Jesus raised 3 people from the dead. There was a child of twelve sunny summers, only recently deceased, a young man on his way to the graveyard, a man dead and buried 4 days and already decomposing in his tomb. D.L. Moody once searched for a text used by Jesus at a funeral. He thought such a text would bring great consolation at the funeral he had to take. He was delighted to discover that Jesus broke up every funeral He ever attended! Here in John 11:25-26 we come as close we ever shall to one of the Lord’s funeral texts. It reveals the 3 kinds of life Jesus bestows.
1. Resurrection Life
(“I am the resurrection, and the life”)
2. Spiritual Life
(“He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live”)
3. Eternal Life
(“And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die”)
Note: Life is a mysterious and complex thing. True, we can now make artificial protein in the laboratory and protein is the building block of life. But it is doubtful if man will ever be able actually to create life, still less to make it out of nothing. To say that life is the only chemistry, as some atheistic biochemists do, is grossly to understate the fantastic complexity of even the “simplest” form of life. But Jesus offers life in 3 dimensions. That we should live again is no more wonderful, after all, than that we should live at all.