“So the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus.” – John 12:10-11
If you’re a present day Christian and very familiar with the story of Lazarus, you can easily miss the significance of the miracle Jesus performed. Lazarus wasn’t just a little bit dead when Jesus raised him. Lazarus was four-days, rotting, decomposing, stinking, in the tomb dead!!! Bringing him back was understood to be impossible. Several prophets (and Jesus) had raised recently dead people back to life. That was good but not unimaginable. NOBODY reversed the natural process of decomposition and restored a man to full life and health after four days. Then Jesus did!
Many who saw or heard about this miracle knew what it meant. Jesus truly was the Messiah, the Christ. He was the anointed one of God come to establish the eternal kingdom of God on earth. He had power infinitely beyond any mere prophet. God had come in the flesh! The raising of Lazarus from the dead was the most important and persuasive miracle Jesus performed apart from His own resurrection. It was a whole other level beyond His previous miracles.
This miracle was so persuasive that crowds were making the short journey from Jerusalem to Bethany to see Lazarus. They met or talked with Lazarus and his sisters and they believed in Jesus. The possibility that Jesus really was Who the evidence of this miracle said He was absolutely intolerable to the religious leaders. They decided there was only one thing to do…. Destroy the evidence! They didn’t just want to kill Jesus to shut down this new movement. They wanted to kill Lazarus to keep people from believing the plain truth about Jesus that he represented.
Their love of their authority was so much stronger than their love of God. Their fear of change so entrenched in their hearts that they wanted to destroy God’s work to prevent people from being reconciled to Him. Those were some seriously hard hearts! Understand the significance of the Lazarus story. Embrace what it reveals about Jesus. Don’t let it merely be a really cool, fun Sunday School story. Jesus is the resurrection and the life! #FollowJesus