I Was Lazarus

Walk With Me to the Tomb

The scene is John 11. Lazarus has been dead four days. The Greek says tetartaios — a four-day corpse. This detail is not an accident. In the rabbinic theology of the time, the soul was believed to hover near the body for three days, hoping to return. On the fourth day, the soul departed and decomposition was irreversible. When Martha says "by this time there is a bad odor" (John 11:39), she is saying something very precise: this is not a case where anything can be done. This is not a coma. This is not a swoon. This is a body whose soul has left and whose cells have begun returning to the dust they were made from. The tomb is sealed because what is inside the tomb belongs there now.

Into that situation Jesus walks, and He does something the text has to slow down to describe. He weeps. Not because He cannot do anything. He can. Not because He is uncertain of the outcome. He is not. He weeps because death is itself an affront to the way He made the world, and even though He is about to undo it, its presence grieves Him. This is important to you, reader, because you are about to learn that the God who raised Lazarus is not a mechanical God ringing a resurrection bell. He is a God whose heart was in the tears before His word was in the command.

He stands at the tomb. The stone is rolled away against the objections of the mourners. He does not go in. He does not lay hands on the body. He does something more devastating than that. He speaks.

The Command That Created the Ability

"When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come out!' The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, 'Take off the grave clothes and let him go.'"

JOHN 11:43-44

Stop at the first line and consider what it does. Lazarus, come out! The command is given to a corpse. A corpse cannot obey commands. A corpse cannot even hear them; dead ears do not hear. So what is happening here? Augustine saw it immediately, and the whole Reformed tradition after him has stood on what Augustine saw. Here it is:

The command of Christ includes within itself the power to fulfill the command.

When Jesus says come out, He does not merely issue a request and hope the corpse will cooperate. The word itself raises the corpse. The command creates the capacity to obey it. Lazarus does not first become able-to-respond and then decide to respond; the voice of Christ simultaneously gives him ears and speaks into them. The grammar of his rising is therefore entirely one-directional: the voice did it. Lazarus, in any meaningful sense, contributed nothing. He had to; he was dead.

And Jesus deliberately designed it so. He could have healed Lazarus before he died. He did not. He waited four days on purpose. He waited until there could be no theory of recovery that credited anything to Lazarus or to medicine or to the body's natural capacity. He waited until the only explanation left was: the voice of God raised the dead. He wanted you to see it. He knew you would one day be in the position of Lazarus and need to know how these things work.

You Were in the Tomb

Paul makes it explicit. "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins" (Ephesians 2:1). Not sick. Not weakened. Not unresponsive. Dead. The Greek is nekrous — corpses. This is not hyperbole. This is diagnosis. Before grace came to you, you were in a tomb of your own, and like Lazarus you had been there long enough that there was a bad odor. Your spiritual nose had lost the ability to smell it. That's what dead noses do. Your friends and family smelled it. The Spirit of God, hovering near the tomb, smelled it. But you, inside, were convinced everything was fine.

Into that situation a voice arrived. It may have come to you through a sentence in a sermon you were not supposed to hear, or a Bible verse your mother used to quote, or a question a friend asked that you could not shake for weeks, or the silence of a night when your defenses were down because your heart had just broken. However it came, the voice came. And when it said your name — come out — you did. You did not weigh the offer. You did not sit up in the coffin and consider your options. There were no options. You got up because the voice raised you. The same voice that raised Lazarus raised you, and the mechanism was identical: the command created the capacity to obey.

Everything you now call your decision for Christ was, seen from the inside, a response to a voice that had already raised you. The decision was real. You really did decide. But the decision happened in a person who had just been brought to life. You did not decide your way from death to life. You decided because you had just been brought to life and life responds to its maker. Effectual calling is not a bypass of your agency. It is the creation of your agency. Before the voice, you had no spiritual agency at all. After the voice, you had the agency of a resurrected man, and you used it exactly as resurrected men use it: you went to the One who called you.

The Grave Clothes

Notice one more detail in the Lazarus story. When he comes out, he is still wrapped. "The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face" (John 11:44). He is alive. He is standing. But he looks like a mummy. The grave clothes are still on him because the resurrection, though instant, does not instantly change the appearance. Jesus says to the bystanders, "Take off the grave clothes and let him go."

You are this too. You were raised. You are alive. But you are still wearing grave clothes — habits of thought, patterns of fear, old sins that cling to you the way funeral linens cling to a body that has just walked out of a tomb. The aliveness is real. The clothes are still there. And here is the beautiful part: Jesus does not command Lazarus to take them off. He commands the community. He gives the grave-clothes-removal job to the church around Lazarus. Resurrection is sudden. Sanctification — the peeling off of the old wrappings — is the slow, communal work that follows.

So if tonight you feel alive but still wrapped — if you know you were called out of the tomb but you also know you still have linens dangling from your wrists — this is not a failure of the resurrection. This is the normal state of the newly raised. The voice did what it came to do. The clothes will come off over time, by the hands of those around you who also heard the voice, who also walked out of tombs, and who now walk alongside you with gentle fingers, unbinding the cerements inch by inch.

What Lazarus Did for the Rest of His Life

Scripture does not tell us much about the rest of Lazarus's life. We know he went to a dinner where his sister Mary poured perfume on Jesus's feet. We know the chief priests wanted to kill him too, because his aliveness was an unbearable witness to the voice that had raised him (John 12:10-11). Tradition says he lived another thirty years and was a bishop in Cyprus.

Here is what we can be sure of: Lazarus did not spend the rest of his life taking credit for his resurrection. There was no testimony he could give that began and then I decided to come out of the tomb. He could only give the testimony you now must give: a voice called me. I was dead. I heard the voice because the voice gave me ears. I came out because the voice gave me legs. Everything I am now — the breath in my chest, the blood in my hands, the fact that I am able to tell you this story — all of it is His doing. Nothing of it is mine except the receiving of it.

That is your testimony too. You were Lazarus. You are Lazarus. Every morning you wake up is a morning you are still out — still called, still alive, still bearing in your own body the evidence of the voice that raised you. Every time you pray you are exercising lungs that the voice gave you. Every time you read Scripture you are using eyes the voice opened. You are forever loved because you were forever called, and the calling did not come from inside the tomb. It came from outside, in a voice that does not take back what it has said.

So if you are ever tempted, in a dark hour, to wonder whether your faith is real — whether you really decided, whether you really chose, whether your yes was sincere enough — remember the grammar of Lazarus. Yes was not your initiative. Yes was the sound of the body moving in the direction the voice had called it. You are not the cause of your response. You are the evidence of His call. And the One who called you will not, cannot, does not, will never, unsay what He said. The hands are still holding. The tomb is still empty. The linens, one by one, are coming off.

"Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live."

JOHN 5:25

You heard. You lived. Keep walking.