Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. John 11:25
BACKGROUND
A man named Lazarus lived with his two sisters, Mary and Martha, in Bethany, a village on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem. The western slope of the Mount of Olives faces Jerusalem and the Temple, so Bethany was on the opposite side of the Mount of Olives. Jesus was close to this family and loved them (John 11:5). Jesus arrived at the home of Lazarus four days after his death and raised him from the dead. Jesus did this to glorify the Father and to highlight the twofold aspect of the raising from the dead.
I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE
This passage is not the first time Jesus has claimed to be able to raise the dead and give life to those raised from the dead (John 5:21). So, what does Jesus mean when He says I am the resurrection and the life? Is He speaking of the general resurrection on the Last Day, or is He referring to something else?
The Resurrection.
To understand what Jesus is teaching when He states that He is “the resurrection” in this verse and John 5:21, we must first know what kind of resurrection He is speaking of.
According to the natural order of events, a restoration from death comes before life is attained. All human beings after the Fall are fallen creatures and are spiritually dead. Therefore, in order to have life, one must first be raised from the dead. In His proclamation, Jesus speaks of the spiritual state of fallen people: “I am the resurrection and the life.”
The fallen human beings are in a depraved state, and their bodies are in union with their spirits. But their spirits are dead, and they are unable to seek God. Furthermore, they have no ability to extricate themselves from this fallen spiritual state. Only God can rescue their dead spirits. For fallen human beings to seek and know God, God must act to quicken (i.e., enliven) their fallen spirits. The Father and the Son accomplish this spiritual resurrection of the dead spirits of the fallen elect through the work of the Holy Spirit.
This is the process of regeneration where the Holy Spirit acts internally in the spirit of each fallen person to re-format the fallen spirit. By this divine act within the souls of fallen persons, they are enabled to hear the call of God for the salvation of their souls. The regenerate individual who formerly could only sin and could not seek God now can either sin or not sin and can seek God. John Calvin writes about the regeneration of the fallen as follows:
According, they believe in Christ, though they were formerly dead, begin to live, because faith is a spiritual resurrection of the soul, and animates the soul itself that it may live to God.[1]
Berkhof has defined regeneration as “that act of God by which the principal of the new life is implanted in man, and the governing disposition of the soul is made holy… and the first holy exercise of this new disposition is secured.”[2] The principle of life is implanted in the dead spirits of the fallen. The resurrection of the dead spirits of the fallen from the dead state to life and salvation is what Jesus is referring to when He states I am the resurrection and the life.
This author believes that this resurrection Jesus refers to is the spiritual regeneration of the fallen to a new life by believing in Christ through faith. By divine act, the principle of the new life is implanted in the souls of fallen individuals. This is a radical change of disposition of the fallen soul affecting the intellect (1 Cor. 2:14; Eph. 1:18; Col. 3:10), the will (Phil. 2:13; Heb. 13:21), and the emotions (1 Pet. 1:8) of the whole person and directing the person’s disposition toward God. Jesus is not speaking of the general bodily resurrection of all at the second coming of Christ.
How do we know that Jesus was not speaking of bodily resurrection?
Consider the following.
- When Jesus arrived in Bethany at the tomb of Lazarus, Martha met Jesus and Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died (John 11:21). But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” “Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again”” (John 11:23). Martha, speaking of Lazarus, said to Jesus, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24). She was referring to the general resurrection, the bodily resurrection of all on the Last Day at the second coming of Christ. And Jesus answered. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25, 26).
- It is important to note that Jesus did not affirm Martha’s statement about the bodily resurrection even though it was correct regarding the general bodily resurrection on the Last Day. Instead of affirming her statement, He made a new proclamation about something different from bodily resurrection, namely, “I am the resurrection and the life…” As we will see, this is unlike Jesus in cases where the person to whom He was speaking correctly responds to the subject being discussed.
- For example, When He was in the district of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples “But who do you say that I am?” (Matt. 16:15). “Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). “And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 16:17). Jesus affirmed a correct statement by Simon Peter regarding Himself.
- Also, we know that Jesus healed a man who had been blind from birth (John 9:1-7). The Pharisees questioned this healed man and eventually cast him out. When “Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.” He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him” (John 9:35-38). The healed man believed in and worshiped Jesus. Jesus accepted the man’s worship of Him as a proper thing, thus affirming his correct belief in Christ as Lord.
- But when Jesus told Martha, “Your brother will rise again,” and she responded with her acknowledgment of the general bodily resurrection on the Last Day, Jesus did not affirm that she correctly understood what He meant. The general bodily resurrection of all on the Last Day was not what Jesus taught at the tomb. He was about to temporarily raise Lazarus from the dead to confirm that He, Jesus, is the resurrection and the life. He is the resurrection that brings the elect from spiritual death to spiritual life.
When Jesus answered by saying, “I am the resurrection…,” He was not speaking of the general bodily resurrection that every human being will experience on the Last Day. Martha was aware of Jesus’s teachings about the general resurrection. But Jesus was not referring to the general resurrection in this case, nor was He earlier in John 5:21. He spoke of the spiritual resurrection to spiritual life limited to only the elect of God, which occurs in the here and now.
In their natural state after the Fall, all human beings have the absolute inability not to sin, and they cannot seek God. They remain separated from God by sin. All humans in this state are spiritually dead. In order to have life, the fallen person must be resurrected from that state of spiritual death. This is the resurrection Jesus talks about in John 5:21 and here in the present verse (v. 25).
Jesus is teaching about how He bestows life upon all the regenerate elect. Jesus came and found the entire world in a state of spiritual death; thus, He had to begin His efforts to give life with a resurrection from the spiritually dead state that everyone existed in after the Fall.
For all in a dead spiritual state, the first step to life is a rising from the dead state―a resurrection, as Jesus told Nicodemus, born again; born of water and the Spirit. The life that Jesus is bestowing is not the life of creation. Even in their dead state, they have that. Jesus is speaking of spiritual life, not the life that ends with bodily death. He is rescuing the fallen souls from spiritual death to a life that continues after physical death in heaven in the intermediate state while awaiting the general resurrection and salvation to eternity in the new heaven and new earth.
In this spiritual resurrection, the body and soul are together, and the body is alive, but the spirit is dead; it has the absolute inability to seek God. So, through the instrumentality of the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son effectuate a re-formatting of the fallen spirit from one that is dead and cannot seek God to one that is alive and can seek God. This regeneration of the dead spirit sets the regenerated elect on their way to belief through faith and the beginning of eternal life. Regeneration by the Spirit is the resurrection that brings the fallen spirit from death to life by saving faith to salvation.
Earlier in John’s gospel, he wrote of Jesus telling Nicodemus that “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). In Greek, the word translated into English as “again” can be translated either as again or from above. Later, Jesus told him, “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). Water here has the Old Testament meaning of purification. And this water of purification is the Word. The apostle Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus that:
as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. (Eph. 5:25-27)
So Christ, the living Word revealed in the written word, is the purifying water by which the Holy Spirit, acting internally within the souls of fallen human beings, effectuates regeneration, which is the spiritual resurrection that brings spiritual life where there was spiritual death.
The Spirit of God re-forms you, regenerates you by the purifying power of the living Word, and brings life where there was death. This is the resurrection Christ is referring to in John 11:25.
We should clarify something regarding the “word.” Christ, the living word, the logos, is the purifying agent, not the truth of the gospel in the written word, though the gospel is part of the post-regeneration conversion. The gospel’s truth is moral and persuasive and addresses itself to the consciousness of humans. The living word works in the subconscious, creatively bringing the fallen soul from death to life.
Note that Jesus does not indiscriminately restore life upon all as in the general bodily resurrection. He said that He “gives life to whom he will” (John 5:21). Jesus selects only those particular individuals, namely, the elect[3] (John 6:39-40, 17:6-12), for this spiritual resurrection. The elect are the souls the Father chose and gave to the Son as surety in eternity before creation (John 6:37, 39, 10:29, 17:2,6, 9, 11, 12, 24) destined for salvation (2 Thess. 2:13).
The Spirit of the Father and the Son, Christ Jesus, rescues the elect from the darkness of their fallen souls by regeneration, which changes the depraved soul from one of total hostility toward God to one that seeks God. This spiritual resurrection is complete once the conversion is consummated at the individual’s belief in Christ through saving faith from God. After conversion, the elect believer is justified and adopted by God, thus beginning spiritual life, which is the second aspect named in Jesus’ “I Am” proclamation in John 11:25.
The resurrection Jesus proclaims here is the work of the Holy Spirit using the Word to purify the souls of the fallen to bring them to spiritual life where there was only spiritual death before.
The Life.
In John 11:26, Jesus explains that all those whose spirits are resurrected from their fallen state of death shall have eternal life by believing in Him through faith. The proclamation by Jesus that He is the life is established upon the power of Christ in the believer. Jesus, in the believer, provides for the perpetuity of life. Thus, their souls, purified and regenerated by Christ, are born again of imperishable seed with Christ dwelling in them (1 Pet. 1:22, 23). Because Christ dwells in every believer, though the body dies because of sin, the spirit will live for eternity because of His righteousness (Rom. 8:10).
Although our body is continually wasting away, our soul is being renewed day by day (2 Cor. 4:16). And this is because of the living Word in us. Our body is transient, but our soul is eternal. As Calvin wrote, “death itself is a sort of emancipation from the bondage of death.”[4]
The regenerative power of Christ works in our soul to effectuate the resurrection of our soul from death to life; because of His presence in us, he gives us spiritual life that will not die. Thus, He not only effectuates the resurrection and the eternal life, but He IS the resurrection and the life.
[1] John Calvin, John Calvin’s Complete Commentaries: The Gospel of John, Trans. William Pringle, Kindle (1847-1850).
[2] Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (The Banner of Truth Trust, 2012), 485.
[3] The elect―in eternity past, God the Father decreed that only certain people would be saved from their fallen state. The Father gave these individuals to the Son as their surety to redeem them by paying the ransom for their sins on the cross.
[4] Calvin, Commentaries.
