Sermon Transcript
John 5:19-29. So Jesus said to them, truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing, and greater works than these will he show him. So that you may marvel.
For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will. For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Truly, truly, I say to you, Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life.
Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment. Thanks.
We’ve been in a series in the book of John looking at Jesus’ miracles, and we’ve said that miracles are little instances of Jesus putting the world back together. When Jesus gives sight to the blind or enables the paralyzed to walk, heals those with leprosy, makes the deaf hear, raises the dead, he is setting right what has gone wrong. Wrong. He is restoring what is broken to what it ought to be. Really, He is restoring humans to what we had at the beginning of time before everything fell apart, and He’s given us a preview of what He will eventually usher in at the end of time when everything is put back together.
That’s been our series. This is our 10th week. And today we fast forward to almost the end of the biblical story, to nearly the final miracle that will ever happen. Jesus talks about it in our passage. So that means no miracle actually occurs while Jesus is speaking in this account, but during this account he says one day this miracle is coming, and it’s called the resurrection of the dead.
Everyone who has ever lived will rise from their graves and step into eternity. It’ll be quite the sight. So as we study this text, we will see death is not the end. There are 2 types of forever. What determines Which type of forever we experience, and finally, what difference does that make for us today?
Okay, death is not the end, 2 types of forever, what determines which type we experience, and then what difference that makes for us today. Okay, so first, death is not the end. Our bodies will resurrect and endure forever. If you are someone who is a little skeptical of miracles in general, This one is really going to push you because the scale is so much bigger than anything else we’ve studied in our series. The claim is everyone who has ever lived will resurrect into a physical body and live forever in that physical body.
That’s the claim, and that claim is utterly unique to biblical faith. No other religion teaches that kind of forever. It’s only in the Bible. Now to be fair, every religion has something that is unique to it, so simply having something that is unique is not unique to the Bible. But embodied existence forever is.
Because many religions teach eternal life. Many, many religions teach eternal life. But theirs is a disembodied existence. As some kind of spirits. It’s not a physical existence.
And even the religions that say that we reincarnate into a physical body, they do not believe in a physical forever. They say people may reincarnate hundreds or thousands of times, but eventually if people do well enough in one of those lives, they escape from this existence, and then depending on the tradition, maybe they join the All-Soul, but regardless, the forever isn’t physical. It’s disembodied, some kind of spirit. And in many of those traditions, the forever isn’t even individual. They describe, you know, us being like drops of water that fall into a much bigger bucket or even the ocean.
And you can imagine if a drop of water falls into a bucket or the ocean, it kind of loses its individuality. And so in those religions, sometimes depending on the tradition, you might even lose your individuality. Not only do you not have a body, you’re not even an individual anymore. Okay, but biblical faith, meaning Christianity and then some streams of Judaism before it, not all Jewish people believed it but some streams, they believe in a resurrection of the dead to a physical forever. Not disembodied, not spirit, flesh.
We say as Jesus rose out of the grave with a physical body so will everyone Which is what Jesus refers to in this passage. He says, verse 28, verse 28, 28, there will come a day when all, all, who? All who are in their graves will hear his voice and they will rise.
All. It’s a little like Lazarus, who we will encounter in a few weeks. You know, Lazarus was— if you don’t know, Lazarus had this— or Jesus had this friend named Lazarus. Lazarus died, Jesus goes to the tomb after he’s been dead for a couple days, and Jesus says to this dead man, to the tomb, he says, come forth!
And the dead man walked out of the tomb. He didn’t float out of the tomb as a spirit, he walked out with a body still wrapped in his burial cloth. And Jesus says one day that will be everyone. One day Jesus will say to the entire world, to everyone who has ever lived, like he told Lazarus, he will tell everyone, come forth, and we will. Every human who has ever existed from the beginning of time will rise back to life.
Now for— again, for those of us who are kind of skeptical of miracles in general, I imagine this one sounds over-the-top outlandish. We may even ask, you know, I mean, okay, so you mean even the people who lived so long ago that their bodies are just completely dust right now, there’s not even a skeleton left, they will rise?
Yes. You mean even the people who are cremated so that there’s no body that could rise, they will rise?
Yes. Is there even enough dirt on the earth for everyone who has ever lived to rise? Don’t some of us share some of the atoms that are in our body with other people who have existed? Like, how could we both resurrect?
It’s because all things will be made new. All things. You, me, even the earth itself, we believe, will be made new. There will be, the Bible says, a new heavens and a new earth, and it’ll be physical. It’s not a spiritual earth.
It’s a you-can-dig-into-the-ground kind of earth. All remade. Us, earth, everything. It’s a miracle on a grand scale. You know, if you’re a little skeptical about Jesus healing terminal illness, I imagine you’re very skeptical about this, because even we can heal terminal illnesses sometimes.
There’s no chance we could do this. So if that’s a struggle for you, I would just— I would submit for you to consider, may God give you faith, if God could create everything out of nothing at the beginning of time, if God could do that, then he can do this. The first words of the Bible are, in the beginning God created. When there was nothing other than God, we said it a few years— a few weeks ago, God spoke all of creation into being from nothing. That is not a conservation of mass, that is a creation of mass.
The mass of the entire universe, in fact, spoke into being. So if— this is an if, and if you can’t get there, I love you— if you can believe the first 5 words of the Bible, in the beginning God created, if you can get that far, if you can get to the 6th word of the Bible, and you’re still in the game.
Then any other miracle we see, including the resurrection of the dead, by comparison is pretty simple.
And that’s what Jesus describes. All of us, every single one of us will be made new and we will live forever.
But not all of us will have the same forever.
Which brings us to 2 types of forever. It’s life and judgment.
Jesus says some of us will resurrect to eternal life while others of us will resurrect to eternal judgment is his word. Judgment is the word Jesus uses, which of course is a very sensitive subject. The idea of judgment is why some people reject Christianity. They don’t like the idea of a God who judges. In fact, they don’t even like the idea of anybody ever getting different outcomes from anybody else.
They think if some people get one thing and other people get another thing, that’s not fair.
Judgment is a sensitive subject. So before we move forward, let’s take a step back. And if you’ve been around Bridges for a long time, you may have heard some of this before, but it’s hard to avoid the category of judgment.
If you reject Christianity because Christianity teaches a judgment is coming, if you reject Christianity for that reason, you have not freed yourself from the category of judgment because judgment’s everywhere whether you’re religious or not and really regardless of your religion. You know, whatever you believe in, whether it’s religious or just secularism, there is going to be some kind of judgment that’s hanging over you. You can’t escape it. On the religious side, I mean, the idea of getting our due based on what we have done or failed to do. Okay, that idea.
We get what we earned, basically. Nearly all religions have that, even the Eastern ones. I mean, just the idea of karma. What is karma? What is that?
It’s judgment. If we do something wrong, the universe will make us pay for our sins. Not that they use the word sins, but the universe will hold us accountable. Same as if we do something right, the universe will reward us. I mean, it’s reaping what we sow.
That’s judgment. Or even, we’ll say Buddhism, who many feel isn’t as judgy of a religion. It is.
Even though there isn’t a concept of God or formally coming into his courts, it’s much more about reaching enlightenment now, and all of us, every single one of us, we have the potential to reach enlightenment, they say. Okay, on the surface that doesn’t feel judgy, but here’s why it is. Not everyone reaches enlightenment.
Some make it, some don’t. Not everybody gets the same things even though everybody has the same potential. In order to reach enlightenment you need to follow the Eightfold Path based on the Four Noble Truths, you have to measure up and not everybody does. That’s judgment. You can’t choose a religion that’s going to get you out from underneath the category of judgment.
And even if we aren’t religious at all, okay, we’re just totally secular, the idea of measuring up or the pressure to perform or failing to reach our ideals, it’s still there. Even if we’re not religious, we— I mean, okay, so we don’t worry about measuring up to God’s standards, but we worry about measuring up to something. We stress if we’re enough. We fret over if we’ve proven ourselves worthy. We can feel inadequate.
We might have imposter syndrome. You know, we worry about if we’ll get found out. We secretly feel or fret that, you know, we aren’t as good as others think that we are, whether it’s with our job or our, you know, how good a spouse we are, how good a parent we are. I mean, we on some level we know we aren’t living up to what we ought to be in some way because we have an ideal of what life is supposed to look like. We think, I need to be to this point by I’m 40, this point by I’m 60, I need to be this independent, my kids need to be doing this.
We have some ideal and we think if we could achieve that, if we could make it there, then we would feel validated, then we would know that we are enough.
And if we don’t make it there, then we feel less than.
And even if we do make it there, we might worry about losing it. That’s the weight of judgment.
It can be torturous. Even if we aren’t religious, it’s still on us. So never fool yourself into thinking that you can get out of the weight, get out from underneath the weight of feeling judged just by avoiding religion. It won’t work. If you walk away from religion because you think that you will get out of feeling judged, you’re out of the frying pan into the fryer.
You’re still on the treadmill to perform. The fear of failure still crouches at your door. We can’t get rid of that, but Jesus says he can. He says there’s another way. Instead of resurrecting into an eternal state of judgment, there is a way that we can resurrect into life.
There is a way to be free from judgment, free from condemnation, free from falling short, free from measuring up. A way where we can have utter wholeness and security, significance without end. We can have life where we don’t feel crushed by the weight of the world on us. We aren’t crushed by expectations. We can have peace.
Christianity says there’s a way, which means if we bail on Christianity, it means we will still feel judged by whatever it is that we do believe in. We can’t get out of that, so we still feel judged. We haven’t bought ourselves our way out of that. But if we bail on Christianity, we will miss out on the freedom that Jesus offers. So How do we get that freedom?
How do we resurrect onto life?
Jesus says what determines which type of the forever we experience is who or what we trust. Jesus says if you believe in him you will have life, believe in him you will escape judgment.
So The criteria for whether we are judged or not, and honestly if we feel judged or not, the criteria is who or what we believe in. This word here, believe, it’s more like whatever is our deepest hope, which we all have a deepest hope. We all have something that we look to to tell us that we’re okay, that we’re going to make it, that we matter. I mean, not to overstate it, but we all have something that we look to to validate our existence. Okay, we all have something like that, we all believe in something whether it’s Jesus or something else and whatever it is that we believe in, whatever we hope in that deeply, that is what determines if we are judged or not.
So some examples so you know what maybe Jesus was talking about, what we’re trying to say. I was a kid of the ’80s, I loved basketball, Therefore, Michael Jordan was my hero, of course. Of course. Had his jersey, whole deal. I remember as a kid, some commentators would say Jordan is the most competitive person that anyone will ever meet.
I just heard that occasionally. It gave him the drive that pushed him to excel. What that meant on a deeper level was that, we’ll say at the core of his being, what he counted on to prove that he was okay where his faith really was, what he believed in, to tell him that he mattered. The thing that validated his existence was that he was better than other people on the court. He could beat them.
If he was better, then he was validated, and he had to be better than everyone else. And for him, it actually kind of worked because he was better. But it didn’t— even being better, it didn’t provide him peace or freedom from judgment. In fact, in the decades since playing— okay, this is just my evaluation as someone who used to idolize him— he’s still fighting to prove himself. For instance, you can look at his Hall of Fame speech, which is about 10 years after he retired.
Just search it up, Jordan Hall of Fame acceptance speech, you’ll find it. If you watch it, it’s not that long, you would not characterize him as grateful for the recognition or content with what he accomplished or very elevating of his teammates. I mean, he doesn’t say, you know, my teammates are the real stars that made my career possible. It’s not that. Instead, one thing Jordan did for the Hall of Fame ceremony, he invited people from his past who didn’t believe in him to the ceremony so that he could say, look at me now, you didn’t believe in me, well, you were wrong.
More than once in his speech, he calls out people who he invited It’s sad. He’s being inducted into the Hall of Fame and he’s still trying to prove that he matters, that he’s better. He’s— I mean, he’s made it, but he’s still under judgment. The thing he believed in most had not freed him, it was judging him. Or fast forward another day, or another decade, sorry.
The documentary The Last Dance, fantastic, documents Jordan’s last NBA championship season. They interview almost everybody involved in that season, including Jordan. Wonderful television. But if you watch it, watch it again, you will not characterize Jordan as some wise sage reflecting back on his life with gratefulness. Instead, he’s holding grudges.
He’s still trying to prove that he’s better than others. He’s still competing in his mind against people he hasn’t even seen in 30 years, but there’s still this pressure to prove that he’s worthy. He’s under judgment, under the weight of it, because that’s how he’s validated. He believed, I’m okay if and only if I’m the best. And it’s crushed him, in my view.
He didn’t escape from judgment, even though he really kind of passed judgment. That’s not only a phenomenon with Jordan. We’ve probably seen so many people who are similar. Maybe they aren’t like Jordan, who needs to be the best in order to feel worthy, but it’s something. Maybe they need to be in control.
That’s their deepest hope, to have things the way that they want them. They tend to stress over every little detail. Detail being in place, you know, the home looking just so, the kids being just so. And there’s a weight that hangs over their lives. They’re in their 20s, 30s, 50s, maybe that’s not that big of a deal, but if they continue down that path of needing the world exactly ordered how they want it ordered or they don’t feel okay, if they continue down that path by the time they’re 70, 80, 90, They’re a wreck.
They’re empty. They’re fraught with anxiety because they can’t get things how they want them. What they believed in didn’t free them.
It hung over their necks. We could say the same as people who are obsessed with their looks, you know, people who need to feel pretty or handsome to know that they’re okay. If I’m pretty, then my life is validated. That’s what they believe in. But have you watched that trajectory over 80 years?
It’s sad. They might not even be able to be around people who they think are prettier than them. Sometimes they’re embarrassed to go out in public because they know they don’t look how they used to. It has ruined their lives. They feel less than.
They’re constantly judged. Just in their own mind they’re judged. We could say the same with people who are obsessed with how many likes they get on social media. You know, they have to be approved by others in order to feel worthy. Their social media clicks are what validates them, but they constantly feel under the scrutiny of judgment because not enough people liked whatever it was that they posted, or the right people didn’t like it, so they feel less than.
Continue down that path for 60 years, how do you think that’s going to go. Fill yourself, fill your soul with that for decades. I have to get enough likes.
It’s going to hollow you out. You’ll be a shell of a person decades from now. C.S. Lewis observed, Christianity asserts, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever. That’s what we’ve said.
Then he continues, there are a good many things that would not be worth bothering about if I was only going to live for 70 years, but which I better bother about very seriously if I’m going to live forever. Perhaps my temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse, so gradually that the increase in 70 years will not be very noticeable unless you’re Jordan, maybe. But Lewis says even if it’s not bad in 70 years, it might be absolute hell in a million years. In fact, if Christianity is true, hell is precisely the correct term for what it would be.
If we place our deepest hopes, if we want to validate our existence with anything other than Christ, and then we carry that plotline out a billion years, Lewis says we will be hideous monsters, tormented day and night, a torment to everyone around us. In one place, Jesus describes that kind of eternity as weeping and gnashing of teeth. Peace, and we can see why.
We could imagine people who we know now, if you continue that plotline out forever, what it would be like, maybe even see some of that in ourselves. But Jesus offers an alternative. He says believe in him, we can be free. In him we can have life. He is the way to get off of the treadmill of proving ourselves, a way in which we can feel really worthy that we can escape judgment.
Verse 24, Jesus says, truly, truly I say to you, whoever hears my word, believes him who sent me, has eternal life. He does not come into judge— he does not come into judgment. Don’t even go into judgment, but has passed from death to life. Which means if we place our deepest hopes in Jesus, not only does that buy us freedom in eternity, but it buys us freedom right now, because he says it’s already happened. We pass from death to life right now.
We don’t need to wait until the resurrection of the dead. We can have life right now. And here’s how that works. Here’s how trusting in Jesus for, we’ll say, our validation frees us. This is how it works.
Instead of the pressure being on us to measure up, like every other system, Like every other religion, like every other secular ideology that says you have to be good enough, right enough, long enough, that you have to prove yourself, unlike every other system that in one way or another says you have to measure up, Jesus says, I measured up for you. Instead of the weight of judgment being on us, he bore that weight for us. This is the cross. All of our failures, all of our sins are placed on him. He was judged in our place.
He takes the blame for the life that we’ve lived, and He gives us the credit for the life He lives, which means we never need to prove ourselves, because He is our proof. He won all the victories. He succeeded. He made it, and He gives us His record. His accomplishments are added to our account, so we are proven.
We have measured up. We are victorious, not because of what we’ve done, but because he did it for us. It means there’s no judgment in this life or in the next. So our choices are, we can try to be enough, we can try to measure up, whether it’s through some other religion or professional accomplishments or parenting, whatever. We can try to earn it, we can try to earn our validation of existence.
That’s one path. Or he can earn our validation, our worth for us. But those are the 2 choices. One of those options leads to endless stress. The other option leads to freedom.
But those are the only paths. Okay, we either stand on our record or we stand on his.
And frankly, if you haven’t figured it out already, none of us have a good enough record to stand on our own merit. If Michael Jordan, for crying out loud, doesn’t have peace standing on his record, I sure don’t have a chance.
But that’s a choice. We can take that path. If we want to be judged by our own record, God will let us do that, and then we’ll get what we deserve. We’ll get exactly what we earned, an eternity of torment.
We will be put on the scales and found wanting.
Forever. And it’ll do no good to call it unfair because it’s exactly what we aimed for. It’s what we chose.
Or we could trust Christ to earn what we could never earn ourselves and therefore be free of judgment because he was judged in our place.
Our record or His?
2 choices, 2 different outcomes.
Okay, so lastly, what difference does that make today? What we trust. It’s whether we live righteously or not. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but the freedom that we gain from not needing to prove ourselves is exactly what enables us to live a virtuous, good life. Think about this.
If we need to measure up in order to escape judgment, if it’s on us to prove ourselves, either— 2 possible outcomes down that path— either we won’t measure up and therefore we’ll feel crushed, or maybe we might believe that we have measured up and therefore we will be full of pride. Or, kind of strangely, it could be a mixture of both. Crushed, prideful, or both simultaneously. None of those outcomes lead to a good, virtuous life. On the crushed side, just think about this.
To the extent that we feel like we’re not good enough, if we feel like we’re not good enough, if we feel like we haven’t measured up, if we feel like the weight of the world’s on us and we haven’t lived up to it, that creates insecurity. That insecurity drives us to destructive behavior. Behaviors. If we feel less than, then we’re probably going to medicate that pain somehow. However we medicate, it will not add to our flourishing or other people’s flourishing.
Further, if we feel like we haven’t measured up, we’ll tend to blame shift, cover up our errors, excuse them, twist the truth to make ourselves look better so that we feel better. If you’ve ever been around people who blame shift, hide, twist the truth, medicate— if you’ve been around those people, you know they don’t make the world a better place.
They hurt themselves, they hurt others. Okay, that’s if we feel crushed, if we have to measure up and then we feel crushed. Okay, on the other side, if we feel like we have to measure up and we feel like, hey, maybe I made it, then we might pridefully believe that, you know, we’re better than others. We can be smug to those who we think haven’t made it. You might know some religious people like that.
It’s why you don’t like them. They are condescending toward those who they do not perceive as holy as themselves. They think they have measured up, they think you haven’t. And if you know people like that, you would not describe them as adding goodness or flourishing to the world. In fact, they are making the world worse.
So either way, if we have to measure up and then we end up either crushed or prideful, like, that doesn’t enable us to live a good life. Then sometimes— this is a bizarre thing— sometimes we can be filled with both. We can feel both crushed and prideful at the same time. You kind of see that in the Jordan documentaries. He’s insecure, so there’s some amount of crushed, but then he’s at the same time claiming that he’s better than others.
That’s not a great outcome either. It’s like we said, it certainly doesn’t fill him with compassion, kindness, gentleness, willing to elevate others above himself. If we believe that we need to measure up in order to have worth, it never leads to a righteous life.
It causes some amount of problems for everybody else and ourselves to different degrees. I mean, not everyone is equally empty, at least initially. In eternity, I guess we will be. But on the other hand, If we have a worth that we— in Christ, what do you have? You have a worth that you didn’t earn.
You’ve escaped judgment, but not by your own efforts. So that enables you to feel victorious, proven, enough, really enough.
But at the same time, you’re humble. You know, you’re not better than anyone else. So instead of being prideful or crushed or probably both, we feel proven, but only by grace. And since we’re proven, we don’t need to medicate, we don’t need to blame shift. We feel secure even in our failures, we can still feel secure.
But because we’re proven only by grace, we don’t feel superior to anyone, so we don’t look down on anyone. We’re not smug, we’re not haughty, we’re not condescending. We’re confident but humble, elevated but not smug. If you have that, then you have what enables you to live a good life. And you will.
This is what Jesus says at the end of our passage, verse 28 and 29. He says, an hour is coming when all who are in their tombs will hear his voice and come out. Those who have done good, to resurrection of life. Those who have done evil, to resurrection of judgment. So the good rise to life, the evil rise to judgment.
And we might think, if we read that verse just in isolation, we might think, oh, Jesus is saying, like everybody else, he must be saying we have to measure up, we have to be good enough to attain the resurrection of life. Stop being evil, be good in order so that you can resurrect to life. We might think he’s saying that, but that’s not what he’s saying, because it was just a few verses earlier he said what determines your resurrection is what you believe in. It’s what’s at the core of your being that determines whether you rise to life or judgment. So he’s not changing that now.
He’s not switching it to, oh, forget about what you believe, it’s about if you measure up. He’s not saying that, but he is saying what we trust in most deeply will necessarily, unavoidably influence how we live. If we believe we need to prove ourselves, to some degree we will be a mess. We will medicate. We might tear down others.
We could be terrible. We could be like those terrible religious people. Okay, that’s a type of evil. It comes from thinking that you need to prove yourself and then thinking that you’re better than others or being crushed because you’re not good enough. But— so that’s one choice.
But if at the core of our being, if at the core of our being we know that we are proven only by grace alone, so we don’t feel less than but we also don’t feel superior, if that is what is most foundational in our hearts, then we will necessarily, unavoidably, add goodness to the world. We will live a good life. Not to try to prove ourselves, but because we already have everything that we need. We’ve already been proven. So then we can focus totally on others and never feel like we’re getting shorted, because we never have to worry about ourselves, because Jesus has already worried about us, so we’re full.
Then we can just focus on others, we’ll add goodness to the world. No hint of self-interest. That’s what belief in Christ provides, all that is necessary for us to be proven.
If we believe that, not only will we escape the cycle of judgment in this life and the next, but we’ll add much goodness to the world in the meantime.
Those are the resources in him. May we embrace them. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for Christ who provides everything that we need. Keep us close to him.
May we dive in even deeper into what he has accomplished for us, Lord. Anytime we feel less than, may we look to him. Anytime we feel prideful, may we look to him.
May he be what validates our existence, and may it change who we are in every single way. Pray those things in Jesus’ name, amen.
