Day 221/260: Read John 11

One of the first memory verses children are tasked with is often John 11:35. Two words: “Jesus wept.” But how much profound teaching is found in those two words?

Why did our Lord weep as He looked at the tomb in which Lazarus’ body lay? Was He simply overcome with the grief that was felt by His friends, Mary and Martha? Or was there something more? Something deeper? Something spiritual?

Where was Lazarus? His body was inside the tomb, but his spirit had departed. James reminds us that “the body without the spirit is dead” (James 2:26); Jesus affirmed that Lazarus was dead. Thus, his spirit was not in the tomb with his body.

If Lazarus was a faithful follower of God, he was in Paradise. Jesus was about to recall him from a place of spiritual safety back into a wicked world filled with temptation and sin. Do those two words—“Jesus wept”—carry more weight when thinking of those implications?

James Burton Coffman commented on this incident, “The prospect of Lazarus again facing life with its inevitable dangers to the soul, and particularly with the additional burden that would be imposed by his resurrection (fort he Pharisees would try to kill him) – all such considerations are of such profound weight that they may be rightly viewed as plunging the Son of God into tears as he thought of them.”

There is so much more meaning to those two little words than when we first memorized them. There is so much more meaning to much of the Bible when we truly meditate on what it says.

Memory (Read aloud 5-10 times)

John 12:48. He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him—the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day.

Pray

Pray for a deeper understanding of the Scriptures, using sound resources to better understand the mind of God.