Why Raise Someone Who Will Die Again?
First Published Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - Revised Sunday, August 9, 2026
He turned to the body and said, “Tabitha, get up.” Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up….
— Acts 9
There are a handful of stories in Scripture that have always left me with more questions than answers.
Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. He raises the daughter of Jairus. Matthew tells us that after Jesus’ death, tombs were opened and people who had died were raised. Then, of course, comes the Resurrection of Christ Himself. And here in Acts, Peter walks into the room where the body of a beloved woman named Tabitha has been laid, sends everyone else outside, kneels down and prays.
Then he turns toward her.
“Tabitha, get up.”
And she does.
What an astonishing thing.
But there is something strange about these stories that we don’t talk about very often. With the exception of Jesus, every one of these people eventually had to die again.
Lazarus died twice.
Jairus’s daughter died twice.
Tabitha died twice.
I’ve always wondered about that.
Imagine receiving the thing human beings have dreamed about since the beginning of time. You have crossed through death, and somehow God gives you your life back. Your family holds you again. You eat again. You laugh again. You wake up the next morning and discover that there is another morning.
And then, someday, you have to face death again.
Why?
Why would God give someone such an extraordinary gift temporarily? Why perform these remarkable signs during certain moments in biblical history when countless grieving people before and since have stood beside graves praying for exactly the same thing?
I don’t know.
Ten years ago, I was more inclined to think I did. I thought perhaps generations of skepticism had left us without enough faith for miracles like these. Maybe, I reasoned, the early Church needed spectacular demonstrations of God’s power in a way that later generations did not.
I am less certain about that now.
I still believe faith matters. I still believe we modern people can become so convinced that we understand the limits of reality that we leave very little room for God to surprise us. But I am no longer comfortable assuming that a grieving parent’s prayer goes unanswered because somebody didn’t have enough faith.
The Scriptures themselves don’t give me permission to say that.
What they do give me is something else.
They give me glimpses.
For a moment, here and there, death runs backward.
A dead girl opens her eyes. Lazarus walks out of a tomb. Tabitha sits up and looks at Peter. These are not yet the final victory over death. They are signs pointing toward it.
Perhaps that is why they are temporary.
Tabitha’s resurrection was not the fulfillment of God’s promise. It was a preview.
The great Christian hope has never been that a fortunate handful of people might squeeze another twenty or thirty years out of this life. It is that death itself will someday cease to have the final word. The resurrection of Jesus is different from all the others because He is not merely restored temporarily to the life He had before. His resurrection points forward to what God intends ultimately to do for His people.
That makes Peter’s little sentence almost unbearably beautiful to me.
“Tabitha, get up.”
Someday, in one form or another, that is what every believer longs to hear.
Child.
Get up.
And this time, don’t ever lie down again.
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