Resurrection and Other Mysteries

Given how little we know about the mysteries of our universe, we do well to err on the side of humility, suggests Lloyd Baum.

Of all Christ’s magnificent miracles, His raising the dead to life remains the most significant for us today. He brought back to life the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow of Nain and His friend Lazarus.

But the resurrection of Lazarus is unique because it happened four days after Lazarus had died. Putrefaction had already started to destroy his body. John records the event thoroughly (see John 11), sparing no effort to emphasise that Lazarus was truly dead, rather than just asleep or in a coma.

Christ arrives after relatives, friends, enemies and bystanders have come to participate in the cultural grieving process. Thus the miracle takes place before a large number of witnesses who hear the commanding voice of Jesus and see His power over death as Lazarus comes forth.
After the miracle Jesus seeks seclusion in the small village of Ephraim and stays there until nearly a week before the Passover. During the final days before His crucifixion, He makes several public appearances, including the triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

Because of his unusual experience, Lazarus becomes a celebrity, and people want to see him (John 12:9). According to one author, he participated in the happy parade as Jesus enters Jerusalem, leading the donkey on which Jesus rides (see The Desire of Ages, page 572).

I can imagine him carrying a palm branch, caught up in the excitement of the occasion. Many recognise him, and stop to talk. Maybe they stood among the witnesses by the graveside that day little more than a month earlier. They ask Lazarus how he remembers the experience, and he says it was like being asleep (see John 11:11). Lazarus tells them he recalls his former life just as he would have if he’d merely taken a nap.

Someone else says they heard Jesus’ command, “Lazarus, come forth!” And another describes how they saw him unwrapped from his graveclothes and able to walk as a living, breathing person. The people listen in amazement.

But the priests do not share this awe. Unable to discredit the event as a fake, the ruling clergy formulate plans to silence Jesus. In fact, they become so desperate to put an end to Him and His escalating popularity that they plan to kill Lazarus as well (John 12:10).
Today humanistic minds still try to silence the miracles of God.

the power of the Creator
How long did it take God to recreate Lazarus? It wasn’t a day, an hour, or even a minute. The Bible tells us that it took no time at all—it was an instantaneous miracle. Likewise the apostle Paul describes the resurrection at Christ’s second coming, comparing its speed to a mere “flash” in time—a “twinkling of an eye” (1 Corinthians 15:52). The Bible indicates that the resurrection will happen instantaneously and simultaneously all over the world.

That’s hard to understand, granted. Paul refers to it as a “mystery” (1 Corinthians 15:51). Believers admit that the power of God and the mechanisms by which He exercises that power are beyond our comprehension. “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25, NRSV).

If they believe in Him at all, humankind tends to limit God to what they can observe and understand. For example, secular scientists teach that life evolved over millions of years—a time problem. But it didn’t take God millions of years to create Adam, Eve and all the plant and animal species on our planet. It took only the power of a word from the Creator. He simply spoke and life sprang into existence. To show His special love for humans, He breathed into Adam His own breath after sculpting him from the earth.

God divided His creation into earthly time periods called days: fish on day five; land animals on day six and so on. And He set one of those time periods aside to remind humans whom it is that created everything. God’s original creatures came into existence as adults; He made plants rather than seeds. And, if it’s not irrelevant, neither did He make Lazarus into a newborn infant; Lazarus came from the grave as an adult.

Believing the biblical Creation story is one thing; explaining it is quite another. Attempts to explain it in terms of known physical laws about time and space will only lead us deeper into the quagmire of confusion. How do we explain the laws of hydrodynamics, the behaviour of electricity, how light acts as both a particle and a wave in motion?

God has filled the universe with mysteries; and, like the rest of us, scientists know so little about them. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,” says the Lord, “neither are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8).

Science continues to make new breakthroughs. In our age of computerisation and space travel we continually discover new things about the nature of time and space. Time and space exist within certain physical laws. We know about the speed of light, the behaviour of electricity and the operation of many other forces. Many of our everyday actions depend on these laws. We build houses, travel to and fro in the air and live our lives dependent on them.

But it’s the great “I AM” who created the physical laws of gravity, electricity, the speed of light and many others, to operate uniformly throughout creation. God made and sustains those laws; scientists merely discover them. As humans, we remain ignorant of many other laws that God has created.

what we don’t know
The story of Lazarus is a prime example of the employment of laws other than our known physical laws. And we read that at Christ’s second coming, Planet Earth will again experience God’s use of what we might call “creative laws” to accomplish His purposes.

We don’t know much about these creative laws. In fact, we don’t even know what they are, let alone how they work. They seem to operate outside our earthly time and space. We only take in faith that God “spoke, and it was done,” that God “commanded, and it stood fast” (Psalm 33:9, NASB). Had we witnessed Creation week, we’d have seen the laws in action but still not understood them.

Consider the law of time and the speed of light. Light travels faster than anything we know about in the universe. We measure time by clocks and calendars. Sixty seconds make up one minute, and 24 hours make one day. The speed of light is about 300,000 km/second (186,000 m/s). If we stood on the equator behind a car travelling the speed of light, during its first second of travel it would circle the globe and run over us seven times before we could get out of its way.

Light takes about nine minutes to reach the earth from the sun. The next luminary body closest to our solar system, Alpha Centauri, lies four and a third light-years away. The constellation Orion is more than 1250 light years distant. If at His second coming Christ returned to the earth via Orion, it would take him 12-and-a-half centuries to get here, if He merely travelled at the speed of light. Obviously God has other laws for speedy travel! He is the God of time and space.

In his old hymn “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” J M Black writes: “When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more, and the morning breaks, eternal, bright and fair . . .” (italics supplied), what did he mean by that? Perhaps he was on to something, well ahead of his time.

There’s a lot we don’t know. The “How?” of the seven-day Creation eludes us, the laws of which we can’t begin to comprehend. Our resurrection remains a mystery, its laws way beyond us. The resurrection of Christ we cannot prove, but we choose to believe (1 Thessalonians 4:14-18). We encourage each other with the power of the Word. It is the same Word that existed in the beginning (John 1:1). It is the same Word that called Lazarus from his grave, answering the question posed by Job millennia before, “If a man dies, will he live again?” (Job 14:14).

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