By now it stinks

“By now it stinks” is the expression used to describe a hope that seems past recovery: enclosed, neglected, visibly defeated, and made unbearable by the evidence of delay. In the book’s treatment of Lazarus, Martha’s words become more than a comment about physical decay. They identify the emotional logic by which people abandon dreams, answered prayer, healing, freedom, and future possibility because the situation appears too far gone. The expression therefore marks the obstacle of hopeless perception, while preparing the reader for the claim that God can still call life out of what appears dead.

Biblical Origin and Immediate Meaning

The phrase arises from the scene in which Jesus arrives to see Mary, Martha, and their family after Lazarus has died. Jesus asks, “Where have you laid him?” The question is presented as ordinary on its surface but prophetic in its significance: it asks not only where Lazarus’s body has been placed, but also where the family’s expectation has gone and what has become of the dream associated with his life. The tomb becomes the location of both a dead man and a buried hope.

Martha answers with the blunt assessment, “Lord, by this time he stinketh.” Lazarus had been dead four days, so her objection rests on the physical evidence of decomposition and on the social and emotional finality surrounding the tomb. She does not merely say that the situation is difficult. She identifies it as offensive, stale, and apparently beyond restoration. The expression gives sensory force to despair: death is no longer an abstract fact but something that can be detected, endured, and used as an argument against renewed faith.

From Lazarus to Dead Dreams

The book extends Martha’s statement into a metaphor for dreams that have been confined in a cave. A stone stands between Mary and Martha and the future they had hoped for, just as obstacles can stand between believers and the fulfillment of their desires. When people encounter resistance, they may shift their attention elsewhere rather than confront the barrier. In that way, dreams remain in the grave not because they were necessarily beyond God’s power, but because the people who carried them became unwilling to deal with the stone in front of them.

“By now it stinks” captures the stage at which abandonment begins to feel reasonable. A dream may seem to have been neglected too long, damaged too deeply, or surrounded by too much contrary evidence to be recovered. The book applies the image to desires such as freedom from addiction, healing from disease, and other prayers that have not yet been answered. The longer the delay appears to last, the easier it becomes to interpret delay as death and resistance as proof that hope has rotted beyond use.

The expression also exposes a recurring human tendency: people see and smell the negative before they can imagine transformation. The visible condition of the tomb dominates their judgment. What looks badly decomposed appears hopeless to raise back to life, and the passage of time seems to have become an independent power that God can no longer overcome. In this sense, the phrase is not only descriptive; it reveals the threshold where disappointment hardens into unbelief.

The Contrast Between Perception and Faith

The book sets Martha’s conclusion against the divine perspective it attributes to God. Human beings see a dead situation, while God is said to see life within it. Where people speak of sickness, God speaks healing; where they perceive failure, God speaks success. The decisive contrast is therefore not between a mildly difficult situation and an easy one, but between two interpretations of the same condition. The stink is real within the scene’s human frame, yet it does not settle what the situation will become.

This contrast gives the expression its theological force. “By now it stinks” is the language of accumulated evidence, while the response associated with Jesus is the language of possibility that does not depend on appearances. The phrase acknowledges the repulsiveness and apparent finality of the circumstance instead of pretending that decay is imaginary. Its challenge is that decay, delay, and disappointment must not be granted the final word.

The image also functions as a warning against allowing elapsed time to define the limits of faith. People may conclude that too much time has passed for a dream to be restored, just as Martha assumes that four days of death have made Lazarus’s condition irreversible. The book’s argument is that the very moment described as too late can become the setting in which divine life is most clearly distinguished from human expectation.

Personal Application and Narrative Function

The expression becomes a direct test for the reader’s own buried hopes. It asks whether a desired change has been placed in a figurative cave and left there because the obstacles seemed humiliating, exhausting, or impossible to remove. The book does not treat discouragement as evidence that the dream was meaningless. Instead, discouragement is presented as the condition produced when people focus on the smell of failure and overlook the possibility that the stone can still be moved.

Its repeated force comes from the collision between an honest diagnosis and an incomplete conclusion. The situation may genuinely look ruined; the prayer may genuinely seem unanswered; the dream may genuinely feel stale. Yet the phrase becomes inadequate when it is treated as a verdict rather than a description of present appearances. In the Lazarus pattern, the tomb’s condition is acknowledged, but the tomb is not allowed to define the ending.

As an expression, “By now it stinks” therefore condenses the book’s central movement from apparent death to renewed expectation. It gives voice to the instinct to surrender when evidence has accumulated against hope, while placing that instinct inside a larger narrative of persistence. The words name the smell of a dead dream, but their literary and spiritual function is to prepare for the possibility that what has been hidden, delayed, and declared finished may still be brought forth.