When God Shows Up Late

What to do with the gap between when you needed Jesus and when he actually arrived.

Can I just be honest with you for a second?

There have been moments in my life where I’ve looked at God and thought, “if you really loved me, you would have showed up by now.”

Maybe you know that feeling. The phone rings at 2am. The diagnosis comes back wrong. The marriage that you’ve been praying about for years is still hard. The thing you’ve been asking God for: the job, the healing, the relationship, the breakthrough – and it’s just… not happening. And you start to wonder if God is even paying attention. If he even cares. Or if any of this is actually real.

That’s not a faithless question. That’s one of the most human questions there is. And I think John 11 is the chapter where Jesus actually addresses it.

The Delay That Makes No Sense

Here’s the setup. Jesus gets word that his close friend Lazarus is sick, like dying sick. Not just under the weather. And John tells us clearly that Jesus loved Lazarus and his sisters Martha and Mary. These were people he likely grew up with. Lifelong friends.

And what does he do when he hears the news?

He waits two extra days.

I know. That doesn’t make sense. If my friend called and said they were in an emergency, I’m not sitting on the couch going “yeah I’ll get there eventually.” That’s not how love works.

Except John does this thing right here that I think is the key to the whole chapter. He puts two verses right next to each other that seem to contradict: Jesus loved them. So he waited.

The delay wasn’t the absence of love. The delay was the love having a bigger plan than anyone in the room could see yet.

By the time Jesus gets there, Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. Martha meets him on the road and says what every one of us has said to God at some point: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

And then Mary comes out and says the exact same thing. Word for word.

I find that detail really human. They both had the same question. And they both walked out and said it to his face.

Jesus Was Angry

Here’s the part that wrecked me when I was studying for this message.

You know John 11:35. Everybody knows John 11:35. It’s the shortest verse in the Bible. Two words. Jesus wept.

We read that and think: he was sad. Of course he was. His friend died. That’s grief.

But look at the verse right before it. Jesus was “deeply moved” in his spirit. I always assumed that was grief language too. Turns out it’s not.

The Greek word there is closer to an animal snorting before it charges. Think of a bull digging into the dirt and lowering its horns. That’s the picture. Jesus standing at the tomb of his friend knowing full well what he’s about to do, and he is angry.

He wasn’t sad that he couldn’t do anything. He was angry that death exists at all. Because death was never supposed to be part of the story.

When God made the garden, the whole design was that human beings would live forever in relationship with him. Death wasn’t in the blueprint. It showed up later, as a consequence of something broken.

And Jesus, standing at a tomb, surrounded by grieving people he loves is not resigned to it. He’s furious at it. He weeps because he remembers what things were supposed to be. And then he does something about it.

The Stinketh Problem

Jesus tells them to roll the stone away. And Martha, ever the practical one, says: Lord, he’s been in there four days. There’s going to be an odor.

The King James Version puts it best: by now he stinketh.

And I love this moment because Jesus doesn’t flinch. He knows it stinketh. He knows it’s been four days. He knows the situation looks completely irreversible. That’s exactly the point.

He didn’t wait two days because he forgot to leave. He waited until there was no human explanation left for what was about to happen.

God isn’t intimidated by situations that have gone too far. Sometimes he waits until it’s clearly too far before he shows up so nobody can argue about who did it.

He calls Lazarus by name. And Lazarus walks out.

What the Cross Has to Do With All of This

There’s a story I keep thinking about. A dad driving his daughter on the freeway. A bee gets in the car. She starts screaming. She’s also deathly allergic, so this isn’t just fear. It’s a real emergency. He can’t get the bee out. So he pulls over, jumps in the back, covers her with his body, and takes the sting himself.

Then he opens his hand and shows her the stinger.

“This bee can’t hurt you anymore.”

That’s what happened at the cross. Jesus took the stinger out of death.

For Jesus to stop Lazarus’ funeral, he had to start his own. And for Jesus to stop your funeral, he had to have his first.

That’s the whole arc. John 11 is not just a miracle story. It’s a preview of what Jesus was about to do for every person who would ever live. He walked into death so that death would lose its claim on everyone who follows him out.

Where, O death, is your sting? It’s in his palm. He already took it.

So What Do You Do With the Gap?

I think the honest question, the one most of us are actually sitting with, is not whether Jesus can do something. We believe he can. The harder question is what to do in the gap between when we needed him and when he showed up.

And I don’t have a tidy answer for that. But I do think John 11 gives us a few things to hold onto.

First: the delay is not the absence. Jesus loved Lazarus and waited. Those aren’t in contradiction.

Second: you’re allowed to say what Martha and Mary said. Lord, if you had been here. You can put that in front of God. He can handle it.

Third: he’s angry at the same things you’re angry at. Death, suffering, the brokenness of the world. That’s not what he designed. He’s not passive about it. He walked into it and dismantled it from the inside.

And fourth: the things that stinketh don’t scare him. Whatever situation in your life feels like it’s been in the tomb too long, too far gone, too decomposed to come back from the guy who raised a four-day-dead man is still in the business of calling people by name out of their graves.

I am the resurrection and the life. Not: I will be. I am. Present tense. Right now. Including whatever you’re carrying into this week.