When John and Peter first came to the empty tomb, John stopped at the entrance and looked in and saw the linen wrappings, but did not go in. Peter came behind him, and he entered the tomb, and he also beheld the linen wrappings lying there. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus coated the body of Jesus from head to foot with the linen wrappings, and they were caked with spices and burial ointments, which would be reapplied in succeeding days to help the smell of decomposition. One thing for sure, Peter and John knew that no one had stolen the body of Jesus because it would have been impossible to unwrap the body and then placed the linen wrappings back to look exactly as they had before absent a body. Besides that, no one stealing the body would take that much time to do that kind of tedious unwrapping. Even though Peter, because of his guilt, had still not come to a place of faith about the resurrection; John saw and believed. He knew that the only way those linen wrappings could be in the condition that they were in without a body, was because the body simply slipped out of the wrappings. Jesus had a real body after the resurrection, though different, it still carried His wounds, and that real resurrected body supernaturally slipped out of the grave clothes and passed through the walls of the tomb. As we said before, the stone wasn’t rolled away so that Jesus could get out, but the stone was rolled away so that the followers of Christ could look in and see. When John saw, he believed, and the way he believed about everything changed forever.
When we think about the empty tomb, we tend to focus only on the fact that Jesus has risen, but there are things in that empty tomb that the Holy Spirit wants us to see so that what we believe (our faith) will advance to new heights.
I think empty grave clothes meant a lot to John because he is the only writer of the Gospels that recorded the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead. Lazarus had similar grave-clothes on him, but when Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, Lazarus walked out of the tomb wholly bound with the linen wrappings, and Jesus told the people standing around to “unbind him and let him go.” Lazarus needed people to unbind him, and I’m sure the grave clothes lay in a heap when they had finished. Grave close symbolically represent all the things attached to us from the old life (the garments of our spiritual death), and when Jesus died on the cross, the grave clothes that he was wrapped in represented all the stuff of our old fallen life that he took in Himself and buried. The difference between Lazarus and Jesus concerning grave clothes is that the risen Christ had no need of anyone to unwrap him of the linen wrappings of death because he just supernaturally slipped out of them.
Remember that you were in Christ during those three days of crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. When Jesus was crucified, so were you, and when he was buried, your old self was also buried, and when he was raised from the dead, so were you as a total New Creation in union with the wholeness of Jesus. When Jesus slipped out of those grave clothes, you were in him, and therefore the new creation that you are in Christ began without grave clothes of your fallen fault self. I am ALL FOR things like Christian counseling and inner healing and have been personally involved in those kinds of ministries for over four decades, but anointed New Testament ministry is not trying to remove grave clothes off of people because in Christ those grave clothes have already been shed. New Testament ministry is calling forth the new creation that people are and showing them the empty tomb where all their grave clothes lay. Showing people who they are in Christ, totally liberated and whole because they are complete in Jesus, is at the heart of all valid Christian counseling. So many Christians are deceived and believe that they still in bondage to the old self at some level, when the truth is, because you carry the power resurrection life, you already slipped out of all the grave clothes two thousand years ago when Jesus slipped out of them because His great clothes we are grave clothes. Jesus is the wonderful counselor, and his finished work was the ultimate inner healing for broken and fallen humanity. Laying down the lies and the deception that you are still the old in bondage fallen self at any level is the goal of valid ministry to hurting and broken believers. Getting them to look into the empty tomb for themselves and to see their grave clothes lying there, brings the full manifestation of the freedom that was gained for them in Christ and His finished work. We have risen from the dead in Christ, and when we arose in him, we arose without the bondage of the linen wrappings. We were born free in Christ.