In the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (John 11), there’s one thing that everyone seems to agree on regarding Lazarus’ illness…<\/p>\n\n\n
Martha says to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” (v.21)<\/p>\n\n\n
Mary says the exact same thing to Jesus minutes later: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” (v.32)<\/p>\n\n\n
The Jews who were with the grieving sisters say to one another, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” (v.37)<\/p>\n\n\n
And Jesus says to his disciples: “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.” (v.14,15)<\/p>\n\n\n
There is universal agreement: “If only Jesus had been there, He could have healed Lazarus and prevented his death.”<\/p>\n\n\n
There is near universal agreement on another point: “Jesus SHOULD have healed Lazarus and prevented his death.”<\/p>\n\n\n
Jesus disagrees.<\/p>\n\n\n
More importantly, He disagrees with Mary and Martha and the crowd on the implication of their complaint:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
“It’s too late for Jesus to do anything now.”<\/p>\n\n\n
Jesus: “Hold my wine.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (John 11), there’s one thing that everyone seems to agree on regarding Lazarus’ illness… Martha says to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” (v.21) Mary says the exact same thing to Jesus minutes later: “If you had been here, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7589,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7588\/revisions\/7589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}