Commentary on the Gospel of John

                                 Chapter Eleven

                                                                                                                                              Verses 1-5 continued

When Jesus said about Lazarus that "This sickness is not unto death," He ignored physical death because He meant that He had annulled the spiritual death of Lazarus when He saved him by His grace. All the souls and spirits of living humans saved by grace go immediately to Heaven after their physical deaths. II Corinthians 5:8. All sinners not saved by grace go to the regions of death after their physical deaths, but God has provided a means to save them with a lesser form of salvation than that of grace. Revelation 5:11-14; Revelation 20:5; Revelation 21:1-5; John 5:28-29. These facts can only mean that physical death cannot be a punishment for sin but happens to be just a transition from the physical realm to the spiritual realm.

God loves all of His living humans that He creates, but when the Bible (KJB) states that Jesus loved particular individuals who were His friends and followers, that can only mean that He had saved them by His grace. John 11:5; John 113:1.

Strictly speaking, the curse means an eternal separation from God because of sin and spiritual death; that is, the Devil's attempt to utterly destroy, by eternal separation from God, the lives of all humans that God creates and loves. But God never cursed Adam and Eve or any of their descendants which means that living humans can become subject to the effects of the curse but never to the curse itself. Genesis 3:14-21; Luke 20:38; Ecclesiastes 3:14; I Corinthians 13:8. Jesus came to earth to save all of humanity from the effects of the curse and to destroy the curse itself and all of the works of the Devil and the Devil himself. Genesis 3:14-15; John 12:31-32; Hebrews 2:9; Hebrews 2:14; I John 3:8.