I am the resurrection and the life

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.” … “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, 15 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.” (John 11:1-26)

Don: Unique truths—defining attributes—about God are to be found in the “I Am” statements of Jesus. His “I am the resurrection and the life” statement in the above passage from John is a statement that God can reverse deterioration and death, and make all things new. But it is more than that.

Mankind lives in a world of cause and effect—a linear world in which if x happens, y can be predicted. Newton’s third law of motion is a prime example of cause/effect: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” It explains why we expect that bad things can happen to good people and vice versa. But “I am the resurrection and the life” is not a statement about predictability, linearity, cause and effect. To us, life is linear and birth and death mark the ends of the line. To us, death is finite, limiting, terminal, and each death has a cause. But to God, death is at most a short nap. That God is not concerned with cause and effect is good news for us. It allows for grace—an effect independent of cause. God is not predictable. He is not bound by Newtonian physics nor by the laws of thermodynamics.

God achieves this reversal with the sound of his voice:

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 11:43-44)

The same reversal and resurrection is accomplished at the end of the age with a shout from God. It is again the voice of resurrection and restoration:

For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. (1 Thessalonians 4:16)

Lazarus’ sisters Martha and Mary lived in a linear world. To them, the timing of Jesus’ visit was critical: Had Jesus come sooner, they reasoned, Lazarus would not have died. But Jesus showed that through faith, God has the power to restore and reconcile at any time.

The dilemma we face is that we seek to define God but as Isaiah (55) pointed out we cannot hope to do so. We want the voice of God to be predictable. We want to claim we understand it. We want to be able to interpret it. But we seem devoted solely to the content of what we take to be God’s voice, and as we have discussed, content is often very misleading about God’s meaning.

The entirety of the Book of Job is given up to dispelling the notion that God is a God of cause and effect. The three Hebrew worthies also demonstrate it as they are about to be thrown into the furnace, in (non) answer to the king’s demand that they bow before him:

Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego replied to the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to give you an answer concerning this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.” (Daniel 3:16-18)

They understood that God was not a God of cause and effect (but even if he were, they said, they still would not bow down.) The king is stunned:

He said, “Look! I see four men loosed and walking about in the midst of the fire without harm, and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods!” (Daniel 3:25)

In our world, fire (cause) consumes (effect), But in God’s world, fire does not necessarily consume, as it did not consume these three worthies, or the Burning Bush of Moses.

That the resurrection and restoration is not just physical is also shown in the story of the Prodigal Son:

But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.’ And they began to celebrate. (Luke 15:22-24)

Jesus talked to Nicodemus about the ultimate in non-linear events: Being born again. In our world, once born, there are no second chances. But not in God’s world:

Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:5-8)

God’s ways are not our ways. His is the way of grace. love, restoration, and resurrection.

Joyce: Does the fact that good and bad things happen randomly to people mean that we are not as central to God’s plan as we think? Ecclesiastes would seem so to suggest:

For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust. Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?  (Ecclesiastes 3:19-21)

Robin: I am encouraged to think that since God created animals with the same breath as us that they and we alike will return to him.

Alice: It’s impossible for us to know everything. We might all aspire to Solomon’s wisdom, because he was human; but we cannot aspire to God’s.

Robin: Before raising Lazarus and saying “I am the resurrection and the life” Jesus thanked the Father for giving him such power. Had he not had the power to ask for it, he would not have been able to raise Lazarus.

Charles: Throughout scripture runs the theme of separation from God as the result of our sin. There are essentially three major divisions: First, the Old Testament—focusing on The Law given to God’s chosen people Israel—the Old Covenant; second, the Gospels and the New Covenant of Jesus; and third, the Epistles that deal with The Church and the Holy Spirit. Violation of the will of God in the garden set the context for the Old Covenant. Disobedience to the will of God was a free choice made by man resulting in separation from God and setting the stage for the Old Covenant. Under the Old Covenant, the way to salvation and reconciliation with God was obedience to His will as revealed in through the Word (The Law). Obedience to the Law (Word) was a free choice. Time would reveal that man was not capable of obedience to the Law providing context for a New Covenant in linear time. Under the New Covenant, God pays the price for justification of sinful man through the sacrifice of his only son in expiation for sin. Subsequently, the Way to reconciliation and salvation requires only faith in Jesus and obedience to the Word become flesh. One way to look at the physical death of Lazarus and subsequent resurrection through Jesus could be as a metaphor for our own spiritual death through sin. It is important that Lazarus was “a friend” of Jesus, a believer. The resurrection of Lazarus, a man and by nature a sinner, can be seen as a metaphor for our own spiritual resurrection/reconciliation through faith in Jesus despite our sinful nature.

Robin: Is there not a re-stating of Jesus as the Word, always existing with God, and the Word was the Creator, so this is another example that what was resurrected was life given back to a dead body? Jesus also resurrects the breath or the spirit. So is the Creator also the Re-creator?

Don: Is it helpful to see God as not a God of cause and effect? Is it easy to understand? Is it important to understand? Is it even true? That God is not linear seems to be one of the major messages of the story of Lazarus. Martha said: “If you had come sooner, my brother need not have died”, but Jesus could suspend the linearity of time. This might be an important lesson he was trying to teach?

Alice: Only through faith can we accept a non-linear God.

Robin: Would he even be God, if he had to be bound by Newtonian law?

Alice: There has to be a distinction between the worldly and the spiritual.

Charles: In many ways, the ability to accept or embrace God’s transcendent, eternal non-linearity is where Hope lies. The human existential crisis (“What’s it all about?” “Why am I here?” “Why do bad things happen to good people and vice versa?” etc.) stems from our finiteness and linearity and physical decay. The infinite, eternal non-linearity of God—the belief that for him, nothing is impossible—provides hope of a suspension of that crisis, hope of a purpose, hope of life after death.

Jay: We want an omniscient, omnipotent God with the attributes Charles has described and rightly identifies as our source of hope. But this God inhabits a different dimension to us. Our road to God is a linear way built according to human dimensions, but that cannot be the way to a God who is everywhere. God has told us we can’t possibly understand him, so how can we possibly know how build a path to him? How can we say there is a step-by-step process that will lead us to him? It doesn’t make sense to say so, yet we do—it’s how we operate.

Charles: Jesus said the path is faith, belief. Does that not require suspension of our natural human disbelief?

Don: Does that mean that our ways of reasoned analysis and instruction and following are faulty?

Jeff: The fact of the matter is that life is indeed linear and does follow a cause/effect relationship. We can say that our physical laws were created by God. Physical laws and their effects are what we can observe, hence they define our reality. Yet somehow he expects us to act in some ways outside of our reality. This is the crux of the argument between atheism and belief in God. The bible may talk of miracles but they are not what we observe in our daily lives.

Jay: It boils down to faith—a level of abstraction at which we find it hard to function.

Jeff: You would think that if we were expected to function at that level we would have been equipped with the necessary faculties, but that does not seem to be typically the case.

Jay: Jesus did not establish a concrete path. The path such as it was centered upon how one treats others. That’s a path that we do have the faculties to follow. We try to make it much more than that, through our interpretation of scripture.

Jeff: It seems an unfair game!

Charles: It’s unfair by Man’s choice, not by God’s. The history of salvation is not about Man finding the way back to God: It’s the other way around. I don’t see the struggle to apply reason to be a fruitless exercise—I see it as the way to find and build faith. Those who struggle the longest and the hardest seem to end up with the strongest faith. There is a reality about the gospel that needs to be preached. It’s hard to witness without speaking the language of the people to whom one is trying to witness. The struggle to understand and bring understanding must be part of God’s plan. I don’t see it being incompatible with a non-linear God.

David: The problem is that as it is presented to us, Christianity is based on content, and the content is scripture—which consists of old and new covenants as Charles described. Did the new covenant invalidate the old? Is the Old Testament wrong and the New Testament right? The Old Testament is legal and linear, cause/effect, etc., whereas the New Testament—at least, the life and teaching of Jesus—is not. If that is so, why did the early Christian church retain the Old Testament? Why didn’t they abandon it, as (in my view) Jesus really intended?

I am not sure I agree that we are unequipped to work with a non-linear God. Daoism deals with very deep levels of abstraction and yet—or perhaps as a result—its scripture, the Dao De Jing, is tiny. You can read its 5,000 or so words in an hour. To study the 774,746-word bible is to commit to a lifetime of potentially being led down the garden path and away from a path that is inherently much simpler—and not at all beyond our ability—to follow.

Charles: In linear time, the appearance of Jesus is set off as part of the ongoing story of salvation that begins and ends in eternity. Much of the context for why God sacrificed his son to expiate our sin is in the Old Testament. The Old Testament also reveals much about who and what God is—everything from ultimate cause (the Creator) to how God is: a stern and righteous judge (the story of Nineveh and the destruction of Assyria) and not just a Being of grace and mercy. Without that context, it would be hard to fully appreciate to understand and appreciate Jesus and his message. I don’t think we can have one without the other, or that the one can be as effective without the others.

David: We have wandered some distance from the topic of the “I am the resurrection and the life” statement. To me, that statement can only be taken in the context of Jesus’ life and teaching, not in anything external and not in the anything I read in the Old Testament. It stands alone. (I have argued before that the bible could be re-written to be much shorter and more to the point!)

Jeff: Nineveh and Jonah are very linear stories and very much cause/effect. But when God sets rules for us that he himself does not play by, it is hard to reconcile.

Don: Are we to conclude that the old covenant is linear, cause/effect, and finite, while the new covenant is non-linear, non-Newtonian, and infinite?

Jay: I am OK with that, but either way, one can find a way to God. Some people need a structured, predictable path, and still live a life devoted to caring for their fellow man. To me, there is an infinity of ways to God, not just one.

Charles: Leaving out the old covenant, the Old Testament, leaves out the issue of the forgiveness of sin, of righteousness, of justification, of the fact that God abhors sin and is ultimately righteous, therefore there is a price to be paid for sin. The entire Old Testament, in both prophecy and structure, sets up the need for God to intervene through grace and the sacrifice of his son to offer expiation, since there is nothing that Man can do to expiate them. The expiation of sin through the death of Jesus and the rebirth through the resurrection are key to the Christian world view, but they need the context, the revelations, of the Old Testament. Jesus may have simplified the law (bringing the Ten Commandments down fundamentally to just two) and may have cast doubts upon some of our stricter human interpretations of the old law, but he did not disavow the Old Testament entirely.

Alice: Paul said we need a tutor. We need to study.

David: To me, that’s the problem: I cannot see that there is any way to prepare for the love and grace of a God whose ways are not our ways. All we can do is believe God is loving and gracious. Studying the Old Testament is not conducive to such belief, at least, not in my case. As I understand Jesus’ tutoring, his lesson is that we cannot prepare for a God who is going to be there for us, no matter what.

Alice: We are already beneficiaries of God’s love and grace. That’s not what we are studying for. We are studying to be led to Christ. The bible says that the end of the law is Christ.

Robin: The Commandments were given to explain sin to us. The people of Israel made the law their God, and added hundreds of laws to the Ten. It became their golden calf.

Jay: Our discussion has treated the Testaments as linear: The Old had to happen before the New. Yet God does not fit this linear mold.

Jeff: That’s the question. We are living in a linear hiatus between the non-linear pre-Creation and the non-linear post-Armageddon.

Charles: For believers, it’s important that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Jesus said he was the Word. If we reject the Old Testament, do we not then reject the New, and do we not reject Jesus himself? If one believes that scripture was divinely inspired, and that Jesus was the Word of both the Old and the New Testaments, then one must also believe that there is no aspect of scripture that can be negated.

It would be nice to think we could fulfill heaven on earth by just reading and embracing and acting upon the Beatitudes, but that’s just not realistic. We need more context.

Robin: Maybe we had to have the linear contrast of the limitations of being linear in our thinking. Maybe that’s why we had to have the Old Testament first, before God could take us to the next level and say, in the New Testament, “Now, I am going to explain to you what was not explained in the Old.” God was talking to linear human beings, so he first had to make a connection with them in terms of things they could understand before he could move them on to things beyond that.

David: And that left the Jews stuck in the Old Testament!

Jeff: I repeat that life seems unfair and the deck is stacked against us. We were dealt a linear hand in a game where God introduces non-linear rules to suit himself.

David: Non-linearity exists in the spiritual realm, not the physical realm, and we are all spiritual as well as physical beings. We take cognitive dissonance in our stride.

Jeff: The problem is that the non-linear parameters are not defined, not codified. As a result, what we experience on that level is different between people and there’s no way to explain the difference.

David: But we’ve just agreed that it should not be linear and should not be codified.

Jeff: Then that takes us to the crux of Christianity!

Robin: Do we want a God who is bound by the laws of this planet?

Jeff: We would say No, but we would mean Yes! We don’t function as well with unpredictability as with predictability.

Charles: How much of that worldview comes form one’s education and experience, which has changed a lot in the last couple of centuries. Even Newtonian science is outdated.

Jeff: We function in a cause/effect environment and Newtonian law still operates at the practical, mundane level. We practice medicine by it. We live our lives by it.

David: Thank God there is a non-Newtonian spirit inside us, otherwise we would all be Newtonian clockwork robots!

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