Theopedia

Lazarus of Bethany

I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.

— John 11:25

Lazarus of Bethany was the brother of Mary and Martha whom Jesus raised from the dead after four days in the tomb (John 11:1-44), an event John’s Gospel records as proof of Jesus’s own claim to be “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). The miracle provoked the ruling council’s decision to have Jesus put to death (John 11:47-53), and afterward marked Lazarus himself for the same fate, since many were turning to Jesus on his account (John 12:9-11).

Biblical Basis

Lazarus lived in Bethany, near Jerusalem, with his sisters Mary and Martha (John 11:1; 12:1-3). When he fell seriously ill, the sisters sent word to Jesus: “Lord, he whom you love is ill” (John 11:3). Jesus did not go immediately. Instead he told his disciples, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4), and he stayed where he was two more days before setting out for Judea, over his disciples’ objection that the Jewish authorities there had recently tried to stone him (John 11:6-8).

By the time Jesus arrived, Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days (John 11:17). Martha went out to meet him and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21), to which Jesus replied, “Your brother will rise again” (John 11:23). When Martha took this as a reference to the general resurrection on the last day, Jesus answered, “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?” (John 11:25-26). Martha confessed, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world” (John 11:27).

Mary repeated her sister’s words to Jesus (John 11:32), and seeing her and the mourners with her weeping, Jesus was “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” (John 11:33) and himself wept (John 11:35). At the tomb he ordered the stone rolled away, over Martha’s practical objection that after four days there would be a stench (John 11:39), and answered, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” (John 11:40). After a brief prayer thanking the Father for hearing him, offered aloud “on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me” (John 11:41-42), Jesus cried out, “Lazarus, come out” (John 11:43), and the dead man came out, still bound in his graveclothes, at which Jesus told the crowd, “Unbind him, and let him go” (John 11:44).

Many of the witnesses believed in Jesus as a result, but others reported the event to the Pharisees, who convened the ruling council (John 11:45-47). Caiaphas the high priest argued that “it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish” (John 11:50), and from that day the authorities plotted to kill Jesus (John 11:53). Six days before the Passover, at a dinner given for Jesus in Bethany, Lazarus was among those reclining at the table (John 12:1-2), and the crowds who came out to see Jesus came to see the man he had raised as well; because so many were consequently believing in Jesus, the chief priests resolved to kill Lazarus too (John 12:9-11).

Doctrinal Significance

The paradigm case of a miracle

Charles Hodge and Archibald Alexander Hodge both reach for the raising of Lazarus as their test case when defining what a miracle is. Charles Hodge holds that a miracle “may be defined to be an event, in the external world, brought about by the immediate efficiency, or simple volition of God,” and treats the raising of Lazarus as the test case: “This was an event which occurred in the outward world; one which could be seen and verified by the testimony of the senses. It was not brought about either in whole or in part by the efficiency of natural causes. It was due to the simple word, or volition, or immediate agency of God.”1 Archibald Alexander Hodge appeals to the same episode to explain how a miracle relates to the ordinary laws of nature: God’s will “acts directly upon every element of the world he has created,” so that “what is true in this simple miracle could be shown to be true in the most complex ones, such as the raising of Lazarus, if we knew enough of the chemistry and physiology of human life.”2

Providence, not misfortune

Loraine Boettner cites Lazarus’s death as an example of divine providence overruling an apparent tragedy for God’s own glory. Seen “from the human viewpoint of Mary and Martha and those who came to mourn for him,” the death “was a very great misfortune,” but Jesus had already told his disciples it was “not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby” (John 11:4).3 That the sign served God’s glory did not make the grief around it any less real: Boettner elsewhere notes that Christ himself, “as He stood with the sorrowing relatives at the grave of His friend Lazarus, wept as He saw the grief of His friends and felt in His own soul a sense of the awfulness of this work of the great enemy,” death.4

A sign of the resurrection, not the resurrection itself

Jesus’s declaration to Martha, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live,” has been read as Christ’s own answer to Job’s question, “If a man die, shall he live again?”5 Augustus Hopkins Strong draws an analogy between the miracle and the sinner’s regeneration: “A dead man cannot assist in his own resurrection… But once made alive, man can, like Lazarus, obey Christ’s command and ‘come forth’ (John 11:43). In fact, if he does not obey, there is no evidence that there is spiritual life.”6 Thomas Ridgley cautions against pressing the analogy between Lazarus and the resurrection of the saints too far. The resurrection promised to believers at the last day is “incorruptible and immortal,” not a resuscitation “of the same kind with that of Lazarus, and others that were raised by our Saviour,” who returned only to mortal bodies still subject to death.7

Related Doctrines

References

References

  1. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 618. ↩

  2. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 276. ↩

  3. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 170-71. ↩

  4. Loraine Boettner, Immortality (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1956), 9-55. ↩

  5. Boettner, Immortality, 59-90. ↩

  6. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1909), 822. ↩

  7. Thomas Ridgley, A Body of Divinity, vol. 2, ed. James P. Wilson (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1814), 384. ↩