When I Cause Him Trouble

But some of them said, "Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man also from dying?" So Jesus, again being deeply moved within, came to the tomb.... (John 11:37-38)

I have previously suggested that the real reason that Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus had nothing to do directly with His feelings of loss over Lazarus but rather was caused by His awareness of the unbelief and depression and despair that was controlling the minds and hearts of so many that He had come to save. It was the persistent and pervasive atmosphere of doubts and unwillingness to trust God that brought pain and sorrow to the heart of Jesus that day.

As I ponder these verses again today I see this conclusion reinforced in the comments of some of the Jews who had come to console Mary and Martha. I recall the intense resistance and hostility displayed toward Jesus by the Jews just two chapters previous to this involving the story of the blind man they refer to here. It is amazing how hostile and unreasonable and even illogical these people became in their quest to maintain their unbelief in the face of overwhelming evidence. They were constantly trying to blame everyone else for the absurdity of their own thinking and trying to shame or intimidate everyone around them into agreeing with their twisted and self-serving perceptions.

Now once again these very same people possessed with the spirit of antagonism and unbelief infiltrate into the crowds of people coming to share the grief being experienced by two of Jesus' best friends. Implicit in their suggestion in this verse they are trying very hard to reinforce the feeling that Jesus does not really care about them or their pain like they have come to trust that He does. These religiously influential people are hell-bent on seeking to maintain their dominance over the people at all cost and they do everything they can to dilute and undermine the growing confidence of the people in the kind of God Jesus is representing to them.

This radical new notion of a God full of compassion who does not bas His government on fear and coercion but focuses on truth and love is a lethal threat to their whole system of control and dominance. In verse 48 this is explicitly what they express as they are backed into a corner after they are exposed by the wonderful sign that Jesus performs in the case of Lazarus. This event was not just about Jesus bringing relief to the hearts of a couple of His best friends; this miracle was the pivotal point in the ministry of Jesus that completed the hardening of the hearts of many of the religious leaders as they confirmed themselves in their wickedness. They had persistently resisted repeated appeals to their hearts by Jesus over several years and had refused to renounce their perverted beliefs about God and now they were moving past the point of no return.

Was Jesus intimidated by this knowledge of their hostility towards Him? Not at all. The disciples had assumed earlier that Jesus had left Judea because He was afraid for His life and went to minister where there was much better potential. But Jesus was never guided by His emotions or intimidated by the threats of His enemies. The reason that He did anything or went anywhere was because He was always listening and responding to the guidance of the Spirit from His Father, not because His emotions were determining His choices.

Jesus certainly experienced the whole spectrum of emotions just as we all do. But unlike most of us He never allowed His emotions to usurp the rightful role of His reason and conscience to determine the direction of His will. It is a lesson I need very much to learn myself and am just now becoming more aware of it. How often I allow emotions subtly influenced by my own selfishness to unduly influence my choices rather than relying on reason and listening to the promptings of the Holy Spirit as Jesus did. But even though Jesus always maintained the proper balance of His mind it does not mean that He was immune from feeling strong emotions Himself.

The emotions that Jesus experienced however, were for very different reasons than what we often assume. Just as people around Him that day assumed incorrectly that Jesus was crying because He was so sad about Lazarus, so too we can misinterpret the emotions of Jesus because we fail to come into sympathy with the perspective of heaven about the real issues involved. Whenever we allow our own emotions to interpret for us our circumstances while failing to seek heaven's perspective of what is going on, we are most likely to misinterpret what is going on and as a result make more faulty choices that only complicate things.

Jesus was seeking to draw Martha into seeing her situation from a different perspective when He engaged her in conversation when they met alone outside the village. He did manage to turn her attention away from her own feelings long enough to begin to take hold of the reality He wanted her to perceive and experience. But Mary seemed a bit further behind and most of the people involved in this story were far from seeing things the way they really were. And if it were not that we already knew how the story turned out it is very likely that we too would fall into the same mindset as most of the people in this story.

This story was recorded for our benefit so we don't have to follow in the example of those people who were so steeped in unbelief. It is our tenacious unbelief that brings the most grief to the heart of Jesus even today just as it troubled Him so much back then. It is not our physical problems that bring concern to the mind of God for these are merely incidental as a part of the process of life, even though we find that very hard to digest. But from heaven's perspective it is our unwillingness to move from doubt and rebellion and hostility against the truth about God into a relationship of trusting that He always has our best interest in mind that is the biggest problem. God could fix our external problems in a heartbeat. However, He often does not do so immediately because it could circumvent our facing the real issue of the condition of our own heart. God is willing to allow us to suffer emotional agony or even physical pain for a season if it will eventually lead us to face the real issue of how we feel about Him, so that we come to see that our unbelief is the problem in our relationship with Him, not how He feels about us.

These Jews were trying to keep the lid on the truth that God really does care deeply about all of His children. For very perverted reasons they did not want people to begin to warm up to the idea of a loving, caring Father whom each person could relate to intimately. They wanted to maintain a religious atmosphere of fear and control and hierarchy and everything that Jesus was telling people and demonstrating was a direct threat to their whole system of control by fear. It was this threat from a compassionate, caring Jesus that was the greatest fear of those who had a vested interest in keeping God looking very dark and dangerous, and they would stop at nothing to stifle, distort or shut down the testimony about God that Jesus had come to deliver.

You and I still face the very same issue today. Will I choose to believe in a good, loving, caring God who has my best interest at heart when circumstances seem to scream the very opposite? How will I interpret events in my life that I am so used to blaming on God? Will I allow these messages of love and grace that I am reading to challenge my long-held assumptions about how God feels about me or will I succumb to the temptation to maintain unbelief that God is as good as Jesus made Him out to be?

I find myself facing these questions more and more as I work my way through the good news about God as reported by one of Jesus' best friends. I want my own thinking to be healed and my own heart to learn to trust Him far more than I do now. I want God to transform me to trust Him just like Jesus did all the time. I want to be a real Christian, not just one who professes to believe but fails to be changed from the inside out.

It is all too easy to sidestep this vital issue of belief. It is too easy to rely on old patterns of thinking that view God as one who cannot be trusted all the time to do what is good. False ideas woven into cultural Christianity have left deep damage and scars in my soul and I want to experience the authentic genuine healing that will bring me to live like Christ. After all, that's what the very word Christian means in the first place – to live and think and relate to others just like Christ did. How strange that we have lost touch with that word.

The more I meditate on how Jesus viewed things and how He related to various situations the easier it becomes to view things differently myself. Yes, I feel even more ignorant and selfish the more I perceive the real truth about Him. But that must not deter me from continuing my quest to know Him even more. Growing awareness of my own sinfulness is not a problem so much as it is an awakening. It can actually be a sign for hope even though it feels like I am hopeless. The only hope is looking at Jesus. As I keep cooperating with the healing plan that Jesus wants to accomplish in my life He is responsible to do the transforming inside of me.

As long as I am willing to keep in relationship with Him and allow Him to draw me closer to His heart, the results are His responsibility. He has promised that He can transform and change me into thinking and acting like Him. Like Abraham I choose to trust that God has the power and ability and desire to do what He says He can do. And if I read my Bible correctly, that kind of thinking is called righteousness by faith which happens to be a good thing in heaven's perspective.