Precious in His SightComfort and hope for believers who have lost someone they love

Scripture never asks the bereaved to feel nothing

Jesus wept

In the village of Bethany, two miles from Jerusalem, lived a family Jesus loved. When Lazarus fell seriously ill, his sisters Martha and Mary sent Jesus one line: “Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick” (John 11:3). They gave Him no instructions and made no demand. They rested everything on His love for their brother, and the word for love there is the ordinary word for the affection of a friend. The Son of God had a friend, and the friend was dying.

By the time Jesus reached Bethany, Lazarus had been four days in the tomb. Jesus knew what He was about to do, because He had told His disciples that He was going to wake him (John 11:11). In a short time Lazarus would walk out of that grave. Yet when Jesus saw Mary weeping, and the people with her weeping, He “was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled”, and John records the shortest verse in the English Bible: “Jesus wept” (John 11:33-35).

The people around Him were wailing, as mourners did at a Jewish funeral. John uses a different verb for Jesus. δακρύω (dakruo) describes tears that break out suddenly, and He could not hold them back. The Greeks said of their gods that they had ἀπάθεια (apatheia), no capacity to feel at all. The God of the Bible is nothing like them. If the Son of God could stand at a friend’s grave knowing the outcome and still weep, then tears at a graveside are no failure of faith.

Jesus treated death as an enemy

Something besides sorrow moved Him. As He came to the tomb, John says, He was again “deeply moved within” (John 11:38), and the verb, ἐμβριμάομαι (embrimaomai), was used of a horse snorting in agitation. It is a word of indignation. Jesus stood before what sin has done to the world He made. He saw more than one family’s loss. Every family will have its loss, and every love on earth will be broken by death.

Grief, then, has no need to apologize. Scripture says, “The last enemy that will be abolished is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). Death is an intruder into what God made. It breaks long love relationships, leaves symphonies unfinished, removes those who are greatly needed, and takes the baby’s cheek and the wrinkled face alike. A believer may have no fear of death and still be struck by it with a tremendous blow.

Scripture records the tears of its greatest saints without a word of rebuke:

John 11 holds nearly everything a believer needs at a graveside, and the rest of this page keeps coming back to it:

1. 11:5-6He stayed two days longerLove and delay stand side by side.→
2. 11:9-10Twelve hours in the dayNo friend can add to a life and no enemy can take from it.→
3. 11:21“If You had been here”What every mourner says, and what Jesus did with it.→
4. 11:25-26“Will never die”Where those who die in Christ are now.→
5. 11:43“Lazarus, come forth”The voice that will one day open the graves.→
6. 11:44“Unbind him”What the living can do for one another.→
7. 11:45Many believedWhat God can do through one death.→

Not as those who have no hope

¹³But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. ¹⁴For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-14

The church at Thessalonica was only months old when some of its members began to die. These new believers loved one another deeply, and they were afraid that those who had died would miss the coming of Christ. Paul wrote to give them the facts, and he did not tell them to stop grieving. He told them not to grieve like people who have nothing ahead of them.

Sorrow at a death is normal and reasonable. It is the release of the pain of separation and loneliness, and God designed it for our benefit. Romans 12:15 commands believers to weep with those who weep. The grief Paul rules out is the dead-end grief of those who expect no reunion, and he removes it with information. What the Thessalonians did not know was feeding their despair, and what he told them would comfort them.

Sorrow and joy live in the same believer

Hope does not end grief. Paul described his own life as “sorrowful yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10), and the two can go on together for years. The waves still come. One believer wrote to John MacArthur after a brother was shot dead in the street:

Scripture sets no date by which a believer must be finished with grief. John MacArthur’s father, Jack, outlived his wife, Irene, by six years. Whenever his son called, the old preacher would say, “I miss Irene, and it’s not like it will ever change in this life.” At his memorial his son said that in all those years he had never seen his father’s joy diminish. Both were true of one man, and both can be true of you.

He keeps your tears

David, in a hard hour, prayed, “Put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book?” (Psalm 56:8). The word for bottle, נֹאד (nod), is the word for a wineskin, a large container. The picture is of God gathering the tears of His children and keeping them as a memorial to their sorrow. He has not stepped back from your grief: “The LORD is near to the brokenhearted” (Psalm 34:18).

He stopped a funeral for a widow

The Son of God showed the same heart in the flesh. At the gate of the town of Nain He met a funeral: “a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow” (Luke 7:12). She did not ask Him for anything. “When the Lord saw her, He felt compassion for her” (Luke 7:13), and the word, σπλαγχνίζομαι (splagchnizomai), describes what is felt in the pit of the stomach. It broke His heart to see a mother with nothing left.

Then He said to her, “Do not weep.” To walk up to a woman leading her son’s funeral and tell her to stop crying is heartless, unless the one who says it can change the reason for the tears. He touched the coffin, raised the young man, and “gave him back to his mother” (Luke 7:15). He did not stop every funeral in Israel, and He did not stop the one you attended. The heart that stopped that one has not changed.

He had room for our sorrow when His own was greatest

On the night before the cross, when no one in the room could comfort Him, Jesus spent the evening comforting them: “Do not let your heart be troubled” (John 14:1). The next day, bearing the sins of the world, He turned His attention to two people: a dying thief, whom He promised paradise (Luke 23:43), and His widowed mother, whom He gave into the care of John (John 19:26-27). At the center of history, the salvation of one sinner and the care of one widow occupied Him.

He knows this pain from the inside. Scripture says “we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses” (Hebrews 4:15). The worst of our pain has nothing to do with the body. It comes through the people we love, and He stood at the grave of a friend.

The first question is where God was

He stayed because He loved them

⁵Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. ⁶So when He heard that he was sick, He then stayed two days longer in the place where He was.

John 11:5-6

Anyone reading those two sentences expects the second to say that He went as fast as He could. It says that He stayed. The messenger took a day to reach Him, He waited two days, and He took a day to travel back, so that He arrived when Lazarus had been four days in the tomb. He had once healed an official’s son from a distance with a word (John 4:50), and He could have done the same here. The people at the tomb said so: “Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man also from dying?” (John 11:37).

He could have. John sets the delay beside His love and makes no apology for it. Jesus told His disciples what the sickness was for: “for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it” (John 11:4). He added, “I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, so that you may believe” (John 11:15). Martha and Mary could see none of this. For four days they knew only that they had sent for Him and He had not come.

Every believer who has prayed beside a hospital bed knows those days. God does not owe us a reason: He “does not give an account of all His doings” (Job 33:13). As far as the book tells us, Job was never told what had passed in heaven at the beginning of his trouble. Jesus said to Peter what He says to all His people in the dark: “What I do you do not realize now, but you will understand hereafter” (John 13:7). Believers live on the strength of those last words.

Not knowing is itself a kindness

A parent who knew that a child would not grow up, or a husband who knew the month his wife would die, could not have lived the ordinary days before it. God kept that from you, and what feels now like silence was mercy through all those years. “The secret things belong to the LORD our God” (Deuteronomy 29:29). What He has told us is what we need: “just as a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him” (Psalm 103:13).

The days of a life are fixed

When Jesus told the disciples He was going back to Judea, they reminded Him that the Jews there had just tried to stone Him. He answered with a proverb: “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world” (John 11:9). Daylight cannot be lengthened and it cannot be shortened. Nothing a friend does can add an hour to it, and nothing an enemy does can take an hour from it. Jesus was saying that His own life was like that. God had fixed its length, and He could walk toward danger without fear.

What He said of His own days Scripture says of every life:

A death comes through a tumor, a truck on the highway, a heart that stops or another person’s sin, and those causes are real. They do not finally explain why that day was the last. The person you love did not die a day early. Nothing about it surprised God, intruded on His plan or got past Him.

The comfort of this truth is also its hardest part

For a believer this is the most comforting truth there is. If God orders everything down to the smallest detail, then nothing has happened outside His purpose. It is also hard to bear, because the hand that holds the days is the hand that closed this one, and we have to accept the dark side of His providence along with the bright. Job did not soften that. He had just been told that all ten of his children were dead. He tore his robe, shaved his head and fell to the ground, and he worshiped: “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21).

What every mourner says

Martha went out to meet Jesus on the road and said, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21). When Mary came to Him she fell at His feet and said the same words (John 11:32). The sisters had surely been saying them to each other for four days. Every mourner knows that sentence, and only the reason changes: the doctor who should have been called sooner, the drive that should never have been made, the words that should have been said.

There was complaint in it, and doubt of His wisdom, and Jesus did not rebuke them. He gave Martha the words believers have read at funerals ever since, and He wept with Mary. He did not explain the delay. He gave them Himself.

What Jesus said about the twelve hours answers that sentence. If no friend can add an hour to a life, then what you did or did not do was not the hinge on which that life turned. People’s choices are real, and people answer for them, but the days of the one you love were written in God’s book before the first of them came.

Real failures are covered at the cross

Some regret has a true cause: harsh last words, visits never made, a forgiveness never asked for, the gospel never spoken. That guilt cannot be argued away, and it does not need to be. The last thing Peter did before the cross was deny Jesus with a curse, and he went out and wept bitterly. On the morning of the resurrection the angel’s message was “go, tell His disciples and Peter” (Mark 16:7). The risen Lord wanted that man found and set back on his feet.

Bring the failure to the same Lord. He paid for every evil word spoken and for every good word left unsaid. What you can no longer say to them you can say to Him, and what He has forgiven you have no need to go on paying for. Mourning can become a way of trying to atone for ourselves, and it adds nothing to the blood of Christ.

The end of the story was not in view

²⁸And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

Romans 8:28

Believers know that verse, and at a graveside it can be the hardest one to hear. It does not say that all things are good. The death of a child is not good, and Scripture never calls it good. It says that God takes all things, and the word πάντα (panta) leaves nothing out, and works them together into what is truly good. The next verse says what that good is: that His children should be “conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29). The promise looks to eternal glory, and it is made to “those who love God.” For them God is working what is best, in time and in eternity, whether or not they can see it.

No one can test that promise while the grief is fresh. But Scripture shows how several such stories ended, and in each one the person in the middle of it saw something very different from what God was doing:

None of them was shown the end while grieving. Jacob waited more than twenty years to see his son’s face, and Naomi held Obed in her lap without ever seeing David. Believers today stand where they stood. Some of what God is doing in your loss you may live to see, and the rest is kept for glory.

What he did not know did not change the scaffold, though it took away his peace. “The eternal God is a dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:27).

The prayers that could not all be granted

Around the bed of a dying believer the prayers often run in opposite directions. A husband begs God to spare his wife. Her children ask for more time. She herself, worn out with pain, asks to go home. A friend prays only for whatever will glorify God. All of them belong to Christ, and they are all speaking to the same Father. What becomes of prayers that cannot all be granted?

God does not settle such a thing the way a judge settles a dispute, giving each side a portion. Prayer is not a vote, and He does not add up the requests and look for a middle course. He is never caught between His children. Scripture teaches that God is sovereign, and that He has ordained prayer as a means by which He acts. Believers are to hold both truths whole, because a solution in the middle would ruin them both.

It is right to ask God to spare someone

To ask is never wrong. David fasted and wept for his sick child, saying, “Who knows, the LORD may be gracious to me, that the child may live” (2 Samuel 12:22). Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and wept, and before Isaiah had left the palace courtyard God sent him back with the words “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears” (2 Kings 20:5). When Epaphroditus recovered, Paul called it mercy, “not on him only but also on me” (Philippians 2:27). In Gethsemane the Son of God Himself prayed “with loud crying and tears” (Hebrews 5:7), and He ended, “yet not My will, but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

That last clause belongs in every such prayer, spoken or not. Someone once asked John MacArthur what the point of prayer was if a family prays for a safe trip and half of them are killed on the way home. He answered that we have to learn to let God say no. Prayer is still communion with Him, and it is offered within His will: keep us safe, “but if You choose to take us home, then You’re God and that’s Your plan.” When Paul asked three times to be rid of his thorn, the Lord left it where it was and gave him something else: “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

One prayer over every believer is always answered

Another prayer is being offered over every dying believer, and no one in the room is offering it. On the night before the cross Jesus prayed:

²⁴Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.

John 17:24

He does not say that He is willing to receive them. He says that He desires them. It is easy to understand that we should want to be with Him. It is staggering that He wants to be with us. And the Son always prays according to the Father’s will, so this prayer cannot fail.

The psalm at the head of this page rests on that desire. The word precious, יָקָר (yaqar), is used of costly stones (1 Kings 5:17). The death of one of His people is never a small thing to God. It is precious to Him because He wants them. When someone prayed “let her stay” and she died, that prayer was heard, and a greater one was answered.

In the end every prayer made in Christ is more than answered

The prayers at that bedside conflict only for a time. Among those who are in Christ, what each one asked for is given, and more. The husband prayed for his wife to be healed. A healing here only postpones the inevitable, and the healing she is waiting for is a body like Christ’s, which will never be sick (Philippians 3:21). The children wanted more time with her, and they will have it without end (1 Thessalonians 4:17). She asked to go home, and she is home. God is “able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20).

None of this removes the cost of the years between. It means that no one who prayed for her good has been refused it.

Jesus told Martha that a believer will never die

He called it sleep

On the road outside Bethany, with a grieving woman in front of Him, Jesus said the words on which all of this rests:

²⁵I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, ²⁶and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?

John 11:25-26

A believer dies, and Jesus says so. He also says that the same believer “will never die.” The body stops and the person does not. He had already told the disciples, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep” (John 11:11). When they took Him to mean rest, He said plainly, “Lazarus is dead” (John 11:14). He was not softening the fact. He was saying what death is to Him: something from which He wakes a person.

After the resurrection the New Testament speaks of the death of believers in the same way. Paul writes that “Jesus died”, and that believers have “fallen asleep in Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 4:14). Jesus took death in all its terror so that it could become sleep for those who are His. Each word Scripture uses for the death of a believer shows something:

Asleep

κοιμάω (koimao), 1 Thessalonians 4:13. The body at rest for a time, as one who will wake. Christians took the word for their burial grounds, and it is the root of our word cemetery, a sleeping place.

Departure

ἀνάλυσις (analusis), 2 Timothy 4:6. The word for an ox unyoked from the plow, a prisoner released, a tent struck and a ship cast off from the dock.

A tent taken down

“The earthly tent which is our house” comes down, and “a building from God” is waiting (2 Corinthians 5:1).

Gain

“To live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21).

Rest

“They may rest from their labors” (Revelation 14:13).

Home

“At home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8).

Absent from the body, at home with the Lord

Death is the separation of body and spirit. As the stones fell on Stephen he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” and then, Luke says, “he fell asleep” (Acts 7:59-60). Those two sentences hold the doctrine. The person went to Christ, and the body lay down. Paul preferred “to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8), and he knew of nothing between the two.

Scripture is plain on what follows from that:

• It is immediate. Jesus said to a dying man, “today you shall be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Christ is usually described as seated, but the dying Stephen saw “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56), as if He had risen to welcome one of His own.
• It is conscious. Sleep is said of the body only. Christ died “so that whether we are awake or asleep, we will live together with Him” (1 Thessalonians 5:10).
• There is no place between. There is no purgatory and no limbo, no holding place where sins are made up for, and no way for the living to pray anyone into heaven.
• No one goes alone. The beggar whom no one noticed “was carried away by the angels” (Luke 16:22).

A hard death is not the last word

Many who grieve carry the memory of the last days: the pain, the machines, the struggle for breath. To fear the dying is natural, and God built that into us. It is a different thing from fearing death. God gives the grace for dying when dying comes and not before, which is why no one can feel it in advance, and the hardest deaths are often where that grace is given most. Whatever those last hours were, they are over, and they did not separate that believer from the love of God (Romans 8:38-39).

Very much better

Paul had a hard life and a fruitful one, and when he weighed it against what lies beyond death he wrote, “having the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is very much better” (Philippians 1:23). He piles up the words, much, more and better, where one would have done. What makes it better is Christ Himself: personal, unhindered, unending fellowship with the One he loved.

Those who have died in Christ are finished with sin and temptation, with anxiety and fear, with labor, sorrow and weariness. Scripture says what is true of them now:

• ✓They are with Christ and they see His glory, as He asked (John 17:24).
• ✓They are made perfect: Hebrews speaks of “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23).
• ✓They have rest from all they carried, and “their deeds follow with them” (Revelation 14:13).
• ✓They are beyond the reach of evil: the righteous man “enters into peace” (Isaiah 57:2).

The Holy Spirit says yes

¹³And I heard a voice from heaven, saying, “Write, ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on!’ ” “Yes,” says the Spirit, “so that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow with them.”

Revelation 14:13

The voice pronounces them blessed, and the Holy Spirit Himself answers. He has sustained His people through everything they suffered, and He says yes to the end of it. The word for labors, κόπος (kopos), means work to the point of exhaustion. That is over for them, and the record of their service has gone with them.

Some are taken away from what was coming

¹The righteous man perishes, and no man takes it to heart; and devout men are taken away, while no one understands. For the righteous man is taken away from evil, ²He enters into peace; they rest in their beds, each one who walked in his upright way.

Isaiah 57:1-2

Isaiah says that people do not understand when the righteous die, and that God may be taking them out of reach of what is coming. Two accounts in Kings show it. When the child of wicked King Jeroboam fell sick, God said that he alone of that family would receive a grave, “because in him something good was found toward the LORD God of Israel” (1 Kings 14:13). God told King Josiah, “your eyes will not see all the evil which I will bring on this place” (2 Kings 22:20). No one can say of a particular death that this was the reason. Scripture does say that God has such reasons, and what looks like a life cut short may be a mercy, severe from where we stand and a mercy nonetheless.

If you loved Me, you would have rejoiced

Some believers are ready to go. Old age, long illness or a hard life has worn them down, and they have told God so. Those who love them are often not ready, and they go on asking for more time. Is it selfish to want them to stay?

Wanting them here is love, and Scripture does not condemn it. Paul was ready to accept the death of Epaphroditus, he would not have liked it, and he called the man’s recovery mercy to himself. But on the night before He left them, Jesus taught His disciples something about love. They were full of sorrow because He was going. He said, “If you loved Me, you would have rejoiced because I go to the Father” (John 14:28). They did love Him, but their love was looking at what His going would mean to them. If they had seen it from His side, they would have been glad. Love “does not seek its own” (1 Corinthians 13:5), and true love seeks the joy of the one it loves.

The pull of heaven grows as a believer ages. Most of a life’s work lies behind him, he has lived so long with Christ that he loves Him more than ever, and the longing to be with Him gets stronger. When Simeon had seen the Christ child he said, “Now Lord, You are releasing Your bond-servant to depart in peace” (Luke 2:29), a slave asking his Master for his release. This is no death wish. It is love wanting to be nearer: a letter from someone you love is good, a phone call is better, and being with that person is best.

Letting go does not mean hastening the end

To open our hands is not to take the matter into them. Life is sacred, because it bears the image of God, and God alone appoints the day. To leave the old or the sick to die because they no longer contribute is a sin against that image, and to take a life, one’s own included, is murder. Everything reasonable should be done to preserve life.

A Christian at the very brink of death, kept here only by heroic last efforts, is a different case. A family may ask what those efforts are for, and may let such a person go to the glories of heaven. God may have purposes still unfolding in that life, so the decision is made with prayer and good counsel. It need not be made with guilt.

Grief must not refuse every comfort

Love for the one who has gone can also turn inward. Jacob “refused to be comforted” (Genesis 37:35). There is a place for weeping, and no one should hurry another through it. But a sorrow that looks only at what I have lost, and never at where they are, has stopped looking at Christ. The question to ask in the worst hours is the one Jesus put to His disciples: what does this going mean to the one who has gone?

No believer’s life is cut short

Measured against eternity, a life is very short. “You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away” (James 4:14). Moses said of our days, “soon it is gone and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10). Apart from God that is the whole story. The French statesman Talleyrand wrote on a piece of paper at his bedside:

Paul, waiting for his execution, wrote, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). Both men faced the same death. The difference is what a life is for:

⁷For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; ⁸for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.

Romans 14:7-8

Scripture sums up the long life of David in one line: “David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep” (Acts 13:36). A believer’s life on earth has a purpose from God, and when that purpose is finished God takes His child home. The only reason to stay is service, and when the service is done there is no reason to cling to this world.

The length of a life does not measure its worth

Stephen preached one recorded sermon and was killed at the end of it, and he did not die one day before he had done all that God wanted him to do. The effect of a life has nothing to do with its length. Death leaves symphonies unfinished from where we stand, but no believer’s purpose has been cut off, because that purpose is not completed in this world at all. It was planned in eternity past and is fulfilled in eternity to come, and time is a short stretch in the middle. That is true of a pastor in his nineties and of a baby who lived twenty-two hours.

Only God knows when the work is done

The measure of a finished life belongs to God, and we may not take it from Him. It would be easy to say that a believer who can no longer serve has outlived his purpose, and Scripture does not say that. If He wants you alive, and He does if you are alive, then He has a purpose for you here. It may be hidden from everyone in the room. The sick and the very old still teach those around them how a believer endures: “They will still yield fruit in old age” (Psalm 92:14). Sickness itself can be for the glory of God, as Jesus said of Lazarus (John 11:4), and so can dying. He told Peter “by what kind of death he would glorify God” (John 21:19), and Paul expected Christ to “be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death” (Philippians 1:20).

The question many believers are afraid to ask aloud

When you do not know

Everything written so far about where the dead are is written of those who die in Christ. Many who read this have buried someone of whom they cannot say that: a father who never spoke of God, a brother who walked away from the church, a friend who laughed at the gospel. A believer stood up at a question-and-answer session and told John MacArthur that a cousin had just died, apparently without the Lord, and that it was waking them at three in the morning. How could it be reconciled? “I don’t think you can,” he said, “because you love Christ.”

No one knows what passed at the last

The first thing to say is that you do not know, and neither does anyone else. Could that person have been saved in the last hours? It could happen, and you cannot know it. Much of what happens at the end of a life is hidden from those who love the one dying. The thief on the cross had a lifetime of crime behind him and hours to live, and he said, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). Jesus promised him paradise that day, on the strength of nothing he had done.

Hope cannot go further than Scripture goes

The second thing must be said as plainly. Scripture offers no second chance after death: “it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Asked whether those who had not believed are given a last chance, John MacArthur answered, “I wish I could say it was.” We cannot alter the doctrines of the Word of God to accommodate our feelings. A believer may not declare someone to be in heaven because he wants that to be so, and if a life showed no evidence of faith, there is no evidence to point to. Neither may he pronounce the verdict himself. Honesty stops at what Scripture says and what you actually know, and beyond that only God knows.

The Judge of all the earth will do right

What you can know is the Judge. When Abraham pleaded for Sodom, he rested his plea on one question: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Genesis 18:25). Every person who has died is in the hands of One who knows every word they heard and every movement of their heart. He is not less merciful than you are. He says, “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11), and Jesus wept over a city that rejected Him (Luke 19:41). Part of what shook Him at the tomb of Lazarus was the unbelief of the crowd around Him and where it would lead. The ache you feel is not greater than His.

That ache is right, and it should not be argued away. John MacArthur told that believer that it ought to disturb the soul, and that the Lord would give mercy and grace and comfort to go on. David was a man of faith, and he cried out over his son Absalom, “Would I had died instead of you” (2 Samuel 18:33). Scripture does not hide that grief.

What comfort remains

He was once asked how to comfort a Christian whose unbelieving husband had died. There is one comfort, he said: heaven is promised to her, where there is no more sorrow. God will “wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4), and “the former things will not be remembered or come to mind” (Isaiah 65:17). Scripture does not explain how that will be, and it says that it will be. No tear will be left, this one included.

Until then this grief has work to do. Nothing more can be done for the dead, and everything can be done for the living. The people around you who do not know Christ are still within reach of the gospel, and you now know better than most what is at stake.

What Scripture answers

The bereaved often bring these questions to a pastor. Scripture does not answer everything we would like to know, and it does answer these. Pick a question to read the answer.

The grave does not have the last word over the body

They will rise first

Martha knew the doctrine: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24). Then she stood at the tomb and protested that after four days the body would smell (John 11:39). Jesus had the stone rolled away, and He cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth” (John 11:43). It was well that He used the name. With the power in that voice, a bare command to come out might have emptied every grave on earth.

One day the command will not be limited to one name:

¹⁶For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. ¹⁷Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. ¹⁸Therefore comfort one another with these words.

1 Thessalonians 4:16-18

This was Paul’s answer to the fear that the dead would miss the coming of Christ. They will not miss it. They go first. That beloved wife, that husband, that son or daughter, that friend, will rise before anyone who is still alive is taken. The dead do not lose their place by dying, and the living do not meet the Lord without them. Paul’s words are “together with them.” Then he tells the church what to do with this teaching. He does not ask for a chart of the future. He asks them to comfort each other.

What is sown in the ground will be raised

Some who grieve are troubled by what has become of the body, through disease, fire, the sea or the years. Lazarus had been dead four days. Our bodies, if the Lord does not come soon, will be in far worse condition than his. Whatever is left, and even if nothing is left, He who made the universe from nothing can raise it.

Paul compares a burial to a sowing: “That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Corinthians 15:36). What goes into the ground is not what comes up (1 Corinthians 15:42-44):

Christ “will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory” (Philippians 3:21). The body you buried, tired or wasted or broken, is not the last you will see of the person you love.

Everything death has done will be undone

Paul taunts death at the end of 1 Corinthians 15, asking where its victory and its sting have gone, and he explains: “The sting of death is sin” (1 Corinthians 15:56). When death struck Christ at the cross it left its stinger there. He bore the whole of it. Sin is what gives death its power to harm, and for those who are in Christ every sin has been paid for. Death can still invade a home and wound those in it. It has no power left to condemn them.

The victory is still to come in full, and it is more than an end to further harm. When a tornado is stopped the houses it has wrecked still lie in ruins. God’s victory over death is of another kind. Isaiah promised, “He will swallow up death for all time, and the Lord GOD will wipe tears away from all faces” (Isaiah 25:8). All that death has done will be undone.

³And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, ⁴and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”

Revelation 21:3-4

This is more than tears dried on arrival. The Greek says every single tear, and it means that there will never be another. The tears of loneliness and of lost love will be gone, and so will those of remorse and regret, of neglect, and of yearning for what cannot be. He paid for them. “Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried” (Isaiah 53:4). On the cross He took away our sin, and with it, in the end, our sorrow.

What a believer does when the visitors have gone home

How to go on

After the funeral the days go on. Scripture gives no timetable for grief, but it does show what believers do in those days. None of this happens once and is finished. It is done again each time the waves return.

1. 1

   Run to God, not away from Him

   When his son’s life was in the balance, and when his wife broke her neck in a car accident, John MacArthur said, he did not get angry with God: “I just ran to God.” God is never more intimately known to us than when He comes to us in the middle of our pain.

2. 2

   Talk to your own soul

   The psalmist stopped listening to his troubled heart and began to speak to it: “Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God” (Psalm 42:5). Grief says many things in the night, and not all of them are true.

3. 3

   Stand on what is true

   Sympathy helps for a time, and it does not hold. Steve and Andrea Ostini of Grace Church lost two babies, one at two months and one at twenty-two hours, and what carried them was God’s Word on where those children were. Truth is everything when a child dies.

4. 4

   Worship before you understand

   Job worshiped on the day he lost his children, and David “came into the house of the LORD and worshiped” on the day his child died (2 Samuel 12:20). Bitterness keeps a heart away from God, and worship begins in accepting what He has done.

5. 5

   Let your comfort reach someone else

   God “comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Corinthians 1:4). Comfort is a stewardship. Those who have been through the dark can tell others what they found there.

6. 6

   Go on with the work God has left you

   God said to Joshua, “Moses My servant is dead; now therefore arise” (Joshua 1:2). You are still here, and that means He has a purpose for you. Adoniram Judson buried a wife and children in Burma and stayed: “If I had not felt certain that every trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings.” Your “toil is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58).

You do not sign off at the funeral

At the tomb of Lazarus Jesus gave the crowd two jobs. “Remove the stone,” He said (John 11:39), and when Lazarus had come out, “Unbind him, and let him go” (John 11:44). They could not raise the dead. They could do what people can do, and He left that to them. God comforts the bereaved largely through the people around them. Paul wrote that “God, who comforts the depressed, comforted us by the coming of Titus” (2 Corinthians 7:6).

Job’s friends began well. “They sat down on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights with no one speaking a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great” (Job 2:13). They were right for seven days. When they began to explain his suffering, everything fell apart. In Israel the mourners came and stayed for seven days. Our funerals last an hour, and then we go on with life.

The measure of a church is how it holds the heartbroken. The first ministry the early church organized, apart from worship and evangelism, was the care of widows. God calls Himself “a father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows” (Psalm 68:5), and He calls pure religion “to visit orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27). For anyone walking beside the bereaved, that comes down to a few things:

• Go to them. Your presence does more than your words.
• “Weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). Do not hurry them.
• Do not explain the death. You do not know why, and Job’s friends did not know either.
• When they ask what is true, tell them from the Word of God. A vague reassurance will not hold.
• Keep coming. The hardest months begin after the visitors stop.

What God can do through one death

John closes the account of Lazarus with a result: “many of the Jews who came to Mary, and saw what He had done, believed in Him” (John 11:45). People came to that house to mourn and went home believing in Him. God has often done this. No one may look at a particular death and say that God took this one to reach that one, and a grieving family should not be handed such a theory. God has not told us. What can be said is that Scripture and the history of the church show Him doing it, again and again.

When they stoned Stephen, the witnesses “laid aside their robes at the feet of a young man named Saul” (Acts 7:58). He heard the prayer “Lord, do not hold this sin against them!” (Acts 7:60) and saw a man die with no fear. Years later he was still telling it: “I also was standing by approving” (Acts 22:20). It may well be that Stephen’s death stayed in his mind until the road to Damascus, and the man who came down that road carried the gospel across the Roman world.

Every death speaks to the living

People once came to Jesus with news of Galileans killed by Pilate. He spoke of eighteen others killed when a tower fell, and He did not explain either event. He turned to those who were still alive: “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:5). The real calamity is not how a person dies or when, but dying without repentance. God gives us life and love and every good thing, and from time to time He interrupts His patience with a reminder that death is near and that we do not know the hour. Every funeral is such a reminder, and every believer who has buried someone has heard it.

“Though he is dead, he still speaks” was said of Abel (Hebrews 11:4), and it is true of every believer who dies. The one you lost may still be speaking to someone, and you may be the one who carries the message.