As you have all just heard in Isaac’s eulogy, John grew up in a Christian home, fell away from the faith, and then was summoned back to life again in a cave in Nepal. There is a reality embodied here that is right at the center of the Christian faith, and that reality is something that is called life from the dead.
We all die physically. As the great Augustine noted, in this fallen world, the dead are replaced by the dying. But this physical death came about as a grim reality on account of the spiritual death that was introduced into the world by the great sin of our father Adam. When he took the forbidden fruit at the urging of his wife, and took that fatal bite, the human race was plunged into a condition of spiritual death. He had been told that “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17). Adam did not fall over that very moment, as though the fruit were poisonous. No, but he died spiritually, and his physical death years later was a consequence of that spiritual death.
In Scripture, death is not thought of as cessation. Death is rather a matter of separation. Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. And spiritual death, the headwaters of all other forms of death, is the separation of the fellowship between God and man. Spiritual resurrection life is what happens when that fellowship is restored. And physical resurrection at the Last Day is what happens when that cosmic restoration is manifested to the cosmos.
What God did when He sent His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, was to establish a most gracious offer—an offer of life from the dead. Just as our physical deaths are a token and sign of our upstream spiritual condition, so also the resurrection of Christ from the grave was an upsteam token and sign of the resurrection from spiritual death that is offered to us in and through the gospel. And that spiritual restoration is upstream from the day when the graves will be opened, and the sea will give up her dead.
“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”2 Corinthians 4:6–7 (KJV)
In Christ, the dead are raised. Precisely because the Lord Jesus emerged from a cave in Palestine and into the power of an indestructible life, so also John Grauke emerged from a cave in Nepal with that same power operative in his life, a new life that he embraced and lived out to the end of his days here on earth. His new life was conceived in that moment, and we rejoice in the fact that there is no cave on earth that can restrain or retain the dead when God issues His gracious summons to new life.
The apostle Paul forcefully argued that our resurrection life was closely connected to the historical reality of Christ’s resurrection. He said that if Christ were not raised, we Christians are of all men most to be pitied (1 Cor. 15:19). If Christ is not raised, then we are all still in our sins (1 Cor. 15:17).
The reason for this is plain. The Holy Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, working powerfully in that Jerusalem cave, is the Spirit who was at work in that cave in Nepal. This is what Paul tells us clearly in Romans.
“But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.”Romans 8:11 (KJV)
The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is the Spirit who dwells in us. And if He dwells in us, then He is going to do with our bodies exactly the same thing that He did with the body of Christ. This body here, the body of our brother John, and all of our bodies also, are going to be raised from the dead. God has given a surety of this in that first great resurrection. God has established the fact that Jesus Christ will judge the world in righteousness by raising Him from the dead (Acts 17:31).
This is a funeral, and we have gathered to mourn the loss of our brother John Grauke. But we are mourning our loss, not his. He currently has a complete perspective that none of us can have, at least not for the present. We still walk by faith, and he can now walk by sight.
I say that we can walk by faith. Faith how? Faith in what? What is the gospel that occupied the center of John’s life? What is the gospel that came to life for him in Nepal? Here it is.
We all, descended from Adam as we are, were born into a race that is estranged from God. We were in a condition of spiritual death because we were separated from fellowship with Him, and separated because of our sinful condition and our resultant sinful thoughts, words, and actions. God looked down with pity on this Adamic wreckage, and in His good grace He determined to establish a new Adam, a second Adam, a last Adam. In Christ, He offers us a new way of being human.
Christ lived a perfect, sinless life, and died under the wrath of God so that He could pay the penalty that we owed because of our vile behavior. We are invited to look at that death of His in faith, and if we do, then that death becomes ours. If we look to Christ, we die in Him, we are buried in Him, and come back from the dead in Him.
If we trust in Christ, as everyone here is most certainly invited to do, we are pulled to our feet, and we walk out to the mouth of a pagan cave in a pagan land where we can see, for the very first time, the sunlight of a Christian world. All is forgiven. So come forth.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen.