here? Let's see in the rest of our passage, picking up in verse 39.
Jesus said, take away the stone.
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