SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/28/2016 7:02 AM
My Worship Time Focus: The Problem
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: John 11:38-39
Message of the verses: “38 So Jesus, again being deeply moved
within, came to the tomb. Now it was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. 39
Jesus said, "Remove the stone." Martha, the sister of the deceased, said
to Him, "Lord, by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days.’”
We first
want to think about this problem that we see here before we go into looking at
what these verses can mean to us as we study them. If anyone else in the entire universe would
have been standing in front of the place where Lazarus was buried, and have
been dead for four days then there surely would have been a problem. However we have the God who created
everything seen standing in from of this cave where the body of Lazarus was
buried, so that eliminates all problems.
I have often though about and have told unbelievers that if I was
standing in from of the grace of Lazarus and was about to do what Jesus was
about to do then there would be a great problem.
Next we see
that Jesus was once again deeply moved and John MacArthur, that this time it
was because of the doubts of what the mourners said in verse 37 “"Could
not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man also
from dying?"” He goes on to write
about what this word “deeply moved” (embrimaomai)
means, as he compares it with what we talked about in verse 33 “He was deeply
moved in spirit and was troubled,” Where
he wrote “Deeply moved is a misleading translation of the verb embrimaomai, which literally means to
snort like a horse. Apart from its use
in v. 38, it appears only three other times in the New Testament (Matt. 9:30;
Mark 1:43; 14:5).”
A tomb in
Israel was likely a cave as we have seen that in different places in the OT and
NT. They can either be a natural cave of
a cave dug out by a person like in the case where Jesus was laid. There was a level floor and there would be
shelves in it to bury more than one person, perhaps like in the case of Abraham
it was for a family. It was likely
outside of the town itself, as Jesus never got to the home of Martha and Mary,
and also so that the living would not be defiled by it as they came in contact
with dead bodies as seen in places like Numbers 19:16 and we can compare that with
Matthew 23:27 and Luke 11:44.
We next
look at what could be described as panic when Jesus told the sisters to remove
the stone, for Lazarus had been dead for four days and because they did not
preserve the bodies and because bodies decompose and that causes a bad odor Martha
said to Jesus “Lord, by this time there will be a stench.” I can’t help but think that three times now
Martha has been telling the Lord some things that we know that He already knows. I don’t want to give her a hard time, because
I may be doing things like that myself, like telling the Lord I really need Him
to answer this or that prayer in this way when I should be saying like what
Jesus told His Father while in the garden when He was praying about His crucifixion
where He said “Not my will but Your will be done.”
Martha may
have been thinking that Jesus wanted one last look at Lazarus and that is why
He wanted the stone rolled away, because it is almost for certain that she had
no idea that Jesus was going to raise Lazarus from the dead. Now as I think about Martha in this situation
I can perfectly understand why she would not want the stone taken away from the
cave, for she surely did not want to see her brother’s body like this as in her
mind it was already too late to have Jesus do anything about his death. MacArthur writes “Since her brother had
already been dead four days (the perfect tense of the participle indicates she believed
that Lazarus had entered into a permanent state of death), Martha had given up
all hope.”
Well that
is the problem as we see it in these two verses, and in our next SD, Lord
willing, we will look at the promise as seen in verse forty.
Spiritual meaning for my life today: I worship a great God who can do anything He
wants to do and I desire to see my faith strengthened as I read His Word each
day.
My Steps of Faith for
Today: Trust the Lord to give me the
strength and the wisdom to teach my last Sunday school class for the summer,
and to give me wisdom as to whether or not I should be a back up for another
class that begins next week.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “Genesis.”
Today’s Bible question:
“What did Ahab want that belonged to Naboth?”
Answer in our next
SD.
8/28/2016 7:56 AM
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