Show Me Where You Laid Him

I have been itching to write or speak on John Chapter 11. And I believe the Spirit has prompted me too strongly today to resist the urge.

John Chapter 11 is about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. It is a powerful and amazing story that God uses to show us what Jesus did with each and every one of us.

"Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha."

Verse 3, "So the sisters sent to him, saying, 'Lord, he whom you love is ill.'"

Here we got Jesus in a town separate from that which Lazarus is in, Lazarus bedded down to die, and his two sisters desperately looking for Jesus to come and make him well.

What is Jesus' wise decision after the sisters tell him this?

To stay where he is at for two days. (verse 6)

But after these two days, Jesus prompts the disciples to depart with him to Bethany where Lazarus is.

The disciples reply "Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?"

Thomas goes so far to say "Let us also go, that we may die with him." (verse 16)

Please realize something as we read this. Bethany, where Jesus was headed back to was a place that him and the disciples just left because the Jews were trying to stone him there. And if you look at the progression of events in this section of scripture, we find that immediately, in chapter 12, because of Jesus return to Bethany and his raising Lazarus from the dead, the Jews begin to plot how to kill Jesus.

Ultimately, Jesus return to Bethany to raise Lazarus leads to his crucifixion.

Now Jesus and his disciples go to Bethany. Mary and Martha express some amount of frustration with Jesus because they say "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."

How many times have we cried this out? Lord, if you had been here, my finances wouldn't be in the garbage. Lord if you had been here, I wouldn't have gotten cancer. Can you believe today that God is near, and perhaps that doesn't always look how you would like it to?

Let me skip forward a bit.

After conversing with the Mary and Martha for some time. Jesus asks this simple question.

"Where have you laid him?" And he immediately weeps.

There is much debate about why Jesus cried, but may I suggest today that it wasn't just because Lazarus was dead. Jesus after-all knew that he was going to be raised. But may I suggest that Jesus wept because he knew that there was a cost in coming to raise Lazarus, and that cost was his crucifixion. That Jesus knew, in returning to Bethany and raising Lazarus from the dead, he wept under the burden of knowing he must die in order to do this.

And may I be so bold as to suggest further that Jesus has said this about every single person who is someone "whom he loves." That Jesus has said "show me where you laid him" and began to weep knowing that in raising you out of your trespasses and sins, he was going to suffer a most brutal death.

Do you believe we were dead in our trespasses and sins? If you have accepted Jesus, be confident that at one moment, Jesus spoke to God the Father, asked "where have you laid him/her" and wept on his way to your tomb, knowing that in raising you to life, he must pay your price.