Lazarus Raised

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Lazarus Raised

John 11:54

54 Jesus [Iesous] therefore [oun] walked [peripateo] no more [ouketi] openly [parrhesia] among [en] the Jews [Ioudaios] ; but [alla] went [aperchomai] thence [ekeithen] unto [eis] a country [chora] near [eggus] to the wilderness [eremos] , into [eis] a city [polis] called [lego] Ephraim [Ephraim] , and there [kakei] continued [diatribo] with [meta] his [autos] disciples [mathetes] . KJV-Interlinear

54 Jesus therefore no longer continued to walk publicly among the Jews, but went away from there to the country near the wilderness, into a city called Ephraim; and there He stayed with the disciples. NASB

Jesus knowing the thoughts of the hearts of the Pharisees and their cohorts, will again withdraw into a neighboring region. Why? Jesus Christ controls history. I have stated before that God controls history. Jesus Christ is God and He as well as the Father, as well as the Holy Spirit all together control history. They all work from the same play book, the divine decrees, which were set into concrete in eternity past.

Jesus moves in, to perform the necessary miracles to open the eyes of those who need a little push in getting their eyes opened to the truth. He also performs miracles to prove and to demonstrate to all, that there are those who will never believe no matter what the extent of the miracle.

God controls history in three ways. First He controls history directly. Second, He controls history indirectly. Third, He controls history permissively.

In the first method, has God takes action directly on His own. He created the angels. He created the universe. He restored the earth in six days. These we all understand and generally we think of them first. But God, knowing all the thoughts, motives, and actions that everyone will pursue in their life no matter when they live, and knowing all the repercussions of the collective thoughts, motives, and actions of everyone and the interactions of everyone, and ... knowing all the thoughts, motives and actions people will do with respect to the environment in which they might live, knowing all this, God can place people into history in exactly the right place in order to bring about the desired outcome of history at any point in time.

Remember that you are conceived in the womb and at that point you are nothing more than a biological mass. You have biological life in a physical body.

When you are born into this world, then God breathes 'neshamah' the spark of life or human life as we call it, into your soul. This becomes the second component to your life - soul and human life.

When you believe in Christ, then you receive your third component in life, the human spirit and eternal life. Your three containers are the physical body, the soul, and the human spirit. The contents of these containers are biological life, human life and eternal life respectively.

Each begins in an infant or nothing stage. The physical has to grow up, the mental has to grow up, and the spiritual has to grow up. Sometimes they grow up and often times they do not.

So Jesus who executes history has power over life and death. He creates what He will and when He will, and He takes away, what He will and when He wills. This is His direct intervention into history.

The second method of controlling history is the indirect method. This comes from the thoughts and actions of people. Believers or moral people will follow their standards in history and thus bring about law and order or not. Nature will bring storm and famine and will cause havoc on folks. They will endure or move elsewhere, and thus the movements of peoples and more, will enter into history

The third method is the permissive will of God. He allows mans free will to function. Often times several forces will rise up in history, and one will be used to destroy another. If an evil group rises in population, then another even more evil force may arise and cut that first bad group out of history. In times past there have been cultures that have risen in their degeneracy. Another evil power, may be allowed to rise up in order to destroy or to put into check that first evil culture.

The Book of Judges is filled with the degeneracy of the Israelites. God allowed their neighbors to rise up and to bring them into oppression, before He went to their rescue following their repentance. Other cultures have risen up in history and because their degeneracy was so great, they were erased entirely from history.

Jesus Christ is to go to the Cross, but not just to any old pair of boards that might be hammered together, and not on just any occasion, and not anywhere. He was to go to the Cross on Passover, in the afternoon between the hours f noon and three o'clock. We have already studied this, as it follows the procedure of the sacrifices of that specific feast, the Passover. Since Moses time and the Exodus, some 1500 years earlier, this time was established.

Jesus moved out of the region knowing that the Pharisees and others would not pursue Him, knowing that their heat filled passion would soon cool off and thus He could control their reactions and actions through their own decisions, or better to say the lack of their decisions toward Him.

Jesus Christ controls history. He does not interfere with each of our decisions. He does not cause us to make one decision or another. He does know what we will do even before we know, and in so knowing He can place each one of us into history, as he has done, so that we will have every opportunity to have a better life. It remains only for us to make the right decisions to gain that better life. Those decisions of course are to believe in Christ and to grow up spiritually.

Could the Pharisees pursue Christ where He was? Of course, but they didn't. He had only to move just far enough away in order to prevent their taking some action which would not fit into history as history was intended to go.

So likewise God gives us all plenty of rope with which to make our decisions - right or wrong. We have no excuses. We all can decide to study and grow up in the right way, or we can come up with excuses as to why we don't have the time or the desire to pursue a spiritual life. We can be indifferent, we can be offended and therefore justify in our own minds, that we do not agree with this Bible stuff. We can do a lot of things to convince ourselves that we do not need a spiritual life as defined by God. We can even define our own spiritual life.

But sooner or later God will snap that rope tight and either get our attention then, or not, and of course He can call us home, in which case we will have no more chances to get our life together.

The Pharisees had many chances and time to evaluate the prophecies, to evaluate the miracles, to evaluate all the information which was available to them. We all have plenty of time to evaluate our lives. They failed, but it did not prevent God from doing what was necessary for history. Nothing you do will change the course of histories intended conclusion. What you can do is make the right decisions with regard to your own personal eternal life, and thus maximize the blessings you will have in eternity, or ... you can make the wrong decisions and lose out on eternity. Your life is entirely up to you. God will take care of history overall and He will take care of you. You have to decide where you are going to fit in, in the giant scheme of things. Will you be a winner or just historical filler.