John 5:25-26 “I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.”

We might think that Jesus is talking about the resurrection of the dead at the end of time. But there is an important clue in his words that this is not so: “A time is coming and has now come.” Jesus is talking about something going on even on the day he was speaking. Dead people heard his voice. Those dead people lived.

But Jesus wasn’t preaching in the cemetery. We hear no reports of people crawling out of the ground or coming out of tombs, not on this day. Jesus was preaching in the city of Jerusalem during one of the Jewish holidays. Still, dead people were hearing his voice, and those dead people were living.

Jesus was using a very common picture of our natural spiritual condition. As we are born, as we exist before coming to faith, we are dead to God. There is a saying common in Mediterranean cultures that has found its way into TV and movies. “You are dead to me.”It’s a way of saying, “We have nothing in common, no way of getting along anymore, and no way you can fix it. It is as though you don’t even exist.”

Isn’t that what sin does to us? Adam and Eve ran and hid from God after they ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. They were afraid of him. They lost all trust in him. They didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. And they were helpless to fix this themselves, if they had even wanted to do so. They were dead to God.

Don’t you see that in the lives of people who have no faith? Isn’t that where our own sin is constantly threatening to take us back? Some have created deep misery for themselves with an ungodly lifestyle. Their vices have destroyed their health, consumed their wealth, and brought pain and separation to practically all their relationships. But they lack even the faintest desire for God’s love or grace, in large part because that would come with an admission that they were wrong all along, the humility of repentance. They can only pity themselves and resent their bad fortune. They are dead to God, dead in sin.

For some, spiritual death does not look so dramatic. They were born without such a strong taste for self-destructive pleasures. They have reasonably stable families. They are contributing members of society. They may not be overbearing or explicitly arrogant, but they are confident that they are good people. Maybe they betray just a hint of cynicism, or insecurity about the deep future, but they themselves may be mostly unaware of the vast spiritual emptiness inside of them. They may be no less spiritually dead than others, but their moderate, unassuming, unremarkable lives may make it even more difficult to see.

Jesus spoke to people just like this. He still speaks. And they live. “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.”

Jesus’ words didn’t rely on rhetorical tricks and clever strategies to raise the spiritually dead. They ran on divine authority. They brought miraculous power to bear. The power to create life has been part of God’s story from the very beginning. It is literally the first story in the Bible. God the Father doesn’t need help to create life. He doesn’t raw materials or willing subjects to create life. He “has life in himself.” He speaks, and there it is.

It is the same way when Jesus speaks to us. His words worm their way into heads and hearts, and they start changing everything. They create new ideas, new beliefs, new feelings, new realizations that never existed in that person before. Where there was nothing spiritual–no true knowledge of God, no true trust in God, no true agreement with God, no true presence of God–now there is. His words give birth to the miracle of spiritual life that we call faith or conversion.

This is all a feature of God’s grace. It is another example of God doing everything to save us because we could do nothing. How could we? We were dead in our sins. We had nothing to pay God for our sins, nothing we could do to make it up to him. You can offer tons of gold to the Almighty if you have it, but what good is that to him? In heaven, they pave the streets with that stuff. So, because we were dead in our sins and had nothing to give him, God himself paid the price. He gave his one and only Son. Jesus paid the full price for our sins and left not one thing for us to pay or do. It was all grace, all free.

Because of our spiritual death, we don’t even have the desire or ability to receive the gift. You can put a flower on top of a literally dead person laying in the casket and let gravity hold it there. But the dead person won’t reach out and grab it. He can’t. He’s dead. So with the spiritually dead Jesus speaks his words, and those words go in and create life. Eyes open and see. A heart beats with faith and believes. Jesus speaks, and people live.