Theological term
Sign
2 sermons · All terms
The Resurrection and the Life, Part 1
What does it mean that Jesus delayed coming to Lazarus while professing love for him? John 11:1–16 opens the account of the resurrection of Lazarus by pressing the question of how dark providence coexists with the love of Christ. The death of Lazarus is shown to serve a purpose higher than the welfare of one family: the glorification of God through the display of the Son's omniscience and omnipotence. The passage calls every hearer to reckon with what makes Jesus glad — the belief of sinners — and to confess with Martha that he is the Christ, the Son of God.
The Lord Who Treads the Waves
John 6:16–21 records the fifth of the seven signs in John's Gospel: Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee toward his storm-tossed disciples. The sermon works through two movements — the disciples' vulnerability in the storm and the Savior's sovereign approach across the water — to establish that Jesus, by treading the waves, enacts what the Old Testament attributes exclusively to Yahweh (Job 9:8; Psalm 77:19; Isaiah 43:16), thereby demonstrating his consubstantiality with the Father and his lordship over the natural order. The divine self-disclosure 'I am' (ego eimi), voiced both here and at key junctures throughout John's Gospel, is shown to be Jesus' deliberate appropriation of the covenant name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14. The sermon closes by pressing the theological remedy for the fear that afflicts God's people: a right knowledge of Christ as the great I AM displaces anxiety about trials, persecutions, and earthly circumstances.