John 11:17-37 If God Is Love, Why Does He Allow Suffering? Part 2: The Grief

Grief doesn’t wait for a convenient time, and neither do the questions it brings. When tragedy hits, we instinctively ask: If God is love, why does He allow suffering, and if God is sovereign, how can evil exist without making Him its author? Pastor Harry Behrens keeps those questions on the table and then tightens the focus to what the Bible actually says about justice, mercy, human responsibility, and the nature of evil. 

We start with a difficult reset that confronts modern assumptions: Scripture does not treat us as people who are owed a suffering-free life. From Romans and Ephesians, we talk about sin, wrath, and grace, and why the gospel is not God meeting an obligation but God giving mercy that was never deserved. Then we correct a common Christian expectation that coming to Christ should make the hard things go away, looking at Jesus’ own words about tribulation and Paul’s “thorn” as an example of purpose in weakness. 

From there, we draw a crucial distinction for anyone wrestling with the problem of evil: moral evil versus calamity. Using James 1:13, Isaiah 45:7, and Job 2:10, we explore how God can be sovereign over disaster without being morally wicked, and why collapsing those categories either blames God for sin or turns Him into a passive observer. Finally, we return to John 11 and watch Jesus meet Martha with truth and Mary with tears. “Jesus wept” becomes the clearest picture of a God who enters suffering on purpose and still holds the authority to undo it. 

If this helped you, subscribe, share it with a friend walking through grief, and leave a review so more people can find the conversation. What question about suffering are you carrying right now?

Transcript

The Question Under Our Grief

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In our last episode, we began asking one of the hardest questions anyone can ask. If God is love, why does he allow suffering? Today we continue that conversation by looking deeper. If God is sovereign over all things, how can evil exist without making him its author? Is every tragedy the same in God's eyes? Or does Scripture distinguish between different kinds of evil? In this episode, Pastor Harry steps back from the narrative of John 11 to examine what the whole of Scripture says about God's sovereignty, human responsibility, and the nature of evil. As difficult as these questions are, the answers reveal a God who is perfectly just, perfectly holy, and perfectly good. Here's Pastor Harry Barns with today's message.

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Hello and welcome again to the Takeaway. I'm your host, Pastor Harry Barns, and today we're going to be sitting with something deep inside human emotion, the experience of grief and the questions that always seem to rise up out of it. Why is this happening? Why does it feel this way? Where is God in this? Why would He allow it? Now, if you have ever grieved anyone or anything, a person, a marriage, a dream that died, you know these questions. They arrive uninvited and they do not wait for a convenient time. Now, here is what I want you to see underneath those questions before we go any further. At the root of every why is this happening, we are actually trying to comprehend evil. The weight of it, the discomfort of it, the loss of it, the feeling of our whole world coming apart at the seams. And underneath that struggle to comprehend is something older than any of us, something that was never ours to carry in the first place. It was inherited, passed down from the very first fall in the garden, and handed to every generation since a weight none of us have the capacity to hold rightly, because it was never given to us to hold at all. It was taken. That is where we're going today. We are going to be continuing in John chapter 11, moving into verses 17 through 37, where we meet Martha, then Mary, and where Jesus does something the Bible has been pointing us toward for a long time. But before we get there, I want to address something directly because I know in the last episode it landed heavy for a lot of you. We sat with a hard question. How does a loving God allow evil in this world, the sickness, the tragedy, the horror done to the innocent? Now, some of you finished that episode still carrying weight from it. And I want to pick that weight back up before we move forward because

We Are Not Owed Suffering-Free Lives

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there is a piece of the answer I haven't yet said, and it belongs right here at the front of this episode. It's the assumption that we are owed protection from suffering in the first place, that a good God's job is to shield people who deserve to be shielded. And scripture, scripture does not let us stand on that ground. Now we covered this back in our study through Ephesians, where Paul writes in chapter 2, verse 3 that we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. And Romans 3.23 says, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 6.23 follows up and says the wages of sin is death. It doesn't say the wages of murder or abduction or the worst atrocities you can imagine. It says the wages of sin, period. Now, what that means is that none of us enter this world with a claim on protection from suffering. What every one of us is actually owed by strict and perfect justice is actually death. Now, I want to say something that is hard to say here and harder still to hear because it cuts against everything our culture tells us about ourselves. We ask why God allows suffering to fall on innocent children. And I want to ask a question back to you. Who told us they were innocent? That is a difficult sentence to say out loud because it can sound like I am judging a child or excusing what was done to them, and I'm not doing that. What was done to them remains evil, and the person who did it bears full responsibility before God for it. But scripture is clear that every human being, including every child, is born into sin. We're not born neutral, waiting to decide later whether we will sin. Like David says in Psalm 51, that he was brought forth in iniquity and in sin his mother conceived him. Every one of us starts life already inside the fall, already under Adam's curse, and already, as Paul says, dead in our trespasses and sins. Now that does not make any specific evil less evil. It does not mean a person's suffering is a direct punishment for their own sin. Job's story rules that out completely, but it removes the assumption that God has broken some promise to protect innocent people, because none of us were ever standing on that ground of innocence to begin with. What God made instead was a promise of mercy to people who deserved wrath. And that changes the entire math of this question. Paul says it in Ephesians 2, 4, and 5. But God being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, he made us alive together with Christ. But God, everything before those two words is what we deserved. Everything after them is what we received instead. Grace is not God fulfilling an obligation. It is God giving what was never owed to us in the first place. And now here is something else worth understanding as we sit with this, because it changes how we should expect this world to feel.

A Defeated Rebellion Still Runs

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What we are living in right now is not heaven and it is not hell. It is an intern place. And that is true not only for us, but for the angels, for the demons, and for Satan himself. Hell is an eternal place prepared for the devil and his angels and for those who reject Jesus Christ. This world is not that place. Now, what we are living inside of right now is a world where rebellion against God is still being permitted to run its course before the final judgment that ends it. And I want to be careful with how I say that, because there is no battle in the sense of two evenly matched sides with an uncertain outcome. Colossians 2.15 says, Christ already disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, triumphing over them at the cross. Revelation shows Jesus defeating his enemies with nothing more than a word from his mouth. What that means is that God has never been straining against Satan the way two opponents strain against each other. What we are watching is a defeated rebellion, still permitted to operate for a time, within limits only God sets. It's the same pattern we saw with Job. Now, Paul calls Satan the prince of the power of the air in Ephesians chapter 2, the one currently at work and the sons of disobedience, the one all of us once followed, walking according to the passions of our flesh. Now Jesus said it to the Pharisees directly, to their faces in John chapter 8. He said, You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. Now that is a hard thing for anyone to hear about themselves before Christ, but it is exactly what Scripture says about every one of us prior to salvation. So when we ask why a good God allows this much darkness in the world, part of the answer is that the rebellion has not yet been finally removed, even though it has already been decisively defeated. And now, until that removal comes, we live inside something real and ongoing. It's not a contest, God might lose, but a permitted rebellion running out its allotted time before the judgment already determined. Now, here is a question this naturally raises. And I think there is a common misconception among Christians that needs correcting directly, right here, right now. Once I come to Jesus, once I am under his righteousness and no longer under wrath, many believers quietly expect that their suffering should stop. And that that coming to Christ means the hard things go away. But Jesus never promised that. He said, In this world you will have trials and tribulations. He told his disciples that in John chapter 16. The Son of Man himself suffered and died. And we are told plainly that we are following after him, that we must take up our cross daily and follow. Now, Paul is actually one of the clearest examples of this because, unlike Job, Paul was told exactly why his suffering was there. He writes in 2 Corinthians chapter 12 that because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations he had received, a thorn was given him in the flesh to keep him from becoming conceited. Now he asked God three times to remove it, and God said, No. God said, My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness. Now there is actually something beautiful in that. So that Paul would not turn inward toward his own accomplishments the way Satan turned inward toward himself, but instead would stay turned toward the one who had saved him. And Paul's response is remarkable here. He says, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For when I am weak, then I am strong. David wrote Psalms from Caves while being hunted. Abraham wandered as a stranger in a land he was promised but would not see fully given in his own lifetime. Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers, and years later said the words that summarize this entire principle. He said, You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. Now, here's the difference, and I want to state it as clearly as I can. Before Christ, our suffering existed under the wrath we were born owing. After Christ, our suffering is no longer about wrath at all. That debt was already paid fully at the cross. Now our suffering exists for a different purpose entirely. It's for the glory of God displayed through lives that have already received his love and are now living deliberately for his honor, the same way his son did all the way to the cross. So the believer is not suffering because they are still under judgment. The believer is suffering because they are following the pattern their savior walked first, and God is still at work in the middle of it. The way he was at work in Joseph's slavery, using what the enemy meant for evil to produce something the enemy never intended. Now I know these are hard truths, and I want to say that plainly because I am not saying them to be harsh to you right now. We live in a culture that has trained us to believe that we are owed a defense, that if something painful happens to us, someone must be at fault and someone must answer for it. And when it comes to God, the honest starting place Scripture gives us is not that we deserved better. It is that we were born spiritually dead. Under a wrath we earned honestly, and that by grace, not because of anything we did, we have been made alive. Not because of anything in us, because of the great love with which God loved us. And now we need to slow down right here because I

Why Believers Still Suffer

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think there is a piece of this that has to be said with real precision, or the whole picture gets distorted. When we ask how God relates to the evil in this world, Scripture is actually working with two different categories. And if we collapse them into one, we end up either making God the author of sin, which he is not, or making him a bystander to evil, which he also isn't. Now the first category is moral evil. That would be sin, wickedness, the willful choice of a moral being to do wrong. That belongs to Satan and it belongs to us. James 1.13 could not be clearer about where this category stops when it comes to God. He says, Let no one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. Now the Greek word there is kecos, which means moral wickedness. God is never its source, its author, or its tempter. That door is shut completely by the New Testament itself. Now the second category is what the Old Testament calls calamity, disaster, judgment, loss, hardship, the things that happen to us that feel evil, that are genuinely painful, but are not moral wickedness. And here scripture speaks with a boldness that surprises most people the first time they hear it. Isaiah 45 7 in the King James has God saying, I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things. Now newer translations render that final word calamity or disaster because the Hebrew word is Ra. That's a word broad enough to cover both moral wickedness and simple hardship. And here the context settles which one is meant. Light is paired against darkness, peace is paired against Ra. That is not a moral pairing, that is a totality. God declaring his sovereign rule over the entire range of human experience, the good and the hard alike. And here's where scripture interprets scripture in a way I find remarkable. That same Hebrew word Ra shows up in the mouth of Job in Job 2.10. After he had lost everything, he says, Shall we receive good from God and shall we not receive Ra? Now older translations render it evil, and newer translations say adversity. And the text tells us directly, in all this, Job did not sin with his lips. Now Job is not accusing God of wickedness. He is affirming that the hardship that fell on him came from a sovereign hand he trusts, the same hand that gave him every good thing he had enjoyed before. Now Isaiah and Job are using the identical word in the identical sense, and neither one is describing God as morally evil. Both of them are describing a God who is sovereign over calamity and entirely innocent of sin. So here is the distinction, stated as plainly as I can state it. God is the sovereign author of calamity. That would be loss, disaster, even what feels to us like

Moral Evil Versus Calamity

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evil in the moment, and he has every right to be, because this is a guilty world under his just authority. God is never the author of moral evil. That would be sin, temptation, wickedness. That belongs to the enemy, and it belongs to us. Now I do not want that distinction to sound cold because it is not meant to be. A God who is just enough to ordain calamity in a guilty world and loving enough to enter that calamity himself and weep inside of it. That God is not a distant God balancing a ledger. He is a father disciplining what he loves, the way Hebrews 12 describes it. Not because he delights in our pain, but because he refuses to leave us where sin left us. Justice and love are not competing in him, they are meeting and coming together in him. Now, someone is going to ask the next question because it is the honest one right here. And it's this if Satan is a created being, and we are created beings, where did the very capacity for moral evil come from in the first place? Because Satan was placed on this earth, and it was in the garden before Adam and Eve had ever sinned that the serpent tempted them and something in them that was capable of listening. Now I think Genesis 3 actually shows us something remarkable here, and it changes how we should hear the question we have been asking this whole episode. The serpent tells Eve, If you eat this fruit, you will be like God, knowing good and evil. And in the Hebrew, knowing good and evil is not primarily about becoming aware that evil exists as a category. It is the authority to determine, to judge, to decide for oneself what counts as good and what counts as evil. That authority has only ever belonged to God. It is not a piece of knowledge we were missing, it is a throne we were never meant to sit on. And that is exactly what Adam and Eve reached for: not information or authority, the right to be their own judge of good and evil, rather than receiving that definition from the one who made them. And now here is why that matters for everything we have been wrestling with today. When we look at the suffering in this world, Lazarus in the tomb, an abducted child, any horror you can name, and we conclude a loving God would not allow this. Therefore, something is wrong with him. In that instance, we are doing the exact same thing Adam and Eve did in the garden. We are climbing onto the bench and declaring a verdict over our Creator. We are using a moral compass that has been broken since Eden, a compass we were never given the right to hold in the first place. And now I want to be careful here because this is not meant to shame anyone for asking the question. Job asked it. Martha and Mary are about to ask it directly to Jesus' face, and he does not rebuke either of them for it. The asking is not the sin. But understanding why the question feels so unanswerable from where we stand, that is the sin's fingerprint. We are trying to judge the goodness of God using a faculty that was stolen from him in the first place, not given to us. And it was corrupted the moment it was seized. And that theft is what Paul means in Romans 3.23 when he says, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We did not simply break a rule. We reached for a throne and we have been reaching for it by nature ever since. The way Romans 5.12 says, sin and death spread to every one of us through that first reach. And here is what I want you to hear underneath all of that, because this is not a courtroom drama. God is winning against us. This is love refusing to let the theft define the relationship. God does not strike us down for reaching for his bench. He does not close the conversation and walk away, though he would be entirely right to do so. Instead, he weeps at a tomb he is about to empty. He sends his own son to receive the very judgment we deserved for stealing what was his. That is not a judge defending himself against a courtroom that had no standing to convene against him in the first place. That is love, the great love Paul describes in Ephesians, the love with which he loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses, choosing mercy over the verdict it had every right to render. Now, there's one more piece to this that I want to name before we move into today's text. There is a real gap between how God sees and thinks, and how we see and think. A gap so wide that we are simply not able to close it by reasoning harder. Isaiah writes, My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than yours. That's Isaiah 55, 8 to 9. That is not God refusing to answer us because he does not care. It is God telling us plainly that some things are simply too big for us to hold yet. The way a young child cannot understand why a parent's discipline or a painful medical

Eden And The Stolen Bench

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procedure is actually good for them. Child is not being dismissed. The child has not grown there yet. They don't have the understanding or the capacity to grasp it. And neither do we. Job never received an explanation for his suffering. God met him at the end of that book with question after question, establishing exactly this gap. He says, Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? David never received a full resolution to the psalm that he wrote out of the confusion. We are in good company right here. Moses names this directly in Deuteronomy chapter 29, verse 29. He says, The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever. There is a category of things God has not chosen to fully explain to us. Why he created beings with a genuine capacity for rebellion, knowing what would follow. That sits inside the secret things. What scripture does reveal clearly is that moral evil belongs to the one who commits it and never to God, and that he is entirely just in whatever calamity he ordains. But that is not the whole answer. It is the answer he has given us. And naming the boundary honestly is not a failure to teach. It is the faithfulness to what has actually been revealed to us. Now, here is where I have landed myself in this. After wrestling with this for years, including in our own study of Ephesians, God's ways are higher than our ways. He planned all this before the foundation of the world, the redemption, the ones he would call, the timing of every rebellion he permits and every mercy he grants. And nothing, nothing is unfolding outside of what he already determined. We cannot fully understand that plan. And here is the harder truth underneath of it. Even if God laid out the full answer in front of us right here, right now, today, in plain language, I don't think most of us are mature enough yet to actually receive it. And we may already have more of that answer in front of us in his word than we are currently capable of understanding right now. Growth, not more information, may be what we are actually missing. So what is left for us to do with that? Well, Hebrews 11:6 tells us that without faith, it is impossible to please God and that he rewards those who seek him. The reward is not automatic and it is not handed out for free. It is given to those who seek. The answers you are looking for are not going to arrive neatly in a 30-minute podcast episode. They come through wrestling with God's word, yourself, through prayer, through pursuing him with everything you have, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, the way we talked about a few episodes back. That pursuit is the path he has actually given us. Not a shortcut around the mystery, but a real relationship with the one who holds the truth. And today we're going to see that Martha and Mary are about to stand in exactly that place, grieving, something they cannot make sense of in front of the only person who actually can make sense of it. Now, where we left off last week was with Lazarus sick and word reached Jesus. And he said plainly, This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God. Then he stayed two days longer, exactly where he was, though he loved his family, and we know that he already had the power to heal from a distance. And then he told his disciples, Lazarus has died. And Thomas said, Let us also go that we may die with him. That is where we left the story. And now Jesus arrives in Bethany, and Lazarus has already been in the tomb for four days here. So with that, let's read verses 17 to 27 to pick it up. It reads, Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, and many of the Jews had come

Mystery Faith And Seeking God

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to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him. But Mary remained seated in the house. Martha said to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you. And Jesus said to her, Your brother will rise again. Martha said to him, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. Jesus said to her, 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. Do you believe this? She said to him, Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world. Now Martha goes out to meet him on the road, four days late by every human measure. And the first words out of her mouth are the same accusations both sisters will make separately before the scene is finished. They say, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Now, we spent significant time with the exact line last episode, so I'm not going to re-argue it here. What I want you to notice is something we did not say last time. Martha does not whisper this to a friend or hold it back out of fear of disrespecting Jesus. She says it directly to his face, and Mary's about to say the exact same thing. That is not a failure of faith on their part. That is honest grief, spoken to the only one who could actually do something about it. Both women trusted Jesus enough to bring him their hardest accusation rather than hide it from him. And then Martha says something remarkable right after that. But even now, I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you. Now she is still holding on. And as we could see, there's grief and faith that are still sitting in that same sentence. And then Jesus answers her simply by saying, Your brother will rise again. And Martha responds with theology that is completely correct. She says, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. Now that belief was the standard, faithful, Second Temple Jewish doctrine. The resurrection of the dead at the end of the age was a real and orthodox hope. And Martha holds it exactly the way she should. She is not wrong here. But Jesus does not affirm her doctrine and move on. He relocates it by saying, I am the resurrection and the life. And now Martha believed in a future event. And Jesus tells her the resurrection is not merely an event she is waiting for. He says it is a person standing in front of her. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. The last day is not the only place resurrection lives. It is present wherever Jesus is present, because resurrection is who he is. Do you believe this? He asks her. And Martha answers with one of the clearest confessions in the entire gospel. Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world. Now she does not fully understand what is about to happen. She couldn't have, but she believes the person standing in front of her, even without yet seeing what he is about to do. And then we read verses 28 to 37, and it says, When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, the teacher is here and is calling for you. And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there. Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled, and he said, Where have you laid him? They said to him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. So the Jews said, See how he loved him. But some of them said, Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying? Now Mary comes out and says the exact same words Martha said here. That's word for word. Two sisters independently arriving at the same honest accusation. Now watch how differently Jesus responds to each of them. With Martha, he taught, he gave her truth. He said, I am the resurrection and the life, and he drew a confession out of her. But with Mary, he does not teach at all. He weeps. Now these are two right responses to two different people carrying the exact same loss. Martha needed to hear the truth stated plainly, but Mary needed to be met in her grief without a single word of correction or explanation. And Jesus gives each woman what she actually needed, not a formula applied evenly to both. Now that tells us something about how presence and truth both have their place, and wisdom is knowing which one the moment is calling for. Now, verse 33 uses language that carries more weight than the English translation usually shows us. We see that he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. Now, some of the strongest language in the Greek text for grief and even indignation close to the language used elsewhere in Scripture for someone confronting an enemy, not merely mourning a loss. Now, here's the question that language raises. Is Jesus troubled because he has just discovered something has gone wrong that he did not control?

Martha Meets Resurrection Himself

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Or is he troubled because he is standing face to face with an enemy he came specifically to defeat and the moment has finally arrived? Because if Jesus is simply reacting to a tragedy he is now scrambling to fix, that would mean God lost control of something. But everything we have built across the entire series stands against that. The shepherd who marked his sheep before the foundation of the world, the craftsman who knew exactly what reclaiming his work would cost before he made it, the God who preserved his covenant through 400 years of silence and never once lost what belonged to him. None of that allows for a God who is surprised by a grave. So here's what I believe is a better reading, and also the true one. Jesus is not discovering death for the first time at the tomb. He is standing in front of an enemy he has always intended to judge. And the trouble in his spirit is the righteous confrontation of a sovereign God who did not lose this fight. He is a God who permitted it within a purpose he set and who is now moving in this very moment to defeat it. His grief is completely real and not helpless. Both things are true in the same breath. And then, in the middle of all that theology, in the middle of holding the full authority to raise this man from the dead, Jesus wept. Even knowing what he was about to do, holding the resurrection in his own hands, he wept because the wrongness of death is real, and grief is the appropriate response to it, even for the one who is seconds away from undoing it. And then we see the people watching react two different ways. Some say, see how he loved him. And others ask the exact question we spent an entire episode answering last time. Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying? That question is sitting right there in the text, unresolved in the moment it is asked. And I want you to notice something about where John places it. He puts it in the mouths of the crowd, right at the emotional peak of the story, right before Jesus walks to the tomb and does the very thing that answers it, because the question was never going to be answered with an explanation. It was going to be answered with a resurrection. So let's bring this together. We began by naming something very difficult that none of us are owed protection from the suffering of this world because all of us stood under a debt of wrath before grace ever entered the story. We were not born innocent, waiting on the sidelines. We were born already inside the fall, under judgment, in a real sense, on the side of the enemy until the day God made us alive. That is not a comfortable truth, and it was never meant to be. It is meant to reframe the entire question. God did not fail to protect people who deserved protection. God, in staggering mercy, chose to save people who deserved wrath. And that mercy did not begin at the empty tomb outside Bethany. It began before the foundation of the world. And for those of us who already belong to him, our suffering now is not the old suffering. It is not the wrath we once earned. Christ carried that at the cross fully and finally. What we carry now is the cross he told us to pick up. The suffering that comes from living for his glory in a world still caught between two kingdoms, the same way Joseph suffered in slavery and said afterward, You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. We have watched in these verses what God's mercy actually looks like up close. Not a God observing suffering from a comfortable distance while explaining its purpose to us. We saw a God who stood in front of a grave he was about to empty, and he wept anyway. A God whose trouble at the tomb was not confusion or helplessness, but the righteous anger of the one who is already moving to judge and defeat the very enemy standing in front of him. So, did God lose control of evil? No. Did God judge it rightly, permit it within a purpose only he can fully see, and then pay whatever the redeeming of it required? Yes. That is the whole difference. And it is the difference between a God who is a victim of the world's brokenness alongside us, and a God who entered the brokenness on purpose, carrying both the grief and the authority to undo it. Martha believed in a future resurrection and received a present person. You may be holding a grief right now that feels like it will only ever be resolved someday, in the last day, far off and hard to picture. But I want you to hear what Jesus told her, because it is just as true standing where you are right now. He is not only the resurrection that is coming, he is the resurrection and the life right now, wherever he is present. Whoever believes

Mary’s Tears And Jesus’ Tears

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in him, though they die, yet shall they live. You did not deserve that promise. Neither did I or Lazarus or Martha or Mary, but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, he gave it anyway. Let's pray. Father, thank you that we are not owed the protection we sometimes demand of you, and thank you even more that you gave us mercy we could never have earned instead. Thank you that you did not lose control of death, that your trouble at Lazarus' tomb was not confusion but righteous purpose, and that your grief for us has never meant you were powerless to save us. Meet us in our graveside moments the way you met Martha and Mary, with truth where we need truth, and with tears where we need your presence. In Jesus' name, amen. Now I want to thank you again for joining us today, and I hope this message, as always, has 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, feel free to visit us on our website at the takeaway.faith. There you can send us an email or you can click on the text us link in the episode description, as we would truly love to hear from you. Now,

Prayer Next Steps And Invitation

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in our next episode, we're gonna finish the story of Lazarus as Jesus walks to the tomb, commands the stone, rolled away, and calls a dead man by name. What happens next is the loudest answer John's gospel ever gives to the question we have been sitting with these past two episodes. That's where we're gonna be, and I hope you'll join me. God bless, and we'll see you next time on the takeaway.