Welcome to our 69th lesson in the Gospel of John. The seed dies to rise again. Now, what I will be doing in this lesson is taking you back and trying to put you within the cultural context of Christ's time. and look at the historical developments that led up to that cultural context in which Christ walked and died. It's extremely important that we get a grasp of it. I think for far too long Christians have lived in isolation of that cultural context and we only dimly grasp at the elements that swirled about Christ and the people constantly creating noise, drowning out the message of Christ. We look at the gospels, we look at the epistles, and our attention is directed through the noise, so much so that we don't even know that the noise existed. But it's just like living today. We are surrounded by noise. And out of that, we are trying to pick out the threads of truth. Now, I don't mean just studying the Bible and understanding the truth of the Bible, but I mean how to walk in those threads of truth amidst all the noise that is around us. And I don't mean just noise from the world, but I mean noise from Christendom and Christianity, mature and immature. And what is applicable to me? What is applicable to my life? I feel like Naomi's husband. How do I pick the right path? How do I make that decision that's best for my family? because my sons are wasting away before my eyes." And sure enough, they stunted in their development that they were weak and died early. You cannot fault the man for trying to pick out the threads of truth, walk in the path of righteousness, do what is best for his family. And in the end, he did. Because of his decisions, the lineage of David sprang forth a couple of generations later. Man after God's own heart. So this is what we're gonna try and do. And then I challenge you to look around at the noise that surrounds you. So the force is tugging and pulling on you in every direction. And determine, can you pick out that thread of righteousness? And you cannot use, God spoke to me because God does not speak today. We have his word, but his word is general. You need specifics. Well, the spirit moves me. That may well be. Define what that means. I get a feeling? No. How do you know you're on the right path? When your life is producing the fruits of the spirit, despite outward tribulation, outward trouble, Even when you're standing alone, if you're producing the fruits of the Spirit, and of course the Holy Spirit is working through you to produce that, that's how you know you're on the right path. Not just you have a peace, not just your heart's calm, not just the door open, none of those things mean much. They presuppose spiritual awareness. And since we have no sensory apparatus to determine spiritual anything, any such comments or statements that allude to such a spiritual awareness are tenuous at best. they're not defendable. The only thing that is defendable and the only thing that is consistent with Scripture is what does your life produce. That, my friends, is how you know you're on the right path, in the midst of all the noise around us. And so what I'm going to describe actually is between John 19, 42 and John 20, verse one, Christ is died. He's been taken down from the cross. His body's prepared. He's been put into a clean tomb where never a body has been. And he's there. during the day of Pesach, Matzah, and First Fruits. Well, he's going to rise on First Fruits and on the regular Sabbath, those three days, those three events in that one day. And then when he rises, he rises as first fruits, and we'll get to that in our next lesson. We've talked about it in our last lesson. If you want to have a greater understanding of what I mean, how those three vessels come together, then I would urge you to go and listen to my previous lesson, at least the previous lesson, if not more. And so, his body is in the tomb. And we know from the other Gospels A stone has been rolled in front of it, a seal has been placed upon it, and a Roman guard is encamped outside of it to ensure that his apostles, disciples do not steal his body away so they can claim a resurrection. Remember, no one believes in a resurrection. it's pretty much unheard of. And we're gonna talk about that in a little more detail in this lesson. But in the ancient world, there was no understanding of resurrection like we have today. So what appears clear to us today was not apparent to Christ's followers in his day. See, we have clarity of 2000 years of acculturation. which hides our ignorance of their worldview. And so the positive aspect is when you say resurrection, we know exactly what that means. Even if we're not Christian, we have some understanding and acceptance that one can rise from the dead in bodily form. Of course, There's always the coming back from the dead in shadowy form. And we'll talk about that in a few moments. But today we would call that just being ghosts. Not that they're real, but that's what horror films and fantasies are made from. And so really in the ancient world, there was no understanding of resurrection except in idolatry, the gods. The gods and goddesses may go down to the underworld and come back, kinda, with help, with caveats. But not so mortal people. And so in between this time when Joseph and Nicodemus prepared his body for burial, on that Friday before sundown, when Passover and Pesach and the Sabbath will start. And the time the Marys came on Sunday to prepare his body for burial, because they didn't know what Joseph and Nicodemus had done. They only knew that he had been laid in that tomb. And it's like they weren't sure that there was a guard there, but they knew there was a stone there. Because they were debating, how are we going to move that thing? It's for sure the guards aren't going to help them. And so that shows that while Joseph and Nicodemus took him down off the cross publicly and prepared, they took his body away to a private place, prepared a place in the tomb privately, the apostles and disciples were not there by and large. So they didn't know that Christ had been prepared for burial. And so the Marys are going to come That's his mother and Mary Magdalene and another Mary who was part of that group were going to come and prepare his body for burial. What this shows is unbelief and resurrection. They're preparing his body for a long-term burial because that's just what you do. So, superior modern man, us, we view mythology as literature devoid of power. We think of them as stories, but actually they're religions. They're idolatries. They're not just stories with a moral ending like Hesop's fables and so forth. they're actually their religions, their understanding of their world and the spiritual forces around them in that world. And so we need to keep that in mind. We also need to keep in mind that whether you believe that the gods and goddesses existed or did not exist, does not negate their influence on the believers. You can believe anything that doesn't make it true. People believe in evolution. They think it's the only answer to origins, but it doesn't make it true. The fallacy of the majority. Everybody can believe a lie that doesn't make it true. One person can believe truth, but that doesn't make it truth either. Truth is truth whether you believe it or not. Now the matzah, which is in your Bible the festival of unleavened bread, in Hebrew that would be called the matzah, is a week-long period of time for introspection. It started off with a high holy day, which it'd be Sabbath-like. And it was just coincidence that it fell on a regular Sabbath day. And it also coincided with Passover or Pesach in AD 33 when Christ died, was executed. And during that week long period of unleavened bread, not only were you supposed to get all the leaven out of your house, but you were to think about sin, your sin. Because if you go back and listen to the previous lesson, you're going to realize that running around sweeping up leaven or yeast and putting it outside the house and cleaning everything does not remove leaven. Yeast is in the air. It's in the very air you breathe. It's on your clothes, it's on your skin. Sin is pervasive. You cannot get rid of it. They were just getting rid of the outward trappings of sin. They were supposed to understand the pervasiveness of sin and the impossibility of dealing with sin. You cannot get yourself clean enough. Every time you take a breath, you are contaminating yourself with leaven. And this should have brought them to realize their absolute need for God to provide his salvation. Now, some did come to that understanding, but very few. And the apostles and disciples during this time period mourn the permanence of his death, though he talked about his resurrection. In Matthew 12, 40 and Mark 10, 34 and in John 2, 19 through 22, he talks about his resurrection. After Christ told Peter that he was correct, that he is the Messiah, Christos in the New Testament Greek, he began to tell them how he must go to Jerusalem and suffer and die and rise again. And this shows how impossible it is for us in the flesh to grasp the truths of God apart from the Holy Spirit of God. See, we look at the Gospels and the apostles just look absolutely stupid. How many times did Christ tell them? Lots. How many times did they admit that he was the Christ, the Messiah, the God? Lots. How many times they actually comprehend what that meant? Not at all. Otherwise, they would not be mourning his death, they would be awaiting his resurrection. Not that they'd be throwing a party after the cross or the Stavros, but they would be waiting expectantly for him to rise. they would be full of hope. Instead, they're mourning. They're scattered, they're afraid. If they did that to Christ, what will the Sanhedrin and the Romans do to them? And we certainly don't want to go through that. And so, by and large, the only ones watching Christ's execution was Jesus' mother and John. of the very inner circle. And we know that only because Christ looked down from the cross and said, woman, behold thy son, son, behold thy mother. Christ was preparing for the future of his mother without him. Now we know that Jesus' followers had some comprehension of some kind of resurrection. So they had some eschological viewpoint of resurrection in a distant future. At the raising of Lazarus, Martha stated that she knew he, meaning Lazarus, would rise on that last day. Now I want us to turn to John chapter 11, And look at those passages, starting in verse 23, where he said, Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again. Statement of fact. Martha said to him, I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. See, she's got an abstract understanding or comprehension that that is their hope. Sometime down the road there's going to be a last day. All will be resurrected. 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 me shall never die. Do you believe this? Now He's talking immediately, but she is perceiving this as an abstract intellectual discussion probably. She is not expecting Lazarus to walk out of the tomb in about half an hour. She said to him, yes Lord, I believe you are the Christ, the Son of God who is coming into the world. So what? What does that mean? What does that mean to Lazarus? You tarried, he died. Now he's going to rise on the last day. We know that. Yes, and you'll be there and you'll make it all happen on that last day. But she doesn't have any comprehension about what is going to immediately happen because they had no real grasp of resurrection. And we have to understand that concept, because it just seems so obvious to us today after 2,000 years of acculturation in it. Because you know in the Old Testament, if Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, that would do no more than put him on par with Elijah, whom people thought he was Elijah anyway. If he raised Elijah from the dead, that would only confirm to them that he was indeed Elijah come back. Because Elijah raised the Shulamite woman's son from the dead. But you know, no one had ever raised themselves from the dead, ever. So, if Christ is executed and placed in the tomb and he's dead, who's going to raise him from the dead? Who's going to stand outside his tomb and come forth? Because throughout the history of the Bible, anyone raised from the dead was through another agency. Even a man Dead man who was thrown in Elisha's grave and came to life because God allowed it to be so, still needed Elisha's grave, Elisha's bones to be the medium for that to occur. But whoever just got up and walked out of their own grave. outside of a Hollywood fictional horror movie. And what did the ancients think the afterlife looked like? Well, we know from Homer, which is probably some of the earliest records and, and uh, that period, and he's Greek or Hellenistic, and he's writing about Macedonians or Mycenaeans. That's where he's getting his material from. They saw death as a permanent shadow type existence, a vapor, or in Hebrew, a habel. We talked about that word in the last lesson. You know it better as able. Because able was considered worthless, a vapor, an insubstantial, not dependable. That's why he watched the flocks because he wasn't fit to do anything else. And the flocks can pretty much watch after themselves. And so the dead were considered to be a vapor or shadow of their fleshly self. depending on what culture you're in, depending on what mythology you're reading. They may be wearing battle armor still. They may still be displaying their gaping wounds of war. It just varies. Now, if we remember in Acts 17 verses 16 through 34, when Paul was in Athens for a period, and he started talking to the Greeks there, about their unknown God, he was talking about Christ, who is that unknown God to them, and about the resurrection from the dead. And the Greeks just scoffed at the idea of the resurrection. We got through life once, why do we want to do this again? The whole point is to avoid death, not to die and come back. So you can die again, that has to be in their mindset. Because the ancient world, no one wanted to come back to this life. And it's only in several of the Oriental beliefs that grew up in the Axial Age, 800 BC to 200 BC in that period, where reincarnation came to be a belief system of Confucianism and Hinduism and a couple others, I believe. But there, it's a punishment, not a blessing. If you did not live properly, you have to come back and go through life again. Now, if you were pretty good at it, you could come back maybe as a better person. If you didn't do too well at it, you come back as a lower caste person or an insect or whatever. And you had to keep doing this over and over and over again until you got it right. It's a punishment. Only Westerners look upon it as a blessing. Why? Because we confuse reincarnation with resurrection as a reward. It was not a reward to them. Still is it today. It is a punishment. The goal is not to come back at all. The goal is to die and stay there, going back to the one. Now, in Homer's Odyssey there, the dead could talk to the living, If given blood to drink, you do a sacrifice, you take the blood, you let the dead drink it, and they can talk. They have some awareness of you and can talk to you, but it doesn't last very long. It's not a permanent type of resurrection. You do not get your body back, none of this. In fact, it's kind of akin to when Jesus spoke to the crowd in John chapter six. We're going to turn there in John chapter six, verses 53 through 59. Jesus is going to use some of this imagery in reference to himself. Now, some of the confusion down through Christendom is that Jesus is talking about you literally drinking his blood and eating his body. And that's because Christians were ignorant. They were ignorant of the cultural influences preceding and extant during the time of Christ. Christ is the master teacher. In fact, he is the only teacher, he says. And thus he uses this imagery that they would understand, but he uses it in a different manner. Rather than drinking the blood as dead, as a sacrifice, So you can come back to a kind of shadowy existence for a temporary period of time. He's talking about metaphorically, spiritually that unless we are baptized with his baptism in the blood and the water, In other words, we accept his blood sacrifice on the cross that he died for my sins that I could not die for so that I would not have to die and spend eternity in Lake of Fire. We just remember death is not a cessation. It is a separation. The fleshly body ceases, and then it stinks, it decays, it breaks down, and it really ceases. The soul never dies. It never ceases. Once God creates life, he does never destroy life. God is not so presumptuous as to destroy what he has created. Only man creates life and seeks to destroy it. and abortion. God never does that. But if we look to here in John 6, starting in verse 53, so Jesus says to them, Amin, Amin, or absolute fact. I say to you, unless you eat the flesh, the son of man, drink his blood, you have no life in you. Now they would understand this from what today we would call a mythological viewpoint. Because remember, they're still adulterous people. We're going to look at this in a few moments in this lesson. Jews never gave up their idolatry, ever. They just morphed it from one form to another, but they never ever gave it up. They would have grasped onto this understanding. A lot of A lot of them would not, they would take it hyper literally and say, why don't we drink blood and eat flesh? And that is, understanding is what came into the church and created controversies and why the pagans hated Christians once they heard this concept because they thought Christians were practicing cannibalism, which was very distasteful and disgusting to them as indeed it should be. Because that's not what Jesus is saying here. Unless you take in the fact, the spiritual truth of his death, I mean, his payment in blood for sin as the partial lamb, and as the goat of Yahweh, Unyom Kippur, who died for sin, Unless you grasp that, you are then linked to the goat of Azazel and left to wander in the wilderness without hope for payment for your sin. You have to answer for your own. That is where comes Hades held today. and then into the lake of fire. You have to make payment for your own sin. And you have no righteousness to offer, thus you have no payment to get out. Now, in the Hebrew view, Sheol, hell and paradise, coexist but are separate. Now that was going to be something unique. See, in the Hellenistic view of hell or of afterlife, you came down and Sauron ferried you across if you had coin. If you didn't, you had to wait a hundred years and then wait your turn to get ferried across. Then you came before the judges and there was one of three rows that you could be assigned. One went to torment, one went to didn't matter. You're going to eat and forget and just wander around being a corporeal shadowy ghost for the rest of eternity. And the other path, last path, is if you were very good, virtuous or brave or whatever, you would go to the Elysian Fields and be rewarded. All three are in the same underworld. Well, Sheol was kind of like that. Now we know about Sheol because Christ. Luke chapter 16, verse 19 at the beginning. And of course we know it as the story of Lazarus and the rich man. And it's not the same Lazarus as the one who was raised from the dead in John. Just Lazarus was very poor. Lazarus and John was very well to do. Now, whether this is a parable or an actual fact is immaterial. When Christ taught his parables, they always involved real life events. So when Christ is speaking here, he's speaking of what he knows as fact. because he is God. He has awareness of this. But since no one has come back from the dead, there's no way anyone else could have direct knowledge of this. When I say those who have come back from the dead, yes, Lazarus was raised, There's no record he had any knowledge. The Shulamite son, when he was raised from the dead, there's no record he had any knowledge. Those who were destined to be raised from the dead seem to have no memory of where they were, what was going on. We don't know if their separation from the body was different than normal because they were destined to come back. Even the leader of the synagogue in the Gospels, when his daughter had life restored to her. She rises up, I'm hungry, go feed her, it'll be fine. No memory, no fear, no happiness. No, nothing. So that's some of the great unanswered questions and to avoid any disputes, since no one gives us any answers, we can't make them up. We just accept it as fact. But here, we do have actual factual knowledge because Christ is God. And when the rich man died, guess what? He was immediately in hell. suffering. And when Lazarus died, he was immediately in paradise and not suffering, being comforted as a child of Ibrahim. Yet, those in hell could look across and see those in paradise and vice versa, but they could not pass Either way, it was fixed. First of all, those in paradise would not want to go to hell and those in hell definitely would like to get out of there, but can't. But we know that they did co-exist and were inside of each other because this is what Christ tells us. He's God and we will accept His speaking of this is fact. Whether or not the actual events were true or not, the overall motif is true. Now, what's the biblical view of afterlife? Well, this is the problem. The Pentateuch is absolutely silent on afterlife. There is no mention of it. And the Sadducees only accepted the Pentateuch as scripture. And probably weren't that sure about Deuteronomy. And so they did not believe in a resurrection. How do we know they don't believe in a resurrection? Well, Matthew tells us in Matthew 22 verses 23 through 29, when they came and asked Christ's ridiculous question. about the woman who had a husband who died before impregnating her and she married his brother under the laws supposed to and he died and so and so, all seven brothers in the afterlife. Now they were asking a question to which they didn't even believe because Matthew tells us this, that they didn't believe in the resurrection. Sadducees didn't. Pharisees certainly did. But their view of eschatology would be very limited because it's just not a lot written about it in the Old Testament. And what is written is more about the Millennial Kingdom and very little about eternity future. For that, you have to go to the New Testament into the last couple of chapters of Revelation. However, there was a resurrection from the dead in the shadowy ghost form. Saul, when he was getting ready to battle the Philistines, and he really didn't have a good feeling about this, He had persecuted mediums throughout the land trying to please God, who was not pleased at all with him. Now mediums, as it says in the scripture, had familiar spirits. In other words, they did not talk directly to the dead. They spoke to a demon who spoke to a demon who spoke to, you know, and eventually the spirit was contacted and the information was relayed back and then to the medium and Shiri spoke, usually a female. Thus, though they claim communication with the dead, we have to remember just as people do not die, demons, angels, Even the following ones do not die. And they are at work around us constantly. And so, they have this vast font of knowledge that we do not have access to. So, you want to go and speak to a medium who will contact her demon about your dead, lost loved one. Her familiar demon through his chain of command will contact the demon that was with that person, get information, you know, and there you go. But we have to understand that it's like Paul talked about in 1 Corinthians 10 verses 20 and 21. When you do idolatry, when you do any of these things, you are actually speaking and worshiping demons. Not the crazy gargoyle demons of the medieval period. Satan will come as an angel of light. He will speak soothing, comforting words if you wish, if that's what it takes to move you. And so this medium screamed because she saw a real spirit coming up out of Sheol. And she'd never seen that before. So I'll ask her, what does he look like? He's an old man, he got a robe. Oh, that's Samuel, because he asked her to contact Samuel. So Samuel speaks. What do you want? I'd rather not die tomorrow. Too bad. You and your sons will join me. I remember Saul had a changed heart, but Saul was a confused believer and waffled a lot, but I believe that he did have salvation. He was just a picture of somebody who wanted one foot in heaven and one foot in the world and you can't please God that way.