John 11:1-16 If God Is Love, Why Does He Allow Suffering? Part 1: The Delay

If you’ve ever prayed for God to step in and felt the silence stretch on, John 11 can feel almost unbearable. Jesus hears that Lazarus, His dear friend, is dying. He loves Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. He has the power to heal. And He still waits. That one detail forces a question many of us carry quietly: if God is able and God is love, why does He sometimes choose delay instead of rescue?

We walk line by line through John 11:1–16 and trace the pattern John keeps repeating: suffering becomes the stage where God’s works are displayed and the Son is glorified. But this time the “sign” isn’t a restoration, it’s a reversal. We also tackle a deeper issue behind the debate: is God’s glory at odds with God’s love, or are they the same reality from two angles? Along the way, we connect the dots to Job, where Scripture refuses to excuse evil with neat explanations and warns us against defending God by making Him smaller.

This message doesn’t ask you to call horror “good.” It names evil as evil, points to the promise of Revelation 21:4, and lands on the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” God does not watch your pain from a safe distance. He enters it, grieves with you, and calls His people to do the same for one another when words fail.

If you know someone hurting, or you’re the one hurting, listen, share this with a friend, and subscribe so you don’t miss what comes next in John 11. After you listen, will you leave a review and tell us what part you’re still wrestling with?

Transcript

The Question Behind The Pain

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Have you ever struggled to understand like the bottle enough suffering? If God truly loves us, why does he he always intervene? Why does he sometimes seem to delay when he has the power to act? In John chapter 11, Jesus receives word that his dear friend is dying. The Bible tells us that Jesus loved him and his sisters. Yet instead of going immediately, he waits. At first glance, that decision doesn't seem to make sense. But as the story unfolds, Jesus reveals something profound about the relationship between God's love, God's glory, and his purpose in a world marked by suffering. Join Pastor Harry Barrens as he unpacks one of the most difficult questions in the Christian faith. Here's Pastor Harry with today's message.

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Hello and welcome again to the takeaway. I'm your host, Pastor Harry Barrens, and today we're going to be tackling some of the hardest questions ever asked about God that often cause Christians to stumble or avoid conversations altogether. Because if we're honest, they're very difficult in light of our current understanding of God. So today, I hope to guide you through them in such a way that not only will you be able to answer them, but that your view of God will grow as well. So the questions are these Have you ever wondered why God allows sickness and death and corruption? Why he allows rape and murder and the abduction of children, all of it in a world where we are told God is love. And if he is love, how can a God of love allow these things to take place? That is the question we are going to attempt to answer today. And I say attempt because it is a question that good pastors and faithful theologians have wrestled with for centuries. A question no one this side of eternity answers with total finality. It requires an open mind and an open heart and a willingness to let the words of God speak to us and for us to receive them with faith and hope in what is still yet to come. Because God's perspective on this world is fuller than ours. And we tend to get stuck in the here and now, unable to see past what is directly in front of us. Now, there is an image I use to describe this in my book called Seeing Salvation from Heaven's Perspective that captures this thinking in chapter one called fragmentation. I use the image of a pile of bricks that used to be a cathedral. And I want you to see that cathedral today, not just the pile of bricks. Now, I don't want us to get so fixed on any one stone that we lose sight of the picture God is painting here in his word, in our lives, and across all of history. Because when we see the cathedral, we can have faith and trust in the one who built it. We can see it displayed in its full glory and radiance, built by the very love with which he loves us, and we can find joy and satisfaction in who he actually is, not in who we think he should be.

Lazarus Falls Ill In John 11

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So what we are doing today is opening a brand new chapter, John chapter 11, covering verses 1 through 16. And we're going to sit with the story of Lazarus, a man Jesus loved, whose death and whose raising becomes the hinge on which the rest of this gospel turns. And I believe this chapter, more than almost any other in Scripture, gives us the clearest picture we have of how God's love and God's glory hold together in a world like ours. So with that, let's begin in verses one through four to get started. It reads, Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. It was Mary who anointed the Lord with anointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent to him, saying, Lord, he whom you love is ill. But when Jesus heard it, he said, The illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.

Signs Escalate Toward Resurrection

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Now, this is not the first time John has shown us this exact pattern. Back in chapter 9, the disciples stood in front of a man born blind and asked Jesus a question that had been debated for generations. Who sent? This man or his parents, that he was born blind? And Jesus answered, It was not that this man sinned or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. Now, here we are in chapter 11, and word comes to Jesus that Lazarus is sick. And Jesus says almost the exact same thing. This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it. It's the same architecture we saw before. It's the same divine logic. But watch what has happened between these two moments, because there is an escalation here that I don't want you to miss. A man born blind receiving sight is a staggering miracle, something that had never happened in recorded history, something the man himself said in chapter nine had never been heard of since the world began. But sight given to a man who never had it is a restoration. What is about to happen to Lazarus is not a restoration, it is a reversal of something final. Death cannot be undone, except by the one who holds authority over it. John has been building toward this the entire gospel. Water becomes wine, a boy near death is healed from a distance. Five thousand are fed from five loaves. Jesus walks on water in the middle of a storm. A man born blind receives sight. And then now a man four days dead is called out of the tomb. Each sign is greater than the last, and every single one of them exists for the same stated purpose, the glory of God displayed through the Son. Now there is something else in verse four that matters for how we read what Jesus does next. He does not say this illness will not lead to death as a hope or a wish or a guess about how things might turn out. He states it as settled fact before Lazarus has even died, which means Jesus already knows exactly what he intends to do. The outcome is not uncertain to him for a single moment. And here is where we have to be honest about something, because the text will not let us soften it at all. Jesus was not powerless to prevent this. We already know from earlier in this gospel that he could heal from a distance. He did exactly that for a Roman official son dying back in chapter four with nothing more than a word, without ever setting foot in the house. He had the power, he had the relationship, he loved this family. John already told us that twice. And knowing all of that, he chose to stay exactly where he was for two more days while his friend died.

Love Named Then The Delay

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Now, this is not a story about a God whose hands were tied. This is a story about a God who could have prevented a death and chose the delay instead. And I don't want us to move past that too quickly because that is the real question underneath everything we are doing today. Not simply why does God allow suffering in the abstract, but why does a God who could stop this specific pain right now in front of him sometimes choose not to? Now he is not late to what is about to happen here. He is early for something greater than anyone standing in Bethany that day could imagine asking for. But that does not erase the fact that he could have kept Lazarus from ever dying in the first place, and he didn't. Now some of you are already feeling something as we walk through this, and I don't want to move past it as if it isn't there. We just said it plainly. Jesus could have prevented this, he had the power and he had the love, and he chose the delay anyway. Now that sits uncomfortably, and it should. This is the question we opened with now standing right in front of us in the text itself. If God is love and God is able, why does he allow what love should never allow? Now we are not going to answer that just yet because it deserves more than a quick answer in the next few minutes, and so do you. But it is sitting there while we keep walking through this text, and we are going to come back to it fully before this episode is over, I promise. Now, here's one thing I want to plant before we move forward because it's going to matter later. Isaiah 43 7 says, Of God's people, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made. Now, Lazarus, Mary, and Martha were not incidental to what happens in this story. They were made, like every human being, for the glory of God. Now, what happens to them here is not glory imposed on them from outside their purpose. It is glory finally displayed through the very reason they exist. And here is the second thing. When Jesus was asked which commandment in the law was the greatest, he answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. And the second, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. We find that in Matthew chapter 22, verses 37 to 40. Now, God did not give his people two separate commands about two separate things. Love him fully, love others as an extension of that love, and said, Everything else in the law and the prophets hangs on that. Love and glory were never separate categories in what God revealed. That is going to matter more than you know by the time we get to the end of this episode. Now let's keep walking through the text in verses five through six. It says, Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. Now, look at what John does here, because I don't think it's an accident. Verse three, we see the sisters send word, Lord, he whom you love is ill. Verse 4, Jesus says, This is for the glory of God. And then in verse 5, almost as if John is answering an objection before the reader can even raise it, he tells us directly, Now, Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Now the text will not let you separate the two. It opens with love named by the sisters and states the purpose as glory, and then immediately reaffirms the love a second time. In John's own voice, as the narrator, making absolutely certain that no reader walks away, thinking the glory statement in verse 4 diminished or replaced the love in verse 3. And then, right after telling us how deeply Jesus loved this family, he stays two days longer, right where he is.

Danger In Judea And Thomas’ Loyalty

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And then we read verses 7 through 16, and it says, Then after this, he said to his disciples, Let us go to Judea again. The disciples said to him, Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you. And are you going there again? Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him. After saying these things, he said to them, Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him. The disciples said to him, Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover. Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest and sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, Lazarus has died, and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe, but let us go to him. So Thomas called the twins, said to his fellow disciples, Let us also go that we may die with him. Now the disciples are afraid, and their fear is not irrational. And if we go back to what just happened at the end of chapter 10, we see that Jesus is standing in Solomon's porch, and he says, I and the Father are one, and the Jews pick up stones to kill him. That is the last thing that happened before this chapter opens. So when Jesus says, Let us go to Judea again, the disciples are not being cowardly here. They are remembering quite reasonably that the last time he was there, someone tried to kill him. And then Jesus answers with the image of the 12 hours of daylight, which he is saying there is a set time for what he is about to do. And he is not walking into it blind or careless. He knows exactly how much daylight is left. And then he tells them plainly, Lazarus has died, not asleep, he died. And then he says something remarkable. He says, For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. He was glad, not because his friend had died. We already know from what follows that this grieves Jesus deeply. He is glad because what the disciples are about to witness will produce a depth of faith that a simple healing never could have given them. And then Thomas speaks and he says, Let us also go, that we may die with him. This is not a triumphant faith. This is a man who expects the worst, who has resigned himself to the very real possibility that walking into Judea means walking into a stoning and who chooses loyalty anyway. Thomas doesn't understand what is about to happen any more than the rest of them do. He simply refuses to let Jesus walk into danger alone. Now I want to spend some time with you right here, speaking into your life directly, looking at the cathedral that God has been building through scripture, through your life and through all of history, so we can see where all of this is ultimately pointing and how these things resolve. They don't resolve with us knowing the answer definitively, they resolve with us having hope and faith in the one who does know.

Love And Glory Two Angles

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Now, this episode is landing at exactly the right time for me personally, because this is something I have wrestled with myself, trying to understand the character of God and how his worth is displayed in a world like this one. A few weeks ago, before I sat down to put this episode together, I had a conversation with my neighbor about this very question. And he is someone I have spent years in conversations like this with, someone who has grown in his own faith in ways I have watched with real joy. And that conversation is part of what brought me to where we are right now. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with my neighbor about this very question, the one I asked you to hold on to earlier in this episode. He said something a lot of thoughtful Christians say, something that sounds right on the surface. He told me that in his own study, he had come to believe that the love is what's behind God's glory, that glory is just what love looks like when God puts it on display. And I told him where I landed that glory comes first, that love flows out of God's glory, not the other way around. And he asked me a simple question. He said, Okay, so what's behind the glory then? And I sat there for a good 30 seconds or so before I said anything because I didn't want to just respond. I wanted to actually think it through. And somewhere in that silence, it hit me. And I asked him the same question back, the other direction. I said, Well, what's behind the love then? And he stepped back a little and he smirked because I think he saw exactly where the question was going. And he didn't have a clean answer waiting on the other side either. Now, here is what we found. Sitting right there in that conversation, both of us landing on the same truth at the same moment. If you ask what's behind God's glory, the answer is his love. And if you ask what's behind God's love, the answer is his glory. Neither one is standing underneath the other. They are not stacked, they are the same reality seen from two different angles. Glory is what his worth looks like on display. Love is what his worth looks like given away. You cannot separate them because they were never two things to begin with. That is why the two greatest commandments were never intentional love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. And on these two hang everything else God ever revealed. That is why Isaiah could say in the same breath that we were formed and created for his glory and mean it as an act of love, not instead of one. Love and glory were always the same reality. We just don't have the categories most days to see them that way. Now Mary and Martha are going to say the exact same thing to Jesus' face when he finally arrives. Both of them separately. And they were not wrong about that. He could have. We already established that. This is not a case where Jesus was somehow unable to help. This is the same pattern we uncovered back in episode 50, when we spent an entire episode in the 400 years of silence between Malachi and Matthew. The God who could have spoken and did not, who could have sent a prophet and didn't, who let Antiochus desecrate the temple and let his people fight for three years in the wilderness before the rededication came. That was never God being absent or unable. That was the same God choosing the same silence and the delay because he was working toward a fulfillment that silence alone could prepare the way for. Now, here at a much smaller and more personal scale, we are watching the exact pattern again in one family, in one grief, in one tomb.

Naming Evil Without Explaining It

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So back to the question we opened with. Now I'm not going to stand here and tell you that the horrors of this world are secretly good, or that they are love wearing a different face. They are not. Rape is not love. The abduction of a child is not love. War, abomination, the slow decay of a body in a tomb, these things are evil. And scripture never once asks us to call them anything else. They are what we know them to be. And they should break our hearts exactly the way they do. And I want to go further than that because someone listening right now is thinking Lazarus getting sick and dying is one thing. That is natural. That happens to everyone eventually. But what about the child who is abducted, abused in ways I will not describe in detail here by people who are supposed to protect them? What about slaves with no power, no voice, and no way to save themselves? If Lazarus' death raises the question, these stories detonate it. And I am not going to pretend that the question is smaller than it is, or move past it quickly, because it deserves to be named exactly as heavy as it is. Now, here's where I want to bring in something from the book of Job because I think it gives us the only honest framework scripture actually offers for this. In Job chapter one, Satan comes before God and asks for permission to afflict Job. And God sets a boundary this far and no further. Satan did not act with unlimited freedom. He acted within a limit only God had the authority to set. And that boundary matters enormously because it means the evil done to Job was never God's decree. God did not author what happened to him. God permitted it. Within a limit, he alone controlled. And the evil itself belonged entirely to the one who requested it. And later in that book, when Job's friends spend chapter after chapter trying to explain his suffering, insisting he must have sinned and that there must be a reason that makes all of it make sense. God does not commend them for defending him. He is angry with them because in trying to justify what happened to Job, they made God smaller. They tried to fit him inside an explanation human logic could hold when the truth was bigger and stranger and did not need their defense in the first place. Now I think this is exactly the posture we need here. God does not need us to explain away what happened to that child or to justify it or to find the hidden reason that makes it acceptable. It is not acceptable. It never will be. What happened to them was the architecture of the enemy, what Paul calls the prince of the power of the air and Ephesians chapter 2, operating within whatever boundary God and his own wisdom permitted. The evil belongs to the one who did it and to the enemy behind him. It was never the decree of a God who delights in harming children. And that last part matters more than I can say. That child was not a prop in someone else's story of redemption. Isaiah told us why. They were created for God's glory. The same glory Lazarus and Mary and Martha were made for. Whatever redemption comes is theirs. Not borrowed, not secondhand, not a side benefit to somebody else's faith. It's theirs. So what do we do with the horror itself if we are not permitted to explain it away or justify it? I think this chapter gives us the only faithful answer. We do not defend God. We trust him in exactly the places we cannot yet see. The way Job never received an explanation from God and was never given one and was still restored, still met by God Himself, out of the whirlwind, still satisfied by the presence of God, even without ever hearing the reason why. God's glory does not need our defense, it needs our faith in the God who has not yet finished the story we are living inside of. But

Job’s Limits And Trust

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here is what this chapter also shows us. And I think it is the closest we get to an honest answer for suffering of every kind, small and unspeakable alike. God does not display his love by preventing every hard thing, he displays it by walking directly into the hardest things and doing something with them that prevention could never have produced. If Jesus had rushed to Bethany the moment word reached him, the world would have watched a healing. But because he waited, the world watched a resurrection. The delay was not God loving his own glory more than he loved Lazarus, Mary, or Martha. The delay was what made a far greater display of his love possible for them and for everyone who would ever read this story afterward. Now I want to be honest with you about something else, also. I cannot fully explain how the suffering in your life right now or the horror on the news this week becomes purposeful in light of eternity. I don't think anyone can decide of it. What I can tell you is what Scripture promises is coming. In Revelation 21, verse 4, God says of the new heavens and the new earth, he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. Now we cannot yet comprehend the weight of that promise, but we can know it. We cannot yet feel the full shape of it because we are not there yet. The same way Mary and Martha could not yet comprehend what Jesus was about to do while their brother lay decaying in a tomb. All we can do on this side of it is trust him, the way Thomas trusted him, enough to say, Let us go and die with him, even without understanding what was coming. The way Mary and Martha each said the same aching words to his face and were not rebuked for saying them. Now here's the truest thing in these verses.

Jesus Wept And God Enters Grief

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What we read is the shortest verse in all of the Bible. Jesus wept. Even knowing what he was about to do, even holding the resurrection in his own hands, he stood in front of that tomb and he grieved in real time with the people he loved. God does not observe our suffering from a safe distance while explaining his purpose to us from far away. He enters it. He feels what we feel. It moves him in the way it moves us. And that is the God who is walking with you through whatever this season has been. Not a God who is unmoved by your pain, but a God who weeps in the middle of it, even while he is already holding what your resurrection is going to look like in his hands. Now, a dear friend of mine, a pastor, lost his son a few years ago in a tragic car accident. And I filled in for him for a time. And the very first message I had to give was just a couple days after it happened. He and his family were in that room that morning, desperate to hear from God, hearts broken over something they could not make sense of. And I had to stand in front of them and say something true. So I got up and I gave them the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus wept. I told them there is a moment in which God meets us, and this is it. He relates to us, he meets us exactly where we are. He understands the tragedy we are living through. And there is a display of his character coming that is greater than we can comprehend right now. Not displayed yet, not in that moment, but promised with a certainty that every tear will one day be wiped away. But in the middle of the tragedy, he does not remove it. He does not wipe away the tears while we are still in it. He sits with us through it. And I told that congregation the truest way we would feel that nearness that morning was by doing it for each other. So he did not give a long message. We broke into groups and we prayed and we wept and we embraced that grieving family and we hurt with them. We did not explain it away. We did not try to make it smaller than it was. We sat with them the way Jesus sits with us. This is why Martha's answer to Jesus matters so much. And I want to bring it back one more time before we close. When Jesus tells her Lazarus will rise again, Martha answers with correct doctrine. She says, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. She knew the theology. And Jesus does not affirm the doctrine and move on. He says, I am the resurrection and the life. He does not give her a better explanation. He gives her himself. Because some things are never going to be settled by being understood correctly. They are only settled by being displayed, lived, held, walked through in the presence of the one who is the answer.

How To Sit With The Suffering

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Now, one more thing before we close, because there is a whole group of people listening to this who are not one carrying the loss directly. You are the one standing next to them. You are watching someone you love walk through the exact kind of tragedy we have spent this entire episode sitting with, and you do not know what to say. And that not knowing feels uncomfortable enough that you want to fill it with something. Now, Paul says it plainly in 2 Corinthians 5 20. He says, We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. In that room, standing next to your grieving friend, you may be the nearest thing to his presence they can actually touch. And an ambassador's job is not to justify what happened, not to explain it, not to fix it. We already saw what happens when people try to do that. Job's friend spent chapters trying to explain his suffering, and God was not pleased with them for it. The job is to do exactly what Jesus did at that tomb. Weep, embrace them, be still. The way Psalm 46 10 puts it, be still and know that I am God. This is what it looks like to love your neighbor as yourself. What do you actually need in the middle of a tragedy that cannot be explained? You need to be embraced. You need people who will weep with you, feel the weight of it with you, and walk through it beside you. Not people trying to explain it to you because it cannot be explained. When we try to offer our own fixes to a tragedy no one can fix, we do not help. Let me say that again. When we try to offer our own fixes to a tragedy nobody can fix, we do not help the situation. We accelerate the harm. No matter which side of this we are standing on, the one carrying the loss or the one walking beside someone who is, it is through the love of God displayed by those who love us, sitting with us, walking with us through these things, that we see his worth on display. And when we are still and know that he is God, we see him displaying his glory through his love to all whom he has called and created for his own glory. And in that we have the promise and the hope that every tear will be wiped away and all things will be made new, and we will not remember the hurts, but we will always know the glory to the praise of his glorious grace.

Prayer, Promise, And How To Reach Us

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Let's pray. Father, thank you that your love and your glory have never been two separate things. Thank you that you do not stand apart from our suffering, but that you enter it and you grieve with us inside of it, even while you are already at work on something greater than we can yet see. For those carrying real pain today, the pain that has no easy explanation, we ask for your nearness, not a resolution. Teach us to trust the one who wept at the tomb he was about to empty. In Jesus' name. Amen. Now I want to thank you again for joining us today, and I hope today's message really helped you take a step closer, knowing just how much God loves you and wants you to know him. Now, if anything today resonated with you, or if you have any questions or comments, you can feel free to reach out to us at thetaway.faith. There you can send us an email, or you can click on the text us link in this episode description, as we would truly love to hear from you. I know today's message was not easy to hear, and I know it touched many of you in ways that you were not expecting. We are here for you, whether it's to cry, to pray, to listen, or to answer your questions, please reach out. Now, on our next episode, we're going to continue in John chapter 11 as Jesus finally arrives in Bethany, and Martha comes out to meet him on the road with the words that have been sitting underneath this entire chapter. Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And what Jesus says back to her is one of the seven great I am statements in this gospel, and it is going to change the way you think about death for the rest of your life. God bless, and we'll see you next time on the takeaway.