Expectation—Vague or Vivid?

Japjohn Berg is bending his blond head over a piece of wood. He is very carefully carving letters as well as his nine-year-old skill will allow. Come closer and you will see that the letters are the beginning of a street name in Holland. What can it be?

It’s an address, the address of the new apartment to which Japjohn, his mother Marry, and his little brother Stephan have recently moved, leaving their beloved house because Daddy can no longer drive Stephan to his school and they needed to be many kilometers closer. Stephan is very handicapped from cerebral palsy and must learn in a special school to point out with his chin the pictures he is matching, because he can not use his hands or legs and is deaf.

Here is a family drawn close together by great difficulties, and amazingly close to the Lord. The resurrection of the dead and the coming changed bodies of all believers who in this life are handicapped have taken up much time in family conversation—conversation around a beautifully set table, always with flowers in the center; or during outdoor walks where leaves, ferns, butterflies, a special tree, a bird on a bush, are noticed and enjoyed. In the midst of enjoying the little things for which we can say “thank you” each day this family has always looked forward with vivid expectation to the return of Jesus—“for then Stephan will run and jump, make and feel things with his hands, be able to hug us, and jump over things like that log. Stephan will do wonderful things when Jesus comes and all believers are changed in the twinkling of an eye, and when we are finally in the new heaven and the new earth!”

Now Japjohn is carving his new address, and he wants to put it on the grave so that “if Jesus comes back and Daddy rises first [Scripture says that ‘the dead in Christ shall rise first’] then he can find us quickly.” “But Japjohn, Jesus will bring us all together quickly. Jesus knows where we are.” “But Mommy, please? May I? I would feel better if I knew he could find the address there right away.” Marry is a sensitive, understanding mother. She hasn’t denied this nine-year-old’s request because someone else might think the carved address on the grave was out of place.

On a grey morning a few months ago the rain was driving across the Dutch landscape as Hans drove to work, having left his family in a cottage where they were to have a week’s vacation in the woods. Suddenly a young truck driver made a wrong movement and skidded into the front of Hans’s car. Hans was killed.

Death is not beautiful. It separates soul from body, husband from wife, father from children. Jesus let it be known that death is not beautiful when he stood at the grave of Lazarus and wept. Jesus wept not just with sorrow, not just with sympathy for the dead man’s sisters and friends, but also with anger at the enemy death. Satan brought death with his taunting temptation to Eve and Adam to choose to believe him rather than heed God’s warning. Jesus wept with a strong emotion, not with polite tears to enter into an atmosphere of mourning. His tears were real and the feelings they conveyed were real.

The amazing thing to me is that Jesus wept after he had already said to Martha, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?” He believed completely what he had said; yet he wept.

Jesus was speaking of the reality of the resurrection of bodies that will be changed bodies, as he would demonstrate with his own resurrected body later, as well as speaking of the fact that he had power to raise Lazarus. Now the resurrection of Lazarus was a miracle, but his body was in the same condition it had been in before. Jesus was speaking of something that no one really understood that day, as he pointed to the future, or else they would have been waiting with vivid expectation after his death for his resurrection. Instead of vivid expectation, the disciples had something less even than vague expectation; they had depression and no expectation at all. As far as they were concerned, it was all over.

The resurrection of Lazarus was a demonstration, an object lesson of the fact that Jesus could raise the dead. The term “firstfruits” used by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians shows that the resurrection of Jesus has no precedent. Jesus after the resurrection was not like Lazarus at all; his body was the same body, but one that cannot ever die or be hurt again.

In the book of Corinthians the true believers are no longer mixed up, but others even then were still just as confused as many had been when Lazarus died. People can be blind as to what is being shown them, and to what is being told them. Paul that day wrote, “If Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?” He goes on to say that hope is a vain hope if it is only a vague kind of hope in this life. “For if in this life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men most miserable.”

Two things are important to notice in Jesus’ speaking of himself as the resurrection and the life, and then afterwards weeping with anger and sorrow. First: it is not wrong to weep, and it is not wrong to be angry at death and at Satan, who causes death. It is not wrong to long for the change that will occur after Jesus comes back. The wrong comes when we turn away from God with bitterness and anger. Then our weeping becomes a separation and sinfulness, rather than a running into the Lord’s arms.

Second: it is also important to believe before we see the resurrection with vivid expectation. Jesus was asking Martha to believe a double thing, his power to do an immediate thing that would be temporary, and his power to do that which would be forever. Asking us to believe, also, Jesus speaks to us the same words. Do we really believe in the lasting resurrection of our bodies with vivid expectation, with the kind of expectation that causes us to have practical thoughts about laying up treasures in heaven, practical thoughts about putting the kingdom of God first, practical thoughts about meditating upon his Word day and night, so that as we read and think we might find out what it is he means us to be doing? How vivid is my expectation? How vivid is yours?

Don’t you think that Jesus sees Japjohn as one who in carving his address is showing before angels and demons as well as before his loving Shepherd that he believes with vivid expectation that Jesus is coming back? The any-moment expectation of Jesus’ return is also the any-moment expectation of the resurrection. How are we showing our vivid expectation?

“Be ye ready also … for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not.”

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