P0sted 12/1/24: Did Lazarus die a second time?
Let’s examine what the Scriptures have to say. There are five or six different Greek words for raised, resurrection, arose, and rise Each word has a different meaning. We can rise from sleep, rise and walk away, and rise from the dead. The word we’re interested in is found in John 11:23, when Jesus said to Martha, “Your brother shall ‘rise’ again.” The same word is used in, Matthew 17:9, “Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be ‘risen’ again from the dead.”
Lazarus had been in the grave for four days. In verse 39 Martha said to the Lord, “Lord, by this time he stinks: for he has been dead four days.” So, Lazarus’s old body was no longer any good, it was in a stage of decay. So, the guy needed a new body, and Jesus was there to give him one.
Jesus tells Martha, in verse 23, “Thy brother shall rise again.” The word rise Jesus used is an intransitive verb, one that expresses an action that is limited to the agent, in this case, (Lazarus). It is in the perfect pluperfect; a tense which denotes that an action or event is to take place previous to another past action or event. It’s used against the following backdrop when Jesus said in,
Verses 25-26, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die.”
The resurrection of the dead was a finished work confirmed in heaven from the beginning of the creation. Revelation 13:8, Jesus is said to be, “A Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” Believers are foreordained before the foundation of the world to be raised to everlasting life, and our names are written in the book of Life. To claim that Lazarus died a second time is to deny the following scriptures. Hebrews 9:27, “It is appointed unto (All) men once to die,”
Phillip LaSpino