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Morning Thoughts on John 11:43 Elder Philip N. Conley

John 11:43, "And when he thus had spoken, he cried
with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth.”

This morning, language still has meaning. One of the earliest lessons about the Bible
that I was taught as a little boy from my natural father was, "You can never hope to
know what the Bible means if you don't first know what it says."

To get the meaning and the message that God has left on record for us, we have to be
acquainted with the Bible's language. By understanding language, we can then build

the language into secure and solid building blocks of concepts. Those concepts are in
turn then laid together to form the structure of Biblical theology as a house that both
shines as a testimony to God's work and an example for our course here below. With-
out the understanding of language, we fail to make blocks (or perhaps worse make
unsteady blocks that cannot hold weight). Without blocks that can be laid together,
we have no structure as a house and shield in the world. We then become ignorant,
forget about God's grace, and wander aimlessly in our daily struggles. Let us choose
the former path that keeps a good house of Biblical thought built upon the language
of the Bible itself.

As we have already mentioned in our previous writing, Christ's spoken language in
the account of Lazarus in John 11 was for our benefit to understand what He did, how
He did it, and what it means. Progressing into this three word sentence of Christ, we
will see some beautiful particulars about the Lord's call, and from that, we glean rich
insights into the overall scope of the Lord's work in this regard. However, for starters,
we need to make some qualifying statements. While we will use Christ's language to

make a comparison to the effectual call in the new birth (and by extension the resur-
rection), this account details bringing a naturally dead man back to natural life again.
What Lazarus experienced in reality (natural raising), points to what God's family
experiences in spiritual raising.