This morning (2025/02/07 the day after my 71st birthday) I am thinking about the video of Shawn Ryan and Diana Pasulka I watched last night, and Wednesday's video with Chuck Missler's series on Genesis, and the fact that I have been struggling more and more over the months since my heart attack, with my lack of motivation and drive to continue with the work that I believe God has given me to do.
I still believe that the work of studying Hebrew and Greek and manuscripts is what God has put on my heart and He does still want me to continue working with these things, but I also believe God is allowing, or maybe causing, my lack of motivation because He wants me to seek Him in some more fundamental and essential ways.
Adding to the mix, I have been reading the book "Hebrew Word Studies" by Chaim Bentorah (a pen name) with 90 chapters, each about a different Hebrew word or phrase. The main theme of the book with a study into these 90 words, is to come to understand the heart of God better. It has definitely affected my heart, and caused me to have new facets of love in my heart for him. With the loss of my own marriage and the longing I still carry for my bride, I can now sympathize with the heart of God, and His longing for His bride. These emotions have been quite intense at times while reading this book.
I see all these things combining together to cause me to be aware that I have a much greater need than just to keep plugging away at this word and study. I need to experience, and enter into the realities that I have been learning about in my study. I believe there is a vast amount of hidden treasures yet to be found in this amazing book we call the Bible, most of them locked up in the ancient manuscripts and lost in our English translations. But I cannot see most of them by intellectual study, without the experiential reality of them.
So, I think, it is essential that I break from the study for a time, and ... what shall I say, learn how to actually experience the things that I "believe". I put believe in quotes, because I think that "believing" something intellectually as fact, does not mean I "actually" believe them.
So this morning, I am pondering two verses that I think are two of the most profound in the Bible. They are both things that Jesus said. One of them I became aware of many years ago as very profound, and the other, in more recent times. I will start with the second, because it has been on my mind much in the last couple of years. It is in John 11, in the conversation that Jesus had with Martha as He was coming to Bethany after the death of her brother Lazarus. Martha heard that Jesus was coming and went out to meet him. I will start in verse 20:
20 Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met Him, but Mary was sitting in the house. 21 Now Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give You.”23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”
24 Martha said to Him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”
This is the setting for the next two verses. Martha has just said what she believes. So Jesus answers her in verse 25, confirming what she said she believes:
25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes into Me, though he may die, he shall live.
But in verse 26 He makes another statement in contrast to 25:
26 And whoever lives and believes into Me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
Verse 26 is profoundly more than verse 25, and that is why Jesus asks her; "Do you believe this?"
27 She said to Him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”
Think about it, did she answer Jesus' question, "Do you believe this?"
Her answer was like what is a very typical answer Christians may give to hard questions. It really had nothing to do with what He asked.
I want to make this point quite clear; consider a courtroom, with a doctor and a witness. I will set up the conversation somewhat differently for, hopefully, obvious reasons:
Doctor:
"I performed the operation, he recovered, ate dinner and was released.
The judge asks the witness:
"Do you believe this?"
And the witness says,
"Yes, I believe that he is a licensed doctor."
What would an answer like that mean in a courtroom?
I want you to really grasp the profound difference between these two statements Jesus said in verses 25 and 26.
But before I do, I want to give Martha some credit for her answer. Her answer was really relating to verse 25, where Jesus said "I am the resurrection and the life ..." Her answer does quite reasonably fit with that part of Jesus' words. Jesus said "I am ..." and she answered "Yes, Lord, I believe You are ..." But in verse 25 Jesus only restated what she already said she believed. So Jesus question "Do you believe this?" is at the end of the second statement in contrast to verse 25. Jesus was asking "Do you believe this?", the additional statement. She did not address any of that in her answer.
So Jesus' question to Martha, is now my question, ... and your question; "Do you believe this?"
So I will give my answer as I would have until these last couple years:
From my teenage years on I believed that I would (quite possibly) never die. I was quite confident of this possibility because I grew up in a church that believed and taught the "rapture" doctrine. So I believed that we were living in the "end times" and that the rapture would happen in my lifetime, assuming I lived a normal, healthy life. In my early years I believed that the "rapture" might happen at any time. But a few years before "Y2K" (the year 2000) I began to consider that my time reference was quite a ways off, like 30 some years off. The change in my understanding came when I considered that the age changed, not at Jesus birth, but rather at His crucifixion, resurrection, and the day of Pentecost. But I still believed that I would be alive for the "rapture." I have "rapture" in quotes because my understanding of the nature of what we call the "rapture" is somewhat different than what was taught, but that is a discussion for another time, perhaps.
Now I want you to see that what I believed most of my years about "never dying" is not what Jesus was actually talking about in John 11:26.
For me in those years, I assumed that I would possibly never die because I was born at the right time in history. I felt quite fortunate for that.
But what Jesus was talking about had nothing to do with being born in the end times; He spoke that to Martha about 2000 years ago, and asked her back then if she believed it.
Now I want to point out the crucial difference between verse 25 and verse 26. First each of the two statements have a condition and a result. I will "diagram" them like this:
25b: "he who [condition], [result]"
26a: "and whoever [condition], [result]"
The two results are very different at least for our existence here and now: 25b "he may die" and 26a "shall never die".
Now the two conditions also have a difference, which is easily missed. Did you even notice it?
But first I want to emphasize the part of the two conditions that are the same:
"... believes into me ..."
Notice I have "into", not just "in" as it is in the great majority of English translations. In Greek there is a word meaning "in" and a different word meaning "into." Greek is a very precise language, and in the Greek the word here is "into" not "in". English is quite loose and sloppy in our use of our words. In Greek you would never say to someone "go in the house." If you did, you would get a strange look, because "in" is a "state of being" and "into" is a change of position or state. So "into" involves action, movement and change. If you are outside in the front lawn, you would have to go "into" the house before you could be "in" the house.
So the part of the condition in both verses that is the same is "believing into [Jesus]." It is not just "believing" about Jesus, it is moving "into" Him by believing, and becoming a member of His body. That is definitely more than "believing" all the correct doctrines about Jesus, Salvation, Resurrection, etc., even having them all completely correct and being fully confident that you are really convinced they are true. The question is have you become a functioning part of His one body.
So "believing into [Him]" is in the "condition" of both statements. But the difference is the word "lives"! "And whoever lives and ..." is only in the second statement. And of course this is easy to miss because He is talking about people in both statements who are physically "alive" and who therefore, "may", or "shall never", die. So of course they are both physically alive. So this little word "lives" takes on a whole new and greater meaning.
So this is the condition that makes the difference between the two statements Jesus spoke to Martha.
Though I could comment more on what "lives" means, I need to talk about the other verse that I saw as extremely profound many years ago. It is found in Mark 11:24:
24 Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.
What a statement! Now verses like this give rise to Christian denominations that focus on "faith" perhaps excessively. Some are known by catch phrases like "Name it, and claim it", and are filled with reports of miracles happening. And if you happen to be in such a church and have not received the miracle you have asked for, they will tell you, "You just don't have enough faith", which results in feeling condemned because of your "lack of faith."
Now as I consider these two verses at the same time, this morning, there is an interesting contrast to be noticed here. With this statement in Mark 11, we have many people who are discouraged and even condemned because they "don't have enough faith". Whereas the response to Jesus statement in John 11, the idea that "You don't have enough faith" doesn't even enter the picture, but rather you will hear, as I often have; "We're all going to die", or "well, the death rate is 100 percent." Of course the preachers aren't going to say "you don't have enough faith", because they don't either, and don't know anyone who ever did (except Jesus, of course.)
So if the "faith" required to answer Jesus question to Martha in John 11:26 is completely unattainable, why are people being condemned for not having enough faith when talking about Mark 11. Shouldn't the faith required for one be on a par with the faith for the other?
So who really has the faith for either of these?