Jesus Wept

Jesus wept.

-John 11:35

This verse is a pretty well-known verse. It’s the shortest verse in the Bible (although you can correct me if I’m wrong). But most people don’t really think about everything that this verse really says.

Yes, I know this verse is only two words long. Yes, I know that it just says that Jesus, well… wept. But you know what it also says?

(1) Jesus was human. Crying is something you can’t do unless your human. I’ve personally never seen anything other than a human cry. But you can correct me on that, too.

(2) Jesus had emotions. Jesus was sad. Hey, one of his friends had just died, and some of his other friends, who were also Lazarus’s sisters, were crying, too. Jesus wasn’t some stone-faced, stoic statue. He was real, human, and felt things just like we do.

(3) It’s okay to be sad. When people die, it’s natural for us to be sad. We shouldn’t take that too far, though. After all, if they’re Christians, they’ll be in a much better place with Jesus.

I hope these points have helped you to see what you can see when you look closer at verses and think about them. I pray that you’ll learn something from this and learn to do this with other verses.

Challenge: Study a verse in depth like this and come up with three points about it that aren’t necessarily obvious.

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Is He Dead Or Not?

Caution: There may be a few spoilers in this post, or, if you’re like Sherlock Holmes, you could deduce spoilers from things I say in this post. Just sayin’.

Have you ever noticed that it’s impossible to believe that people are actually dead in superhero movies?

I’ll admit that the same problem occurs in other movies, too, and in books fairly often. Or is that just my imagination? It’s not.

Sherlock Holmes, for example. He “died” in the books, and he “died” on the BBC Sherlock show (Which I have not watched, but I know quite a bit about thanks to a few friends. *wink* And a past post I reblogged.)

And then, of course, there’s all those minor characters in the superhero movies that supposedly die but don’t. Sometimes main characters, too, like Captain America, although we know that something’s up from the beginning of the movie. You can almost never believe that people are actually dead in those movies.

But you know what’s cool? That’s happened in real life before, too! All those people that are raised from the dead, like Lazarus. (We don’t know the names of most of them.) But the best coming-back-to-life episode? Jesus.

Unlike in superhero movies, Jesus really died. And then he came back to life. He conquered our sin by suffering the worst death the Romans could invent, and then he rose again, conquering death itself. He love us that much.