Don: Jesus’ statement: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die” (John 11) is the great reversal, the promise of restoration, the break in the chain of cause and effect, the demonstration of God’s overwhelming grace, and the mitigation of consequences.
Jeff pointed out that the story of the cosmos takes place in three phases: 1. Before the Fall, when Man was in harmony with himself and with God; 2. After the Fall, when Man is out of harmony with himself and with God; and 3. The phase of the “earth made new” following the Restoration. Jeff suggested we view these as phases of supernatural law (phases 1 and 3) and natural law (phase 2). The contrast between the natural law of cause and effect and the supernatural law where grace abounds is seen in the story of Lazarus, the source of the “I am the resurrection” statement we just quoted. It is worth reading again:
Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. It was the Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. So the sisters sent word to Him, saying, “Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick.” But when Jesus heard this, He said, “This sickness is not to end in death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it.” Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when He heard that he was sick, He then stayed two days longer in the place where He was. Then after this He said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to Him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone You, and are You going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.” This He said, and after that He said to them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I go, so that I may awaken him out of sleep.” The disciples then said to Him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.” Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that He was speaking of literal sleep. So Jesus then said to them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, so that you may believe; but let us go to him.” Therefore Thomas, who is called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, so that we may die with Him.”
So when Jesus came, He found that he had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off; and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary, to console them concerning their brother. Martha therefore, when she heard that Jesus was coming, went to meet Him, but Mary stayed at the house. Martha then said to Jesus, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. Even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give You.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha *said to Him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?” She *said to Him, “Yes, Lord; I have believed that You are the Christ, the Son of God, even He who comes into the world.”
When she had said this, she went away and called Mary her sister, saying secretly, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she *got up quickly and was coming to Him.
Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha met Him. 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. Therefore, when Mary came where Jesus was, she saw Him, and fell at His feet, saying to Him, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.” 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 said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to Him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews were saying, “See how He loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man also from dying?”
So Jesus, again being deeply moved within, came to the tomb. Now it was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus *said, “Remove the stone.” Martha, the sister of the deceased, said to Him, “Lord, by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days.” Jesus *said to her, “Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised His eyes, and said, “Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I knew that You always hear Me; but because of the people standing around I said it, so that they may believe that You sent Me.” When He had said these things, He cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth.” The man who had died came forth, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus *said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.” (John 11:4-44)
In a world of cause and effect, illness has a timeline. If the cause of the sickness is not altered, the risk is that death will be the effect. Yet Jesus chose to delay visiting the sick Lazarus, not out of indifference to Lazarus’ plight but in order to demonstrate that God is not bound by time. God does not exist in a linear world. He is not subject to natural laws of cause and effect. The Jews believe that three days after death, the spirit leaves the body and the person is no more. By the time Jesus arrived, Lazarus had been dead four days, so was no longer even a dead person.
Jesus addressed three groups of students through the Lazarus story: The disciples, Mary and Martha, and the Jewish onlookers. All of them failed to see that God is not bound by time or cause and effect. Their conviction that Lazarus was dead, and not merely asleep, put them squarely in the natural law rather than in a world of supernatural law where death is no more intimidating than taking a nap. Mary and Martha’s conviction that their brother died because Jesus delayed his visit clearly put them in the natural world of cause and effect.
The natural world of cause and effect started at the moment of the Fall, when God told Adam and Eve of the consequences of their disobedience to his will:
The Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life; And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.” To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.”
Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’;
Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:14-19)
The transition from supernatural to natural law occurred at the moment of the Fall. Fallen Man had no choice but to live in a world of natural law. Could it be, then, that natural law was ordained to enable Man to live apart from God? The place where God lives is a place where anything goes. Natural law is suspended in the presence of God. But living apart from God creates a need for predictability, for anticipation of consequences from any given cause, a realization of expectations.
The Jewish onlookers in the Lazarus story are just as bound by time and cause and effect as the disciples and Mary and Martha. If Jesus could restore sight to the blind—a miracle of which they knew—then why could he not save Lazarus, they wanted to know.
The unspoken request of the sisters in verse 3: “Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick” is really a prayer, much like ones we pray, for intervention by God to prevent loss and pain and sorrow and dis-ease and death. Like them we too function in a time-bound world and would like God to do so too and to behave accordingly—that is, in a timebound way of cause and effect. But we know well enough from Isaiah 55 that God’s ways are not our way. Jesus delayed visiting Lazarus for two days just so as to highlight this lesson.
And when Jesus finally made the trip, the questions began, as is God’s way. That God asks questions is the bedrock of scripture. The Bible is not a book of answers, but of questions. The first questions arose at the Fall, when God had to ask Adam “Where are you?” and, when Adam replied he was hiding his nakedness, God asked: “Who told you that you were naked?” We read of God asking Abraham whether anything is too hard for the Lord, and asking Moses what he has in his hand, and asking Elijah “What are you doing here?” after Elijah ran from Queen Jezebel. God poured a torrent of questions on Job, and all through scripture we read of God’s question after question. Jesus himself asked more than 180 question, and only answered eight of them.
If God is asking a question, we really ought to pay attention to it. Answers to questions are usually based on matters of fact, on existing information. But information is constrained by the context of culture and knowledge and period in history in which it is generated. In contrast, God’s questions are timeless and immutable. His questions at the tomb of Lazarus suggest that what we believe about God is fundamental to who we think God is. To see and understand God’s grace requires us to believe that if we put the circumstances of our own life into God’s hands—where time and causality and natural law have no power—then we are doing what God wants. The question: “Where have you laid [Lazarus]?” (the trite factual answer to which Jesus knew perfectly well) is in reality a deeply existential question meaning “What have you done with the hopelessness of your life? Where have you put your failures, your lost causes; the stinking, rotten corpses of the natural world of your existence?” Jesus wants us not just to confront them but to take him to them. And to do that, we must first roll away the stone that blocks the way; we must be willing to expose our rottenness and hopelessness and despair so that God can effect the great reversal: The Resurrection and Life.
When we expose our pain, our dead hopes, the corpse of our departed dreams, we invite God to perform his restorative miracle. Jesus seeks to restore our lives but it is up to us to exhume and expose that which is destroying our joy and peace. He insists that we reveal the sore so that he can heal it. And in verse 44, when he told them to unbind Lazarus and let him go, he was saying that when Jesus unbinds us we must let go of everything that previously held us captive. God does not want us walking around with the fetters of death. We must be released from the grave cloths of unbelief, fear, and loss. And we must be released from the natural law which keeps us apart from God.
Jeff: It seems that somehow, during our current time and condition, more is asked of us than is possible under natural law. Our rules and the condition that we’re in are governed by natural law, yet we are expected somehow to rise above it, to think beyond it and function as if we were living in either our pre-Fall or our post-Resurrection phase. To me, that seems to me an impossibility for humans to do.
David: I find strong parallels between the natural vs. supernatural worlds and Newtonian vs. quantum physics. We now know that Newtonian physics, which only came to being some time after the Big Bang, rests on a base of quantum physics which, like God, are not time bound (and may even be time reversible), may be eternal (existing perhaps within the singularity that preceded the Big Bang) and which, as Heisenberg concluded, are inherently unpredictable.
We cannot exist as mortal human beings in the purely quantum world of the singularity, which is equivalent to the pre-Fall phase one and the post-Resurrection phase 3 worlds. Our mortality depends upon an environment governed at a gross level by Newtonian physics. The universe as we know it could not exist without Newtonian mechanics. It seems it would be better if Newton and his physics had never been born. Then, he would presumably be doing anything but paying attention to the gravity of forbidden apples.
Jeff: The problem is that there is no way for us to think and act on the supernatural level, in a non-natural-law state we are incapable of achieving. We hold up eventual participation in that state as a goal, but the way there cannot be through the natural law. You may say the way is through faith, but the problem with faith as a way is that there is nothing to define it, to map it. Faith is different for each individual. We try to define it, but faith is a non-natural-law condition.
Jay: We always want to measure and quantify things, and faith—like love—is not measurable, not quantifiable. Natural law can only be applied to things we can quantify. We can only determine that something exists if we can measure it. That becomes the issue with things like faith and grace and love. Yet everyone seems to accept that there is such a thing as love—that love exists—even though we can’t measure it or pinpoint its physical source. Perhaps these immeasurable but acknowledged entities are a conduit between the natural and the supernatural realms.
Jeff: There are indeed areas where we can claim to have some sort of supernatural experience so can grasp supernatural phenomena, but we cannot break that down. Nevertheless, we tend to “humanize” these phenomena so that we can break them down into visible, tangible parameters which we then proceed to measure. We say it is desirable to find a mate, therefore it is desirable to be in a relationship which we would describe as a “love” relationship. But can that humanized “love” adequately describe supernatural Love? We define and measure “faith” through parameters set by religion.
Jay: It is a trap. Concepts that are supernatural in origin cannot be defined, but we cannot help but try to define them. God tells us that we cannot hope to fully understand them, but we persist anyway. To define is to exclude, and the kingdom of the God of all mankind is all-inclusive, so its parts cannot be defined without introducing exclusivity into the kingdom—an impossibility.
Jeff: But according to our narrative it does exclude. Man was excluded from the Garden after the Fall, and entry into the new world to come is absolutely an exclusionary event. Perhaps our human understanding of those events is faulty, yet the narrative seems clear enough from a simple, straightforward reading of the Bible. Scripture says, here and there, that there’s no way we can understand, but by and large the Bible is a fairly definitive narrative.
Robin: Hebrews 11 has 40 verses that define faith and give examples of it. Verse 13 says that Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Sarah … “All … died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.” Jesus taught that faith as tiny as a mustard seed had the power to move mountains. Every individual’s mustard plant is not the same size, so it is wonderful that God takes our individual shortcomings into account. He only wants to see that we do what we can do to encourage our faith to grow.
When Jesus heard that Lazarus was sick, he said “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God that the son of God may be glorified through it.” Jesus was glad when Lazarus was dead and glad that he was not there to save him, because then people would believe that he was indeed the resurrection and the life. He knew that human need an extreme, convincing, example. The Pharisees knew there would be a resurrection after the physical death, but Jesus revealed, just before his death, that all of his “I am” statements were true.
In Exodus 7:2-3, God told Moses: “You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall speak to Pharaoh that he let the sons of Israel go out of his land. But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart that I may multiply My signs and My wonders in the land of Egypt.” Why did God keep hardening Pharaoh’s heart and changing his mind about letting the Israelites go? So… “that I may multiply My signs and My wonders in the land of Egypt. When Pharaoh does not listen to you, then I will lay My hand on Egypt and bring out My hosts, My people the sons of Israel, from the land of Egypt by great judgments. The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the sons of Israel from their midst.”
Both Lazarus and Pharaoh are stories designed to show the power and the glory of God. We often wonder why God lets bad things happen; perhaps this is why.
Jay: To me, the Exodus story is one of the most complex and disturbing in scripture. Several times, Pharaoh is ready to let the Israelites go but God intervenes to stop him. In the wider context of the story, we see that God even needed to slaughter all the first-born children.
Jeff: Could there be a more discriminatory lesson?
Jay: It’s very disturbing, and shows what can happen at the interface between the supernatural and natural worlds. Why put Lazarus and his family through the anguish of death if you are going to resurrect him anyway? It is hard to make sense of it.
Robin: This is where faith comes in. Can we still believe when things don’t make sense?
Jeff: How could if even be expected that we would believe in things that don’t make sense? The exemplary patriarchs of Hebrews 11 aspired to a level of faith they were told they should have. That is discriminatory: If you don’t aspire, you lose.
Robin: But then there’s the story of the thief on the cross, who had no time to do anything except ask Jesus to remember him.
Jeff: Faith did not enter into it.
Robin: He had to have faith that Jesus was Christ—he had to have that mustard seed, but it was enough.
Jay: So where does that leave us? We are back to the problem of trying to quantify things, from the great faith of the patriarchs to the mustard seed of faith of the thief. To me, the stories mean that it is not about quantity.
Jeff: That is a conclusion that may be drawn by looking at the stories as a whole, but taken individually they are quantitative and discriminatory.
Don: The faith chapter takes one beyond that. The notion that the patriarchs could see something from afar suggests that they did not have a full comprehension of what the faith journey was about; and that whatever it was that they saw was incomplete, indistinct, and immature. It was not the same as examining something up close. But more than that: If you go on to read who is exemplified in the faith chapter, you begin to see that the way we’ve quantified faith is suspect. It mentions Rahab, a harlot, who seems to have done little to deserve anything; and Gideon, an extreme doubter of God; Barak, an unseemly character; Samson, a suicide; Jacob—one of the most unseemly characters in scripture—who sacrificed his daughter; and Abraham’s wife Sarah, who had no faith that she could get pregnant at age 90 despite hearing God say she would.
It is indeed puzzling and it does seem to call into question our attempts to define and quantify faith.
Robin: They all started with a tiny seed. The crux of chapter 11 is that they started out as weak human beings with a mustard seed’s worth of faith. Through having faith in something much greater than they were, they were able to believe in this supernatural God who then worked these great examples though them.
Jeff: But it provides no path or definition. It’s just saying that they had no faith and then they had faith, so we then assume in our linear way that they must have followed some path that took them from little faith to great faith.
Robin: Faith is how we move from the linear to the nonlinear, the natural to the supernatural.
Alice: Hebrews 11 begins: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” In every example, we see the hope turn to conviction, even though they cannot see. That is faith.
Jeff: That passage tries to define a pathway from the natural to the supernatural. But it’s non-definable. The passage sounds good, but it doesn’t mean anything.
Robin: It’s another mystery. Verse 6 says “And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” So the first step of faith might be just to be able to believe that there is a God, and you build from there.
Jay: That’s right, but then faith is the belief in the existence of something that is completely unprovable quantitatively. As Alice said, it’s something you feel it, you know it.
Jeff: But the passage we just read implies that faith is something that is desirable or even necessary.
Alice: That’s why God gives it to us.
Jeff: But then there are people with less or more faith.
Robin: That’s something we have to leave to God to judge.
Jeff: But our scriptural narrative is giving us examples by which to judge, to discern.
David: Don mentioned at the beginning that in the supernatural world, “everything goes.” In the quantum world, everything has potential to “go”, to be. It is the realization of potential that results in the gross physics we can measure and quantify. Whose faith was it that brought about the realization of the physical world from a quantum state?
At the end of the day, science too has to have faith that its method will result in the revelation of truth. Without that faith, there would be no point in pursuing science. In religion, the faith is in ultimate goodness. Calling it “God” and then anthropomorphizing, personalizing, humanizing it leads to all sorts of problems. Goodness is not personal. It’s a force, a power, that we cannot define but we all see or feel in our hearts. To me, it is much easier to have faith in the concept of Goodness than in the concept of an anthropomorphized God. It’s much simpler to think of God as the Way, the Dao. I believe we all have Goodness within us and I believe we all know (more or less grudgingly) that we ought to realize its potential.
Don: We’ll continue to explore the interface between the natural and the supernatural.
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