I Am the Resurrection — The Day He Called My Name

In the spring of 1996 I was a dead man.

Not struggling. Not wounded. Not searching. Dead. Bound up in sin the way a corpse is bound in grave clothes - layers of it, all the way down, nothing exposed to the air. I did not know I was dead. That is the thing about spiritual death that nobody warns you about. It does not feel like death from the inside. It just feels like life. Your life. Normal. The only life you have ever known.

Then someone preached John 11 and Yeshua called my name.

I said yes. And nothing has been the same since.

I want to take you to that passage because I do not think most believers have actually read it carefully. They know the headline - Lazarus died and Yeshua raised him. They remember that Yeshua wept. Some remember the grave clothes. But the thing that undoes me every time I go back to this text is what happens before any of that. Before the tomb. Before the tears. Before the miracle.

The delay.

He Pushed the Crisis on Purpose

When word reached Yeshua that Lazarus was sick the text says something that should stop every reader cold. He loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. And so when He heard that Lazarus was sick He stayed two more days where He was.

Read that again. Because he loved them He waited.

That is not the response we expect from love. Love rushes. Love drops everything. Love does not sit down and wait two more days while a friend lies dying. We would call that neglect. We would call that abandonment. Martha and Mary certainly felt it that way - both of them, when they finally reached Yeshua, said the same thing. Lord if you had been here my brother would not have died.

That is not theology. That is pain talking. That is the cry of people whose faith was real but whose faith was not yet big enough for what Yeshua was about to do.

And that is exactly why He waited.

Yeshua was not delayed by circumstances. He was not held up by other commitments. He knew what was happening in Bethany every moment. He knew when Lazarus drew his last breath. He knew when they wrapped the body. He knew when they laid him in the tomb. He knew all of it and He stayed where He was because He was engineering something. He was pushing Martha and Mary into a crisis of faith that would crack open their understanding of who He actually was.

Their faith said He could heal the sick. He had done it before. They had seen it. That faith was real and it was good. But healing the sick and raising the four-day dead are not the same miracle and they do not require the same faith. Yeshua needed their faith to get bigger before He could show them what bigger faith makes possible.

So He waited until there was no version of this story that did not require resurrection.

That is still how He works. When the answer does not come on your timeline - when the crisis deepens instead of resolving - it is worth asking whether Yehovah is not being slow but is instead pushing you past the faith you came in with into the faith the miracle requires. The delay is not abandonment. Sometimes the delay is the most active thing He is doing.

He Walked Into the Pain First

When Yeshua finally arrived Lazarus had been in the tomb four days. Martha came out to meet Him on the road. Mary stayed home until He called for her and then she came quickly and fell at His feet.

And when Yeshua saw her weeping and the people with her weeping the text says He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.

Then He asked where they had laid him.

Then He wept.

I want you to sit with that for a moment. Yeshua already knew what He was about to do. He had known the whole time. He had told His disciples plainly - this sickness does not lead to death, it is for the glory of Yehovah. He was not confused. He was not uncertain. He was not grieving the way Martha and Mary were grieving because He knew the end of the story.

And He still wept.

Not because He had lost hope. But because He had not lost the capacity to feel the weight of what the people He loved were carrying. He entered fully into the atmosphere of their pain even while holding the answer in His hands.

That is the character of Yehovah in flesh. He does not stand at a clinical distance dispensing solutions to people in crisis. He walks into the grief. He sits in the weight of it with you. He lets it matter to Him even when He already knows how it ends.

If you have ever felt that Yehovah is unmoved by what you are going through - that your pain is too ordinary or too self-inflicted or too complicated for Him to enter - John 11:35 is your answer. The shortest verse in Scripture carries more comfort than most full chapters. He wept. With people He loved. Over something He was about to reverse. Because their pain was real and their pain mattered and He is not the kind of God who skips past real pain on His way to the miracle.

The Voice at the Tomb

They came to the tomb. A cave with a stone laid against it. Four days. The smell of death already present - Martha said so plainly. Lord by this time there is a stench.

Yeshua said to her - did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of Yehovah?

Then He lifted His eyes and prayed. And then He cried with a loud voice.

Lazarus come forth.

I need you to understand something about that moment. Lazarus did not cry out first. Lazarus did not seek help. Lazarus did not feel his need and respond to an altar call. Lazarus was dead. Dead men do not seek. Dead men do not feel the weight of their condition. Dead men do not decide to get better. Dead men lie in tombs.

The initiative was entirely Yeshua's. The call came from outside the tomb not from inside it. And the voice that called was not a suggestion or an invitation that Lazarus could take or leave at his leisure. It was the voice that spoke creation into existence calling a specific man by name out of death and into life.

That is salvation. Not a decision made in comfortable circumstances by someone who has weighed the options carefully. A dead man hearing a voice he had no capacity to hear and responding to a call he had no power to answer - except that the one calling him supplied both the hearing and the ability to respond in the same breath.

In the spring of 1996 that voice called my name. I did not find Yeshua. He found me. I was not seeking. I was bound. And the same message from John 11 that you are reading right now was preached and something in me that had no business responding - responded. That is grace. Not the greeting card version. The real version. Yehovah reaching into a tomb and calling out what was dead.

The Grave Clothes Nobody Talks About

Here is the moment in this passage that most preachers rush past and I want to stop and stand in it.

Lazarus came out.

Still wrapped. Hands and feet bound with linen strips. Face wrapped with a cloth. Alive - genuinely, completely, miraculously alive - and still wearing everything death had put on him.

Yeshua looked at the people standing there and said - loose him and let him go.

He did not unwrap Lazarus himself. He told the community to do it.

Think about what that means. The miracle of resurrection and the ministry of community are two separate things and Yeshua treated them that way deliberately. He supplied the life. He assigned the unwrapping to the people standing around the one who had just been raised.

Lazarus could not unwrap himself. Try it sometime - bind your hands and feet and see how much you can remove on your own. He needed people who loved him to come close enough to do the work that death had left behind. To remove the strips one by one. To uncover his face. To loose what was still binding him so he could walk in the freedom the miracle had already given him.

This is the salvation picture that the church has largely abandoned. We preach the call. We celebrate the yes. We count the decisions. And then we send people home still wrapped in grave clothes and wonder why they do not look free.

New life in Yeshua is real and it is complete the moment He calls your name and you respond. But the grave clothes - the habits, the thought patterns, the relationships, the wounds, the ways of seeing yourself that death built around you - those do not fall off automatically. They require community. They require people willing to come close enough to do the slow careful work of loosing what is still binding someone who is already alive.

That is discipleship. That is what the community of believers is for. Not just to celebrate the miracle but to do the unglamorous necessary work of helping the newly raised get free of what death left on them.

You cannot do it alone. Yeshua never intended you to. And any version of salvation that does not include a community committed to doing the unwrapping is leaving people alive but bound at the entrance of the tomb.

I Am the Resurrection and the Life

Before any of this happened - before the tomb, before the tears, before the miracle - Yeshua said something to Martha on the road that is the foundation of everything.

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. Do you believe this?

Do you believe this.

Not do you understand this. Not can you explain this. Not have you completed a theological framework for this. Do you believe this.

That question is still being asked. It is being asked to everyone who reads this. It is being asked in the middle of your crisis, in the depth of your tomb, in the moment when the delay has gone on long enough that you have started to wonder whether He is coming at all.

He is not asking whether your faith is big enough yet. He asked Martha that question before He raised Lazarus and her faith was not fully there - she said I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day, which was a way of saying yes I believe in resurrection in theory but I am not sure about right now. And He raised Lazarus anyway.

He is asking whether you will say yes with what faith you have.

I said yes in the spring of 1996 with whatever broken, incomplete, barely-there faith I had. And He did the rest.

That is still the offer. That is still how it works.

If you have never responded to that call - respond now. You do not need more information. You do not need to clean yourself up first. You cannot clean yourself up first. You are in the tomb. He is at the entrance. And He is calling your name.

Say yes. Let Him do what only He can do.

And then find people who will help you loose the grave clothes. Because that part of the miracle belongs to all of us.