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DEATH — THEN
WHAT?
John 11:20-27
I.
Lazarus does one thing, but does it well.
A. Unique to gospel of John.
B. A close friend of Jesus.
C. No quotes, just one action - he
dies.
1) All of us will also die.
2) Then what?
II. How different groups view life after
death, and faith.
A. Science and materialist view.
1) No soul, just brain waves.
a) Death is return to natural
state.
2) Our brain are belief
factories, inventing scenarios that
help
us cope with life.
a) We subconsciously link
causes and effects, and see
continuity
where there may be none.
b) Wishful thinking is normal
- we can't help it.
c) Therefore life after death
is an important theme in
human
thought, since we cannot accept mortality.
B. Religious scholars:
1) Time magazine - many people
believe, but religious
leaders
are turning away from the miraculous.
2) "Jesus Seminar"
majority concludes Jesus
didn't
really rise from dead. Just a myth.
C. The average believer - I hope to
go to heaven when I die.
1) Is this an adequate hope?
2) Does the Bible support it?
III. How Jesus viewed
death.
A. Death is our enemy.
11:33,35,38
1) Jesus is troubled, and weeps.
a) "Moved" means
stirred with anger.
b) Not at their lack of
faith.
c) Not because they have lost
control of emotions.
d) Jesus is angry because he
is confronting enemy.
2) Death is bad, an evil.
a) When God created the
world, everything he created was good.
1> Death was not part
of creation. Gen 3:19
b) Only after mankind's sin
did death become "natural."
1> Death is a
consequence of evil, a punishment of evil.
2> Death is never a
good thing.
c) It is appropriate to hate
death, fear it, be angry at it.
1> Jesus wept at Lazarus'
tomb. John 11:35
2> He wept at his own
death. Matt 26:36-39 [cf Heb 5:7]
B. Two kinds of death.
1) Death of unbelievers.
a) Jesus is not encouraging.
1> He warns people about
dying this way.
2> Without faith in
Jesus, he says we enter hell.
3> Don't fear death,
but hell. Matt 10:28
b) Death means separation
from God, and this means darkness.
1> Death is the
deprivation of God's good gifts.
2) Death of believers.
a) Jesus is very encouraging
here.
b) They enter into Abraham's
bosom, or Paradise. Lk 16:22
c) Many mansions. Jn 14:2
d) He calls death
"sleep" and is happy Lazarus died. 11:11
3) Non-believers sometimes have
same view. (Ingersoll)
It was a cold, gray day in January,
and a persistent drizzle
added to the misery of the
little group gathered about the
open
grave.
A child was being buried.
A few feet away stood a man whose
name was known throughout the
nation.
He was a brilliant lawyer, a famous
writer and lecturer, one of
the
most eloquent and dynamic orators of his day.
He had come to be known as
"the Great Agnostic."
The undertaker asked Robert
Ingersoll to say a few words,
and when told the family
requested it he began to speak slowly:
Why should we fear that which will
come to all that is?
We cannot tell, we do not know,
which is the greater blessing -
life or
death.
We do not know whether the grave is
the end of this life, or the
door of another, or whether the
night here is not somewhere
else
a dawn....
They who stand with breaking hearts
around this little grave need
have no
fear.
The larger and the nobler faith in
all that is, and is to be,
tells
us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest.
[As for the grieving parents] we
know their grief will lessen
day by
day.
There is for them this consolation
that the dead do not suffer.
If they live again, their lives
will surely be as good as ours.
At worst, death is a long sleep.
At best, there might be
something good.
Maybe.
The key difference between Jesus
and Ingersoll - Jesus says his
followers
will wake up from their sleep.
Not a "maybe" but a
definite "yes.
IV. Resurrection: now, later, or both?
A. As life after death.
1) A future event.
a) Taught by Old Testament,
especially Daniel.
b) Martha reflects this
belief - I know my brother will
rise
at the Last Day.
c) This teaching is in John,
with a twist.
2) Future, or just now? [Realized eschatology]
a) Liberal emphasis.
1> John said to
reinterpret prophecy to deal with
just
present belief. 5:25 vs. 5:28f
2> No future hope, but
existential thrust.
3> Religious faith
viewed as irrational.
b) Barclay and doubts about
this passage.
1> Not mentioned in
other gospels.
2> Lazarus vs. cursed
fig tree as source of
contention.
3> Dead don't rise?
4> Thoroughly
spiritualized application. It
doesn't
matter
what really happened, as long as we believe.
c) John is consistent - there
will be a future physical
resurrection.
B. Life in life.
1) There is also more to
resurrection.
2) Higher quality of life, right
now.
a) Life is a present
experience in the very life of God.
b) Are we truly alive right now?
From Henry David Thoreau's book
WALDEN, written in 1845:
I went to the woods because I
wished to live deliberately, to
confront
only the essential facts of life.
I wanted to see if I could learn
what it had to teach, and not,
when
I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.
I did not wish to live what was
not a life, living is so dear;
nor
did I wish to practice resignation.
I wanted to live deep and suck out all
the marrow of life, to
live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all
that
was not life....
3) Occurs during conversion, when
we believe.
a) Not just "pie-in-the-sky."
b) Death seen differently -
we don't die, ultimately.
4) Because we are forever alive,
we can risk death.
a) Freedom, justice, peace
and evangelism are worth
sacrificing
our lives for. [Ron Sider, CT, 7/14/89,30)
[below
I did not used in teaching, but appropriate here.]
CATEGORY: God's Will, Waste,
Failure, Missions
Surrender All, Investment,
Profit, Consecration
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TEXT: Matt 19:16-29*, Mark 8:36,
Luke 18:18-30, Luke 12:33, Acts 13:2-3,
2 Tim 1:5, John 3:16*, Matt
26:39, Phil 1:21, Mark 8:36
SOURCE: Pulpit Helps
TITLE: "What A Waste," People
Said
AUTHOR: Dick Bohrer (Moody Monthly)
Story of Bill Borden, a
young man from a wealthy family who left everything to go into missions to
the Moslems in China, only to die in Egypt of cerebral meningitis. He was 25 and by today's values worth $40
million. But in 1912 he gave his
fortune away. Five months later in
Cairo he died. "What a waste,"
people said.
Borden's parents raised him
in a mansion on Chicago's "Gold Coast" within walking distance of
Moody Church. His father, an
attorney, was active in real estate after the Chicago fire. It was from this, not milk,
that the family fortune grew.
Borden went to Yale, was president of the Phi Beta Kappa honor
society his senior year, was voted third out of 800 for being the hardest
worker, fourth for the most energetic, ninth as the most to be admired, and
seventh as the one who had done the most for Yale.
Bill's mother was devout
and taught him the Bible. Before
entering college, at age 17, his parents sent him on a 10-month global
tour. He left San Francisco in
September 1904, and when they reached London they went to hear Bill's
preacher from Chicago preaching at a series of meetings. He wrote back to his mother, "His
sermon was meant to straighten things out.
I know that my own ideas were somewhat hazy, and I wasn't at all
sure about it. But I am now. In another meeting Torrey gave an invitation
to those who had never publicly indicated that they had surrendered all to
Christ. Bill stood up with several
others and later wrote home, "We sang the chorus: 'I surrender all, I
surrender all. All to Thee, my
blessed Savior, I surrender all." Torrey gave five points for daily
living, with the last being "Go to work." Borden resolved to do so.
During his freshman year at
Yale, at the Student Volunteer Movement Convention, he heard Samuel Zwemer describe the sweep of Moslem influence
throughout the Near and Far East. He
said those 70 million people were not lost because they had proved too
fanatical or because they refused to listen, but because "none of us
has ever had the courage to go to those lands and win them to Jesus
Christ."
Back in New Haven, Conn.,
he founded and privately financed a mission for down-and-out men. One man later said he talked to everyone. At Bible conferences he volunteered to
wait on tables. He had a devoted but
simple prayer life, and was tempted to buy a car but decided it was an
unjustifiable luxury.
Upon graduation he applied
to the China Inland Mission for service to Moslems in China. But they decided he needed more Bible
training and recommended he go to Princeton Seminary. Unknown to anyone - even his mother - he
cut his business ties to give his life totally to Christ. One-fourth of his inheritance was given
for use in Chicago, another fourth for other parts of America, one third
for work in China, and the remainder for other countries. The New York Bible Society and Moody each
got $100,000, equivalent to $4 mil today.
$100,000 of the quarter million he gave to China Inland Mission he
asked to be invested for retired missionaries.
Bill had no doubts. But his mother, she admitted later,
wondered on the eve of his departure for Egypt if he had done the right
thing in giving up everything he owned:
"In the quiet of my room that night, worn and weary and sad, I
fell asleep asking myself again and again, "Is it, after all,
worthwhile?' And in the morning, as
I awoke to consciousness, a still small voice was speaking in my heart, answering
the question with these words: 'God
so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son....'"
Before he departed they
prayed for God's will to be done. It
turned out not to be mission to the Moslems. Borden contracted cerebral meningitis in
Cairo and died. The news shocked the
world. Accounts of his life and
death were written in many languages.
A version for Chinese Moslems reached the very people he himself had
longed to see.
An editorial in a Richmond,
Va., paper said, "His investment has borne rich returns already and
will continue to yield its peculiar fruit.
There are thousands of talented and favored young men who will, in
the light of Borden's conception of investment values, come to a new view
of Christian service." Another editor wrote, "It was not the
million dollars that came to this young American which made his life a
victory and his death a world-wide call to young men and women to learn the
secret of that victory. It was in
things that every man can share that William Borden found the way to the
life which is Christ and the death which is gain. And China and the Moslem world shall yet
share that gain, as his burning torch is used to kindle in other lives the
first of a like passion for Jesus Christ."
Among Bill's papers was a poem his
mother had given him on his 17th
birthday.
It summed up what he did and what
he was:
Just as I am, young, strong and
free,
To be the best that I can be
For truth and righteousness and
Thee -
Lord of my life, I come.
Waste? Was it?
b) Death is only a temporary
transition to life even more
abundant.
V. Lazarus, come out!
11:43
A. Jesus' prayer is in form of thanksgiving rather than a petition.
1) He prays aloud so onlookers
won't think he is acting
on
his own.
2) Each of Jesus' miracles is
really an answered prayer.
B. Resurrection vs. resuscitation.
1) Lazarus was raised, but not
resurrected.
a) Note almost comical detail
of body standing there
wrapped
in burial cloths.
b) Physical existence alone
renewed. Same kind of life.
c) He would die in the
future.
2) Jesus was resurrected, not
resuscitated.
a) Jesus, in contrast to
Lazarus, left no body.
b) Physical and spiritual,
and eternal.
c) Emphasis on tangible future
existence on a real earth.
VI. Belief is the key.
A. Do you believe this?
11:26
1) We give benefit of the doubt
to others, but Jesus is clear
that
few truly believe.
2) True belief leads to changed
lives.
3) No change, no faith.
B. What do you believe?
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