John 5:25 Meaning Most Certainly I Tell You

The dead are not those in the ground. They are the countless people who move through their days lost in thought, driven by the past and anxious for the future, never once present to the life happening now. They breathe and walk, yet they are absent from their own existence. This is the death he means.

The hour is now, he says, because awakening never belongs to some later time. The voice that raises the dead is the call to be present, to come fully into this moment where life actually is. Those who hear it live because presence itself is life, and the instant you truly wake to now, you are no longer among the dead.

The dead are the sleeping self, the awareness that has forgotten what it is and lives as though it were only a body among other bodies. The voice of the Son of God is the inner word a person speaks in the sense of I am. When that word sounds, what was buried begins to stir, and the hour is now, for this waking never waited on any date.

To hear that voice and live is to be raised from within. The self that lay dormant, deaf to its own nature, wakes and knows itself as the source it always was. This is no wish appearing as an object in the world. The man himself rises from sleep. The Son within him is formed and stands up, awake to the awareness that he is the power which shaped his life.