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That's connectwithskip.com. Now, let's get started with today's message from Pastor Skip Heitzig. Jesus, again groaning in himself, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, take away the stone. Now at first, our Lord simply said, take me to where you've laid him.
Why is that? Because graveyards in those days, typically unmarked, owned by families, were outside of town. You don't have them inside of town because to be in a cemetery defiles a person.
Touching a dead person defiles a person. So cemeteries were in caves in those days where they were cut out of rock hills. And go to Jerusalem and you'll see they're everywhere. There's rocks everywhere.
There's rock hills everywhere. So Jesus first says, take me to where you've laid him. But what surprises Martha is Jesus take the stone away.
Why would that surprise Martha? Funeral's over. He's been dead four days. No embalming fluid.
That means one thing. Stank. Big time stank. Well, Martha, the sister of him who is dead said, Lord, by this time there's a stench. I love the King James I mentioned to you last week. By now he stinketh.
For it has been four days. And Jesus said to her, did I not say to you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God? I wish I could right now march you into a tomb in the Middle East so you could see it for yourself. But just imagine going up to the side of a rock hill. There is a cave, natural cave that has been further hewn out into a common area where several people could stand. And then you would look around in different places and you would notice that there is a burial place. A little shelf where you could lay a body and then another niche where you could lay a body. Typically a family tomb had about eight of these little ledges where you could put eight human bodies. Then there was a shelf where after the decomposition ran its course after about a year, you would enter the tomb again.
By that time the flesh has been dissolved and you just have a skeleton. They would collect all the bones of their loved one and put them into this little box called an ossuary. The ossuary met a stone box or a bone box. That's what an ossuary was. You would put the bones, lay it down, the skull on top, close the lid, and there's Uncle George.
And there's Aunt Freda. And you would have the family. And then now you have made room for more people to die and be buried in their place and pretty soon you can collect a whole family in there.
Very convenient. Then the tomb was sealed with a stone. It was a large two to three ton stone. Again, I wish I could show you one right by the King David Hotel. If you go out the back door, turn right by the garden and go down to the park, you'll see one of them.
So just remember that next time you're there. And you'll see one of these stones at the mouth of a tomb. They found its 2000 year old tomb. The stone was rolled into like a wheel, rolled into a little ledge that was carved into the stone and it was rolled downward. Why was it rolled downward? To keep grave robbers out and to keep animals out for obvious reasons. To move a stone out of the way took several people and it took leverage.
It took tools to be able to do it. So Jesus says, get the guys out here, take the stone away. Probably Martha was thinking, oh my goodness, he wants to view the body because he loves him so much. By the way, this is why there are open caskets. It's so, I know it seems creepy and gross to some people to actually look at a dead corpse, but the idea is that it's the last point of contact to see your departed one.
And probably Martha is thinking that's what Jesus wants. But at the same time she's repulsed because she knows it's going to stink. I don't know if you've ever smelt a decaying corpse, but if you have, you'll never forget it. When I was in radiology training in the early days at San Bernardino County Medical Center, we worked with the county coroner who would bring in corpses or parts of corpses, legs, torsos, heads, arms, and have us x-ray them to find the cause of death. Well, if you bring in a corpse or a body part that's been decaying for a couple months, the entire department radiology emergency room, the whole bottom floor, just, it's an unforgettable smell. It's horrible.
Decomposing flesh. Sorry to get into that, but I do want you to get the, you know, we read through this and we have our coffee and it's not the same. Jesus said to her, did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God. Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying.
And you know, they just held their noses and turned away. Jesus lifted his eyes and said, Father, I thank you that you have heard me. And I know that you always hear me, but because of the people who are standing by, I said this, that they may believe that you sent me. Now, when he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with grave clothes and his face was wrapped with a cloth.
Jesus said to them, loose him and let him go. Question, why did Jesus have to pray out loud and say what he said to Lazarus out loud? Did he do it first of all, so God could hear him? No, he did it so they could hear him. He wanted them to listen to what was going on because he's authenticating the relationship he has with his father.
So he prays aloud and then he cries out with a loud voice. He didn't have to. He could have whispered it.
He could have fought it in his mind. But he vocalized it loud for a few reasons. Number one, he was about to do a mighty act. And you want to use mighty speech when you're about to do a mighty act. The speech corresponds to the act. Second reason he did it.
Wizards and mediums whispered and muttered when they gave their incantations and their spells. Jesus to counteract any thought of that spoke loudly. And third, he wanted to get their attention.
What they're about to see is utterly amazing, something that they will not forget ever. So he calls him out. Now notice something in verse 43. He says, Lazarus, come forth. Why did he address him? Why did he just say come forth?
To limit the response, right? We're talking a graveyard setting. If he would have just said come forth, he would have had an army come forth. Go to the Mount of Olives and you'll understand the entire Mount of Olives is to this day a necropolis. It's a place where dead thousands upon thousands of dead are buried.
You would have more dead people than you would be the walking dead. So to limit the response, Lazarus, only Lazarus, nobody else, come forth. And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with grave clothes and his face was wrapped with a cloth. That gives you a little insight into New Testament burial practices.
Okay, you have here, aside from the resurrection, aside from the miraculous, you have a picture of salvation. We were born what the Bible says dead in trespasses and sins. So you were born dead. You were born DOA, dead on arrival.
You can't improve your condition. You know, the idiocy of saying I'm going to work hard to get saved is like a dead person saying I'm going to improve my deadness. I'm going to work really hard and get undead one day and I'm going to get myself alive. Dead people cannot improve their condition. It's a picture of salvation.
You were dead in trespasses and sins. And the Bible says he quickened you, he made you alive. It's his act. It's his grace.
It's his work that did it. Something else. What you have here is what they would call in movie jargon, a trailer. You know what a trailer is right when you go see a movie and the first 30 minutes of the movie you see will show you what's coming next month and next month and the trailer is the best part usually. A lot of times you see the trailer, I've seen the movie, don't need to see it because why pay 150 bucks to see that movie when I can see the best parts and sometimes it's even better than the movie. But it's a preview of coming attractions.
I digress. It's a preview of coming attractions. This resurrection of Lazarus was a preview of coming attractions. What Jesus did to Lazarus that day, listen carefully, he's going to do to you one day.
And I want you to hear this unmistakably. He's going to, so to speak, walk up to your grave and say come forth. When is that going to happen? At the rapture of the church. First Thessalonians chapter 4. It says the Lord will descend from heaven, listen, with a shout with the voice of the archangel and the dead in Christ will rise. That's resurrection.
Rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. What happened with Lazarus will happen to you. If you're alive, you'll be caught up instantly.
If you're dead, you will be raised in resurrected life like Lazarus on that day. You're listening to Connect with Skip Heitzig. Before we get back to Skip's teaching, starting the year with a structured Bible study can shape your spiritual journey for the months ahead and help align your life with God's truth. We want to help you do that with Pastor Skip's book, The Bible from 30,000 Feet and Companion Workbook. Journey through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, gaining a deep panoramic understanding of God's Word that helps you understand the big picture of scripture with greater clarity. These resources are our thanks for your gift of at least $50 today to help share biblical teaching with more people around the world through Connect with Skip Heitzig.
Go to connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888 and request your copies when you give at least $50 today to reach people around the world through Connect with Skip Heitzig. Let's continue with today's teaching with Pastor Skip. The Lord will descend from heaven with a shout. What will he say? What will the shout be? Don't know, but it might be come forth or it might be like Revelation chapter four, come up here or come forth up here. Remember Revelation four, there was a trumpet and suddenly John heard that voice come up here and he was in the presence of God instantaneously.
So this is a preview of coming attractions. What he did to Lazarus, he's going to do to you and to your loved ones who know Christ. That's why death never has the final word.
Jesus always has the final word and his final word is come forth. You will live again. Now people will ask, I hope they will ask, I hope that they're inquisitive enough to say, and then I got a note one time when we were teaching on this, why would the Lord want to resurrect the dead body of a Christian? See, some people get the idea that that's our body, no big deal, it dies, it perishes, then we get a whole new body. No, we don't. The body that went in the ground is the body that gets raised up. I think it's going to look dramatically different. So just relax because you don't want to be 92, 94 and 98 or 96 like those gals.
It's like, could I have died like when I'm 20 then? But that's a whole other study, which we have taught in depth. We did a whole series on the resurrection of the body for the Christian, what you will be able to do, what it will look like, etc, etc.
Done that already. But why would the Lord feel it necessary to resurrect the body? And by the way, it truly is an extreme makeover. I want you to just go home and look in the mirror and take comfort in the fact that it gets better. Not in the short term, but in the long run, it gets better. And the older we get, the more we need to remind ourselves of that. All the makeup, all the stretching, all the whatever you do to fix it up.
The extreme makeover is coming. Why would the Lord need to resurrect the Christian body? How about if I leave that for homework for you? And you can chase that down so we can get through this. Then verse 45 and verse 46, I have to say, is one of the hardest parts of the story for me to believe. Not the resurrection, but this, and I'll show you why. Then many of the Jews who had come to Mary and had seen the things Jesus did, believed in him.
But some of them went away to the Pharisees and told them the things that Jesus did. Verse 45 is placed there by John because that is his theme. The theme of John is faith, is believe. Ninety-eight times he uses the word believe in this book.
That is his theme. He's telling you this so that you would believe. He's showing you why and how people believed. So he closes his book saying many other things Jesus did in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the son of God and believing have life in his name. That's the theme of his book. So it's natural that we would find this verse, many, when they saw a dead dude get out of the ground, they believed.
The hard part for me is the word many. It should read everyone who saw the dead dude get out of the ground, all of them believed. Every stinking last one of them believed.
That would make sense to me. But it says many of them believed, which in first some did not believe and indeed the very next verse bears that out. But some of them went and tattletaled, went away to the Pharisees and they told them, you want to know what Jesus did? Listen, if this were a crusade, an evangelistic crusade, I would understand if it said and some believed and some didn't.
I get that. If this was a church service and an altar call happened, it always happens. Some believe, some don't. But a resurrection of a dead dude from the ground should say they all believed. But here's what I want you to see. This shows you the hardness of the human heart. And people say, well, if I could have a miracle, I believe.
Not necessarily. A dead dude got out of the ground. A lot of people didn't believe it. In the Old Testament, miracles happened in the wilderness, in the desert. Water came out of a rock. Mana came out of the sky.
A Red Sea opened up. A lot of people had hardened hearts and did not believe. In John chapter 6, Jesus fed the multitudes and yet after Jesus' sermon, because it was so tough to hear, it says, and many of his disciples turned away and walked no longer with him. Really? After seeing a miracle like that?
But that is the human heart. Some believe and some don't. Then verse 47, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered a council and said, what shall we do?
For this man works many signs. If we let him alone like this, everyone will believe in him. And the Romans will come and take away both our place and nation. What's wrong with this?
I'll tell you what's wrong with it. You have two groups of people that hate each other, but they agree that they hate Jesus more than any of their differences. Did you see the words in verse 47, chief priests? Chief priests belong to a group called the Sadducees.
You've heard of them, yeah? Sadducees. And then under that is the group called the Pharisees. So you have chief priests, Sadducees, and Pharisees. They're having a meeting together.
That's weird. They never met together. They hated each other. The Sadducees were the theological liberals of the day. They really weren't religious. They were political.
They wanted to appease Rome so that they could maintain their wealthy positions paid for by the Jewish nation and the Roman government. They did not believe in a resurrection. They did not believe in the supernatural world. They did not believe in life after death. They did not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, that the Bible was the Word of God. They only held too loosely the first five books of Moses, the Pentateuch.
That's the Sadducee party. The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed in miracles, believed in a resurrection, believed in the afterlife, believed in spirits and demons, believed all of the Old Testament, the Tanakh, was the inspired Word of God. And they also believed that the oral law was to be considered almost on a par with Scripture itself.
Not so the Sadducees. So they fought. One was a highly legalistic religious group.
One was very liberal and more political in nature. They didn't get along. They hated each other with a passion. But they hated Jesus more, and their hatred for Jesus was the only thing they had in common, and that was the mutual element that brought them together. So they have a little conference here. In the midst of their discussion comes an interesting prediction. Verse 49, and one of them, Caiaphas, he's the son-in-law of Annas. He's the high priest that year. I won't go through all the history of that.
I've done it before. Said to them, you know nothing at all. Nor do you consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and not that the whole nation should perish. Now he said this not on his own authority, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for that nation only, but also that he would gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad. Now what did Caiaphas mean by this? He was really a pragmatist. He was simply saying, look, it's better that he dies than we die.
We better curtail this. We better think of a way to kill him because he's going to cause a riot, and if he causes a riot and an insurrection, they're going to come after us and kill us. So it's better that he dies instead of us. That's what he meant by it. But John says he did not know, he was unwitting to the fact that he was actually prophesying that year that God used his position as the high priest to give one of the clearest predictions of vicarious or substitutionary atonement.
One death is sufficient for all. That's what John means by this. Now he didn't know he was speaking truth, but God used him to speak truth, which is interesting to me because some people say, I can't believe that, you know, God could speak through anybody except a premillennial, dispensational, theological this or that, everybody else is wrong. Listen, listen, God can speak through a donkey. Balaam was riding a donkey and the donkey spoke because he wouldn't listen to God, so God said he'll listen to a donkey talking. So I just want you to hear that because God in heaven is able to give truth, it always has to be compared with scripture, but he's able to give truth through a number of sources. I've been to university, I've been to colleges, there have been some fabulous donkeys that have given me truth. Much of what they say is wrong, but there'll be that nugget of it's like, yeah, that was awesome, that was true. So just because they don't believe everything you believe, God can still use them to speak truth.
So here's Caiaphas, unbeliever, unregenerate, and he speaks God's word as being in the position of a high priest that you're a clear declaration of substitutionary atonement. Thanks for listening to Connect with Skip Heitzig. We hope you've been strengthened in your walk with Jesus by today's program.
Before we let you go, we want to remind you about this month's resources that will help you gain a deeper understanding of the sweeping story of scripture. Pastor Skip's book, The Bible from 30,000 Feet, and The Companion Workbook are our thanks for your support of Connect with Skip Heitzig today. Request your copies when you give $50 or more. Call 800-922-1888.
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