God's Sovereignty Over Death

Transcript

Well, family, as Josh mentioned in our pastoral prayer, our guest preacher this morning is my good friend and brother and pastor, Sean DeMars. Sean is the pastor at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church in Decatur, Alabama. He was out here for the weekend teaching at the worship conference that some of you were in attendance at, and he will be preaching this morning, opening God’s Word to us. One of my encouragements for you is Sean will actually be our guest speaker at the men’s retreat, and so it just worked out perfectly that he could be in town and preach to us this morning and also get him before the men so you know what you will be expecting at the men’s retreat. So, family, would you please help me welcome Sean as he opens up God’s Word to us? Sorry about that mix-up!

All right, let’s open up our Bibles. Let’s go back to John’s Gospel this morning. I want you to know that it really is an honor and a blessing for me to be here with you all. I was supposed to be at a conference in Augusta this weekend after the worship conference. I was going from like one conference to another. But the hurricane messed that up, and so when I found out that I got to be here preaching for you guys, I was really excited. I love being here with this congregation. I love what the Lord is doing. I can’t wait for the men’s retreat. Thomas, if after this nobody signs up, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Let me pray and ask for the Lord’s help, not just for me, but for all of us. Lord Jesus, what we need right now is for your Holy Word to implant itself deep into our beings.

Death Is Normal, Not Natural

In our flesh there is no good thing, but in your Word there is the eternal life and light of the universe. Illuminate our hearts and minds, we ask, O God, in the name of Jesus Christ and by the power of his Holy Spirit. Amen. The main thing I want you to understand this morning is that although death is normal, it is not natural. Although death is normal, it is not natural. In 2012, I sat with my mom on her bed in her sad, lonely little one-bedroom apartment. And I held her hand, and I took a wet washcloth and I put it on her cracked lips and I rubbed it on her forehead. And I hugged her and I kissed her and I prayed for her as she passed away. A few moments after her passing, it was me, my wife, and a friend of my mother’s.

A few moments after her passing, in a genuine attempt to console me, the grieving son, my mother’s friend said, Death is just a part of life. It’s okay. I appreciate what this woman was trying to do. I appreciate her trying to comfort me in that moment. But I think that for her, the normalcy of death had made her feel like death is natural. And I want to push back against that. Although death is everywhere all the time, we have to be honest about that, to live is inevitably to die. To love is inevitably, in this fallen world, to lose. And yet, as Christians, we must know that although death is normal, it is not natural. It is not good. Death is the result of Adam and Eve, our spiritual ancestors, falling in the garden. And when I say falling, I don’t mean like an oopsie-daisy,

like they slipped and tripped and fell and then God punished them like a malicious father. No, they willfully rebelled against their maker. They chose sin instead of God. And because of that, death entered the world through their sin and rebellion. Now, because we are their descendants and because we choose to sin in the same way that they sinned, we too suffer the penalty of death. Paul explains it like this in Romans 5.12. He says, when Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone. And here you would expect him to say, because everyone is connected to Adam and we’re suffering the consequences for his sin. But he says, no, death spread to everyone for everyone sinned. That’s why we die. We do the same kind of thing that brought death into the world. One day during my deployment to Iraq, I was in Mosul in 2009.

I was a combat medic. We were in a level two trauma center. If anybody got shot, burned, blown up anywhere near us, they got choppered in or humveed in or MRAPed in and we would do our thing. One day, a soldier came into the trauma center and he was going into hypovolemic shock. He was losing a lot of blood. We couldn’t figure out why. There was no bleeding. We were checking his body for lacerations or gunshot wounds. We couldn’t find anything. And then he died. And this is not like a normal emergency room. This is basically like a tent. And we just sort of set up imaginary boundaries. So it’s not like we could just tell all the guys in his platoon to go wait in another room. All of his battle buddies were standing 10 feet away as we called his death as he lay there on the table.

They were weeping. They were wailing. Yes, grizzled Army veterans. They were crying over their battle buddy. And the doctor who called this patient’s death, he gathered all the nurses and all the medics around and he said, Guys, this is a teachable moment. Come here. Let’s figure out what went wrong. And finally we evaluated. We figured out he had a hip fracture and it severed a descending artery and he bled out within his body. And so he had every nurse and every medic come along and grab this guy’s hips and squeeze them and jiggle them so they could feel the fracture. While his battle buddies, while his friends, while his brothers in arms were standing 10 feet away. He was cold. He was detached. There was no compassion in the room. And you wonder how can a man be like that? It’s because death has become so normal to him that it feels natural.

Why would you cry over this? In today’s passage, one of the things that we learn about God is that he hates death. In today’s passage, we learn that Jesus feels a particular way about death and that we should feel that way as well. Look at verses 32 and 35 or 32 through 35. Now, when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And when Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit. And greatly troubled. And he said, where have you laid him? And they said to him, Lord, come and see. And Jesus wept. In verse 33, John tells us that Jesus was deeply moved. It also says that Jesus was greatly troubled by this death, the death of his friend.

And this leads to verse 35 where we see one of the most famous verses in all of the Bible, one of the shortest verses in all of the Bible, one of the most powerful verses in all of the Bible. Jesus wept at what he saw. Bible scholar D.A. Carson says that this phrase, this phraseology that John uses all throughout this section on death, it communicates a mixture of anger and agony. Anger and agony. And you know what it’s like to feel those two emotions simultaneously. Think about you here on the news that a young girl has been killed by a drunk driver. You feel anger and agony. Maybe you can remember where you were on September 11th when the planes hit the Twin Towers. What did you feel? You felt anger and agony. It is right for us to feel this way about death. There is a kind of strange stoicism that makes its way, particularly into our reformed, theologically astute, doctrinally precise circles.

A kind of emotionless about death that says, because I see death, because it’s common, because my theology takes death into account. And really because I know that one day death will die because Jesus defeated on the cross. Death need not register with me emotionally. It need not crush me. I don’t have to weep over people dying. You see this in the in the theology of funerals where some people will say things like, don’t cry. They’re in heaven now. Jesus knew he was going to resurrect Lazarus and he wept. I think this kind of stoicism, this emotionless way of approaching death is unbiblical. In the book of Ephesians, Paul tells us that we are called to be imitators of God. So what that means is that when we see Jesus angry over death, agonizing over death, that it is appropriate for us to respond in the same way.

Jesus Shows Us How

When God entered into the world, when he became incarnate flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, we see the morally and spiritually perfect response to death. Here in John 11, we see Jesus recognizing that death is ugly. It is bad. It is wrong. It is normal, but it is not natural. Now, you may be thinking, Sean, OK, you’re starting to repeat yourself. Well, I do that sometimes. But why am I hitting this point over and over? Why am I trying so hard to drive this point home to us? Well, it’s because I think it’s only when we understand the horror of death, the tragedy of death, the unnatural nature of death, only when we come to appreciate the suffering and sorrow that should accompany that death, that we can then begin to appreciate the glory of the promise of the resurrection. You know how they say you can’t really understand sin unless you see the holiness of God?

The more of the holiness of God you see, the more you understand the ugliness of sin? Same thing. You can’t understand the glory of the promise of the resurrection unless you understand the utter, ugly nature of death. Look at verses 25 and 26.

Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. And then he asked what is perhaps the most important question in the universe. Do you believe this?

— John 11

(ESV)

You have to understand what Jesus is saying here, friends. He is saying that he is the ultimate, final, God-given solution to the greatest problem plaguing the human experience. Throughout Jesus’ entire ministry, he has shown himself to be sovereign over all kinds of things that plague us in this fallen world. If you just read through the gospels, you see that Jesus casts out demons to show that he is sovereign over the powers and the principalities and the rulers.

And he comes into contact with sickness and disease and he heals them to show that he is sovereign over our human bodies and all of the maladies that we suffer in light of the effects of the fall. He comes into contact with Pharisees and Sadducees and scribes and religious rulers and he shows himself to be sovereign over their wicked traditions of men. He comes into contact with nature and all of its brutal force, the wind and the waves assaulting the disciples in the boats. And Jesus shows himself to be sovereign over all of creation by silencing them. But here in the raising of Lazarus from the grave, Jesus shows himself to be sovereign over the most significant problem of all, the problem of death. And it is the most significant problem. Even the secular thinkers, they know it. Oh, those French existentialists. They say things like, you know, the only really honest question any of us should ever really ask is, why don’t we just kill ourselves?

Life is suffering and then you die, so why do we suffer? Why don’t we just go ahead and pull the trigger? They get it. They get it. They understand. Death is really the only, it fills the frame of our existence. Jesus has been getting to this truth that he’s the answer to that problem all throughout John’s gospel. If you’ve been paying attention, he’s been saying things like this. I am the light of the world. Well, you know that in the Bible, light and life are very closely connected. What happens when light enters into the world in Genesis 1? Well, life comes with it. Jesus earlier says, I am the bread of life. I am the water of life. He says that he is the shepherd who protects us from those who want to take our lives. But in each of these word pictures that Jesus uses to describe himself, he’s talking about the giving of life.

The Promise of Resurrection

He’s talking about the sustaining of life. He’s talking about the protecting of life. He’s only here in John 11 where Jesus says something different. He says you’re going to die. There’s no way around it. That is the cosmic law. The wages of sin are death. All who have sinned must die. But if you are in Christ, death will not have the last word. If you are in Christ, you will live again. That’s what he means when he says, I am the resurrection. He doesn’t say believe in me and you won’t have to go through that. He says believe in me, you’re going to go through it and you’re going to come out on the other side resurrected with me. You know, the thing that’s really hard about death is that you kind of have to experience it a few million times before you actually die.

Every good meal comes to a last bite. Every fun and restful vacation has a last day. Every good movie finally has to roll the credits. Every TV show has its final episode. Every season of life that is so full of joy will eventually be met with a trial. Partnerships fail, body parts fail, memories tend to evaporate into thin air. And when we experience these little deaths in our lives, what do we do? How do we respond? Very often we try not to stress too much over these things because we know there will be another movie. There’s going to be another show. There’s going to be another vacation, another friend, another bowl of ice cream, at least at my house. We know that there’s always going to be another thing. But the final death, the death that all of these little deaths are pointing to, it is so different.

And it is so scary. I mean, if you want to be honest, it is so scary. Why is it so scary? Why does death terrify us? Why do we spend so much of our lives trying to keep the reality of the fact that we’re going to die pushed out of the frame of our consciousness? Why do we work so hard that we don’t have to think about it? Why do we distract ourselves so much that we don’t have to meditate on the reality that death is coming soon? We’re so afraid of it, I think, because it’s permanent. It’s irreversible. There’s no going back. There’s no trying again. There’s no do-over. Death is so scary because it can’t be undone. When Jesus approached Lazarus in the tomb, he could smell him. When the stone was rolled away, four days, if you’ve ever smelled someone who’s been dead, four days he was in the tomb, he could smell.

And so could everyone who was there with Jesus. Smell his decomposing body. And when you smell the decomposing body, you know this guy’s a goner. There’s no coming back. All hope is lost. The only thing that’s really left to do in a situation like that is grieve. And then we love to hang on to our grief because somehow our grief makes it feel like we’re keeping the person around. We’re keeping them with us. If we let go of the grief, it’s like we’re really letting them die with a sense of finality. And so when Jesus tells Martha these incredible words, he says, Though Lazarus dies, yet shall he live. He is making the most astonishing, glorious, powerful promise that has ever been made. He is saying, I have in my very nature, because I am the light of life, I have in my very nature the power to defeat death.

And I’m going to show you. I’m going to give you a sneak peek of what’s coming down the pipeline because of my finished work on the cross. When Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life, I’m going to raise him. You have got to understand, human beings can’t speak like this. They mustn’t speak like this. There’s a reason why C.S. Lewis employed his lord liar or lunatic argument in defense of the faith. Listen, if you’re here today and you’re just sort of investigating Christianity, and you’re like, you know, he just seems like a good moral teacher. And honestly, like the state of our world today and the culture that we’re in, things are so crazy. I probably just need a little bit of that good moral calibration that Jesus offers. Friends, you have completely misunderstood what we’re doing here today. And I want to invite you to take more seriously the claims of Christianity and the claims of Christ himself.

Because Christ stood up and said, I can bring people back from the dead. And at the end of days, anyone who trusts in me is going to be brought back from the dead. Now, he either is who he says he is, and he’s either going to do what he says he’s going to do, and this actually happened, or he’s a liar or he is a lunatic. Those are your basic options. Prophets don’t speak like this. Friends, when Jesus approached that grave and called out to Lazarus and made him get up, do you understand that he was displaying the glory of God itself? The glory of God himself. Look at verse 26. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this? When Christians talk about the resurrection, I think we should use this language more. We talk about the promise of the resurrection, but what we have to understand is that this promise is not unconditional.

Maybe that sounds strange to you. Your whole life, maybe you’ve been hearing about God’s unconditional love or the unconditionality of the gospel. But what you see here and in many other places is that God’s love is conditioned. His promises are conditioned. On what? Is it like when I tell my kids that we’ll stop at McDonald’s on the way home, if only they’ll behave? No. It’s not conditioned on our good works, on our giving, our religious whatever. Very often, those are the things that get in the way of our resurrection, of receiving God’s promises. The more you think you can work your way into God’s good graces, the further you are away from the actual grace of God. What we see here and again in other texts is that the resurrection is conditioned upon one thing and one thing only. Do you believe it? Do you believe the promise?

That’s why Jesus asked that question. He says, do you believe this? And the Bible calls that faith. Faith is a word that has come to be corrupted in our day. It kind of just means like, oh, I just believe anything, regardless of whether or not it has any basis in reality. The word faith in the Bible means do you trust that which is reliable? God makes a promise. Do you trust him? Do you trust his reliable word? And the thing about this promise of resurrection is it is available to anyone. I’ve been a Christian for a long time, and so far I haven’t met anyone that I think is outside of the parameters of the promise of resurrection. And you may be sitting here this morning thinking that you’re not worthy, that this promise can’t possibly be for you. And friend, I don’t know you, I don’t know your story, but I just can’t imagine that’s true.

And you might come out to me in the service, and you might say, well, you have no idea what I’ve done. And I’ll say, you have no idea what I’ve done. And the really incredible thing about the gospel is the worse you are, the more qualified you are to receive this resurrection promise. Jesus says, blessed are the poor in spirit. If you’re broken, if you’re low, if you’re desperate, if you are all too aware of how evil and wicked you are, you are in a good place. You have been humbled by God, and the only thing you have left to do is to look up and to trust in Him. If you have any questions about what it looks like to do that this morning, I would just encourage you to find me, or Thomas, or Sam, or really anybody in this church that’s a professing Christian.

Living in Light of Death

We would love to talk to you about how to actually receive this promise for yourself. I doubt any one of you guys is going to come to Alabama anytime soon. It’s awesome. You totally should. If you were to drop into Sixth Avenue on a Sunday morning, one Sunday morning, you might hear me say something like, we’re all going to die soon. And you’re thinking, whoa, where’s the Kool-Aid? You know, this is all a little intense. I don’t say it every Sunday or every fifth Sunday, but I think I say it more than most pastors. I try to hold up this reality of our impending death fairly often. And I really, at some points, I’ll try to really drive it home. I want people to know that not only are they going to die, and soon, that’s what the Bible means when it says life is a vapor, it’s a vist, a mist, here today, gone tomorrow.

I also try to drive it home by saying things like, it’s not just you that’s going to die. It’s everyone that you’ve ever known and ever loved. Your parents are going to die. And I’m not saying pass away on purpose or kick the bucket or cross over to the other side. I want you to look it in the eyes. I want you to stare death in the face. You’re going to die. Your parents are going to die. Your children are going to die. Your neighbors, your co-workers, every member of this church is going to die. There has never been a human being other than Jesus, and even Jesus died, that nobody escapes death. And I say this so often, not because I want to be grotesque and morose, but because I want you to experience the fullness of joy when you consider the resurrection promise.

There was a French philosopher. His name was Michel de Montaigne. And he has this thought experiment. He says, imagine that you’re a criminal and you’ve been condemned to die. You’ve committed some kind of capital offense. It’s on camera, all the witnesses. You’re guilty. And you’re in a country where they have the death penalty. You’re going to die. There’s no last minute call from the governor of California rescuing you. You’re going to die. And he says, imagine that you’re going to be executed in 30 days, but in the meantime, on death row, you can experience every carnal pleasure that your heart desires. That will be different for different people. Maybe for you, it’s a steak dinner every night and sleeping on silk sheets. Or maybe it’s, you know, you get to go out and sailboat. Or maybe you get like three massages a day, you know, with a scalp massage to go with it.

Or maybe it’s you get to wear nice clothes or you get to do drugs or whatever it is. You will get to enjoy every carnal pleasure you can possibly imagine until the very last second, right before you die. His question is this. Would you be able to enjoy any of them at all? Would you be able to enjoy all of the pleasures that this life has to offer knowing that you will soon be dead? Now, the point should be pretty obvious. This is not a thought experiment. He’s just saying stuff. He’s just pointing at reality and helping you see it a little better. You have an abundance of carnal pleasures laid out before you. And you will soon be dead. And so the question is, how can we enjoy anything in this life? I mean, let’s just stop and really be honest with ourselves. Even if you get everything that you want out of this life, everything that you think you need to be really and truly happy,

in the end, it will never be yours. The more you have, the more you have to lose. The more you love what you have, the more deeply it will hurt when you lose it. And you will lose it. You’ll lose all of it. You’ll lose all of the knowledge you’ve accumulated, all of the wealth you’ve amassed, all of the skill you’ve accrued, all of the relationships and networks you have built, all of the possessions you have acquired. All of it, when you die, will be gone. Irreversibly, irretrievably gone. At the end of the day, our impending death, if we are willing to be honest with ourselves, should rob us of any chance of joy. Unless.. Unless there is life beyond death. Unless there is a resurrection. Unless there is a life beyond this life, beyond this world, beyond this flesh. One of the reasons why I like to tell people,

hey, you’re going to die and you should think about that, is because I want you to feel the weight of that death, so that when Jesus comes along and he says, I’m the resurrection and the life, you can now have a new experience of joy, not just in the afterlife, but now. You can actually enjoy all of these good gifts that God has given you as you toil under the sun, as the author of Ecclesiastes says, knowing that, in some sense, the best of them will reverberate throughout eternity.

Death Becomes Our Friend

For Christians, death is not the ultimate enemy. Death was supposed to be the ultimate enemy, but then God sent his son Jesus, and through his finished work on the cross, he made our enemy our friend. Now, instead of keeping us from God, death takes us right into his presence. And so, the psalmist cries out, Whom have I in heaven but you? Earth has nothing that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Friends, you have got to feel this hope. You’ve got to live in this hope. You’ve got to breathe in this hope. The hope of the resurrection is something that should impact the way you view and experience all of your life. The world should look at your life and go, that’s somebody who believes in the resurrection. As I was writing this sermon in God’s providence,

me and my family were considering an act of generosity. I won’t tell you what it is. Right hand, left hand, don’t want to lose my rewards in heaven, that kind of thing. But for us, for our station in life, the act of generosity that we were considering was kind of a big deal. And I, of course, me, my wife is like, whatever, we’ll get it back in heaven, hundredfold, boom, good investment. I was really struggling. I wanted to do it but I was struggling. Well, got started late in life, don’t have retirement, don’t make a lot of money. And then it hit me that I was thinking like someone who didn’t believe in the resurrection. Retirement was filling the frame of my mind more than the resurrection was. I was thinking about how to use my money in light of what I was going to do between the age of 70

and who knows how long, which is like this big, instead of thinking about all of eternity. Am I the only one who ever does that? Perhaps you’ve heard of the missionary John G. Patton. John G. Paton. Patton was a missionary to the New Hebrides Islands. He went there after being an inner city missionary in Scotland. He went to proclaim Christ to the natives in the New Hebrides and as he set out on his mission venture, he surprisingly encountered serious opposition from members of his own church. He describes one encounter like this. He says, amongst many who sought to deter me was one dear old Christian gentleman whose crowning argument was, the cannibals, you’ll be eaten by cannibals. But Paton replied to the man, Mr. Dixon, you are advanced in years now and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms.

Right? This guy is kind of fire. Love this guy. I confess to you that if I can live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I’m eaten by cannibals or by worms. And in the great day, my resurrection body will rise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer. John Paton was somebody who believed in the resurrection. And it affected the way that he lived his life. Friends, if you are here and you do not know Christ, I just have to be honest with you and tell you, I don’t know how you do it. I was an adult convert. I didn’t get saved until I was 18 and I had a pretty crazy life up until that point. Looking back on it, I don’t know how I did it.

I don’t know how you toil under the sun. I don’t know how you bear with the anxiety and the depression and the burden and the pain and the suffering and the sorrow and the abuse and the addiction and everything that makes this life miserable. I do not know how you endure and think, I can go tomorrow and the day after and the day after and the day after. And then one day, I’m just going to go back into the ground and that’s it. Or maybe you think, oh, my best hope is that I’m going to go into the ground and then I’m going to come back up as an oak tree. Like really, that’s your great hope? Maybe I lived so well in this life that in the next life I’ll be reincarnated as a being who doesn’t have as much sentience so that I might not have to experience so much pain

The Great Feast

and then I’ll go through these endless cycles until hopefully, maybe one day I could possibly end up in nirvana which is a state of nothingness. That’s your great hope? That’s not my hope. Brothers and sisters, that is not our hope. As we close, I’d like us to turn to Isaiah chapter 25. This passage from the book of Isaiah is absolutely incredible. Isaiah chapter 25, verses 6-8. This is talking about a song that will be sung in future days when God’s victory reigns over all the earth. It says, Here we go, Isaiah 25, verses 6-8. On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well-refined. And He will swallow up on this mountain

the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all the nations. He will swallow up death forever. And the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of His people He will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. Well, Sean, what if I spend my whole life investing in this whole Jesus thing, this resurrection scheme, and then on the last day it doesn’t happen? It’s going to happen. For the Lord has spoken. His words are the same things as His deeds. That’s what makes Him God. What makes you is that you say you’re going to do something, and the odds of you doing it, not that great. When God says He’s going to do something, it’s going to be done. Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life, whoever believes in Me,

will surely live. You have to love this imagery. He talks about a blanket. There’s this blanket, and the blanket is death, and the blanket is laid over all the peoples of the earth, and it’s smothering us. God says, I’m going to take that blanket of death, I’m going to shake it out, I’m going to lay it down in the grass, and I’m going to lay down a feast for us. The good times will roll on forever. The feast will never end. The wine will never run low. The laughter will never grow cold. But this promise could only be made and kept because Jesus entered into death for us. Jesus was kept out of the banquet. He left His heavenly home. He was suffocated by the blanket of death so that it could be a picnic cloth for us. He had to enter into death to destroy it from the inside out.

We can only partake of the heavenly wine because He drank the cup of the Father’s wrath down to its very dregs. The only reason why we can live is because Jesus died in our place. And on the third day, the Spirit of God, according to the eternal purposes of God, because of the very goodness and loving nature of God, raised Jesus out of the grave and seated Him high in the heavenly places above all rulers and powers and principalities. And friends, one day we will sit with Him and rule and reign forever. Help us to believe for that day, Lord Jesus. Let’s pray. Lord, strengthen our weak and feeble hearts. We believe, but help our unbelief. We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.