Death is, so to speak, a favorite topic of mine, and I’ve written about it here many times. I say “favorite” tongue in cheek, of course, because death is the topic we mortals most want to avoid talking about, let alone experience, whether that’s our own, or the death of those we love. We lost a friend this week to this most implacable foe, and as common as death is in the human experience, it never fails to shock us when it rears its ugly head. My first response when learning about this tragedy was, this can’t be! When a young man dies well before his time, no matter the circumstances, it hurts. Especially when it’s one you love and care about. So I knew I’d have to write something because when death comes knocking, I can’t just ignore it or explain it away. I’ve argued, in fact, that death is the great question mark of existence. It forces us to ask why it is, and why we hate it so. Any secular answer is supremely shallow and unsatisfying, but nothing takes away the sting.
In dealing with death, I am always compelled to go back to Jesus’ own confrontation with a death that was not his own, that of his friend Lazarus. We find the account in John 11, and I find it impossible to believe the account was made up, a fiction, skeptics insist, because, well, people just don’t come back from the dead. The problem with that approach to the text is that it is purely question-begging anti-supernatural bias. In other words, secularists come to the story assuming people can’t come back from the dead, therefore the story must be fiction. It could be made up, they claim, because backward ancient pre-scientific human beings believed people come back from the dead all the time. No they didn’t! They were as skeptical of supernatural claims as any post-Enlightenment rationalist. Ask “Doubting Thomas.”
What fascinates me about the story is Jesus’ response. He wept. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he cry when he’ll bring his friend back to life in mere moments? It only makes sense if it actually happened, and if the biblical view of reality is true. Death is wrong, horribly, terribly, gut wrenchingly wrong, and we all know it. Jesus knew it, which is why his tears were not merely tears of sadness, but tears of rage: this should not be!
In this encounter with death, Jesus tells Martha that her brother will rise again, and she replies that yes, she knows he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day, at the end of time. But that’s not the rising again Jesus is talking about, and he says to her:
I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even though he die, yet shall he live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.
Then he asks her the question that confronts us all: Do you believe this? The point of the question isn’t so much, can you wrap your mind around this? Does it make sense to you? To such questions I answer with a resounding, absolutely no! Are you saying, Jesus, that our friend who just died is at this very moment actually alive? That’s a tough one to believe, but not as tough if you translate Jesus’ question a bit differently. Instead of, Do you believe me, he’s actually saying, Do you trust me? The Greek word for belief and faith is trust, not mere intellectual assent.
I have an infinite number or reasons to trust that what Jesus said is true, and zero reasons to believe in any alternative. None of the alternatives to Jesus compel my belief and trust, least of all atheistic materialism. We are not a cosmic accident! So I do trust God’s revelation in creation, in Scripture, and in Christ, and trust Jesus when he says all the saints who die in him are still alive, and we who eventually follow them into eternity will see them again, sooner than we think.
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