The darker the night, the brighter the stars The deeper the grief, the closer is God.
—APOLLON MAYKOV
HOWEVER LONG YOUR loved one lived, it was not long enough. Whether you lost a child before she even took her first breath or your loved one enjoyed a full life and lived to be one hundred years old, it’s never enough. Even if your loved one died after prolonged suffering and you feel immense relief now, there’s part of you that knows he didn’t live long enough.
And you’re right; however long it was, your loved one’s life was too short. God did not create you or your loved one to live a few years or even many years on this earth and then die. He created humankind to live forever. He created each one of us for eternity. Death was never part of God’s original intention for you or your loved one. No wonder death feels so strange. No wonder we rage against it.
In some sense death seems normal here, in the sense that every human being dies. In human terms everything in this world eventually dies: animals, plants, people, civilizations. To have a human being or even a beloved pet not die would truly seem even stranger than death. But in God’s universe as a whole, death is not normal. When God creates things, His original plan is not for them to exist only for a short time. Angels don’t die. Animals and growing things don’t die in heaven, and they won’t die in the new earth God has promised to re-create. People won’t die in the new earth either (Rev. 21:4). Death is a horrible aberration in creation, an intruder, something we rightfully see as an enemy (1 Cor. 15:26).
When I got home from the hospital the Sunday morning my husband died, I sat down with a cup of coffee and my Bible. I opened it to 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s treatise on death and resurrection. In this chapter we’re going to look at that passage as well as others. We’ll examine what God has to say about this subject that affects us all so deeply, the thing that God never originally intended you to experience but that defines your life so completely right now.
The Bible has a lot to say about death. If you haven’t already done so, grab your Bible or open the Bible app on your smartphone, and get ready to highlight some of the passages we will explore as they speak to your heart. In the emotional vulnerability of your grief journey this chapter may seem somewhat heavier than others. You may want to come back to it again in the future. But I encourage you to read it now anyway. If your mind struggles in grappling with some of the theological ideas, simply let the overall picture of how Jesus and the New Testament believers viewed death speak to your heart. There is much hope here.
How Jesus Viewed Death
Jesus has only one attitude about death. He’s against it!
Repeatedly throughout the Gospels we read about how death couldn’t exist in Jesus’ presence. He shows up and sick people get well. People simply don’t die when Jesus is around. And several times when Jesus arrives shortly after someone has died, the person lives again. No wonder the people wanted to make Him their earthly king; they could go into battle and no soldier would die, or at least they wouldn’t stay dead very long if Jesus was there.
People came to realize this relatively early in Jesus’ public ministry. If they could get a sick person to Jesus (or Jesus to them) before he or she died, the individual would be made well. And if they could get Jesus there quickly enough even after someone had died, the person could live again.
This is not making light of Jesus’ miracle-working power or of death. Far from it. But it’s important to pause and understand how completely opposed to death Jesus was—and is. Death was powerless in His presence. There was never anything good or acceptable about death in Jesus’ view.
Perhaps this raises the question in your mind: “I prayed, and my loved one still died. Isn’t Jesus with us now? Couldn’t He have kept my loved one from dying?” We’ll talk about that more in the next chapter, but for now, I’ll say this: Jesus was and is against death 100 percent. And while He was physically here on earth, humankind got a taste of the kingdom of God (Mark 1:15). Humanity got to see a little of what things become like when sin is gone and God reigns in completeness. There is no such thing as death when things are as God wants them to be.
Jesus and mourning
While He was 100 percent against death, Jesus was very much on the side of those who mourned. He didn’t say, “Quit your grieving; it’s not pretty.” His message was, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4, MEV). When He came across a widow whose only son had just died, “He had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep’” (Luke 7:13, MEV). When He saw how upset Mary and Martha were after their brother, Lazarus, died, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). Though on each occasion He knew He was about to raise the person (the widow’s son and Lazarus) from the dead, Jesus identified deeply with the loved ones’ grief. And He feels the weight of your grief with you right now.
More importantly, Jesus wasn’t content to just weep with those who weep; He came to do something about it. He came to do away with death. “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Heb. 2:14–15). In a broad sense we can explain Jesus’ whole mission on earth as dedicated to doing away with the cause, the results, and the very existence of death.
Because He was committed to eliminating death, Jesus also saw what we struggle to fully believe. Jesus could say things like “Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death” (John 8:51). And to Martha He said, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26).
Never see death? Never die? We spiritualize those statements away too quickly. We know from Scripture as a whole and from our own experience that death as we know it, the decay of our physical bodies, happens still today. But in these passages Jesus said the essence of a believer, the real “you” who was/is your loved one, never dies. Jesus says to you as He said to Martha, “Do you believe this?”
Physical vs. spiritual death
These statements of Jesus, and Paul’s treatise on death and resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, challenge us to remember that physical and spiritual death are not one and the same. In fact, they could not be more different. Yes, the human condition has a 100 percent mortality rate in terms of our physical bodies returning to dust, but that’s only the death we see with our physical eyes. Your loved one has not ceased to exist. At my husband’s home-going service, I placed my hand on his casket and declared, “This is not my husband! This is his body, but he is not here.” We grieve physical death, and rightly so. Jesus, Paul, and all the New Testament believers never say we must not grieve. But they do encourage us to remember that what we’re grieving is not the end or even ultimately the most important kind of death.
As believers we pay intellectual assent to the resurrection and eternity, and theologians argue about what they call “the state of man in death.” But I believe these statements of Jesus point us to a reality we dismiss too quickly because of our human time-bound perspective. God is sensitive to how we experience time; He created time, and He created us within it. We hurt over a loved one’s death in part because we can only experience this moment in time. But God Himself exists outside of time. To Him, yesterday, today, and forever are all present at the same time. And just as you don’t waste one ounce of energy worrying whether the sun will come up tomorrow, your loved one’s forever future is more real and “present” to God than his physical decaying body. (If you are concerned about whether or not your loved one is “present with the Lord,” we’ll address that in the next chapter.)
I struggle to find the words to express this, and you probably struggle to wrap your mind around it, especially as you are grieving. Martha struggled too. As Jesus was talking to her about Lazarus and the comparative smallness of physical death, “Martha answered, ‘I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day’” (John 11:24). And when Jesus responded by declaring “I am the resurrection and the life,” all Martha could do was simply affirm, “Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world” (John 11:25–27, MEV).
Perhaps that’s all you can do right now too. And that’s OK. Choosing to embrace this truth does not remove the pain of your loss. It does not remove the blackness of your dark valley of grief, but it does point to the temporariness of it. This truth assures you that your pain will come to an end just as assuredly as the reality that death—physical death included—will die.
We appropriately rage against death because part of us senses it’s not “normal.” But again, remember that your loved one has not ceased to exist. Jesus’ statements that we will “never die” and “never see death” are too overwhelming, too radical to dismiss. Theologians can argue all they wish about “the state of man in death,” but we can believe Jesus’ statements even if we don’t understand every detail about them. In this sense God’s original intent in our creation, that humankind would live for eternity, has never been thwarted. Sin has created a huge detour, to be sure. The physical bodies that God intended to be ours forever are now only temporary, but in eternity they will be changed into bodies that will never die (1 Cor. 15:52–54). God’s purposes have never changed; your loved one is safe with Him. And we can know this much from examining Jesus’ view of death when He was here: Jesus is 100 percent against death, and because of Him death will have an end.
In the meantime imagine Jesus being next to you right now, as He was next to Mary and Martha. You can cry out, as they did, “If You had been here, my loved one would not have died!” And you can see Him weep with you, comfort you, hold you close. And even though it’s beyond our complete understanding right now, know that He understands. How can He be so against death and still be that present with you right now in your grief? In some ways that’s one of the paradoxes of the kingdom of God. It’s fine to ask the questions. And while you’re feeling undone and hoping for the answers, just affirm with Martha, “Jesus, I may not understand. But I believe that You are who You say You are and that You are in the process of making all things right.”
How Early Believers Viewed Death
Jesus’ resurrection was the most disruptive event ever to occur in human history. The entire order of things was upset. Humankind had been raging against death for thousands of years but was powerless to stem its tide even a little. The mortality rate was 100 percent. (Well, except for the special cases of Enoch and Elijah.)
Until Jesus.
Jesus had cracked the death code, found the cure, beat the odds, grabbed death—physical death as well as spiritual death—by the throat and made it bow. Nothing remotely like that had ever happened before. While some are reluctant to acknowledge it, there is considerable historical evidence for the physical death and resurrection of Jesus. And it wasn’t because people didn’t try to cover it up. The priests paid off the guards stationed around Jesus’ tomb to change their testimony (Matt. 28:11–15). In the culture at large, affirming that Jesus was alive was more ludicrous than it would be to claim Elvis is alive today. (See Acts 4:2; 17:32; and 25:19.) For centuries those who dared to claim “Jesus is alive” and live accordingly put their own lives at risk (and in some places they still do).
And yet the early church grew. The eleven remaining disciples, the more than five hundred people who saw Jesus alive after His resurrection, and the growing number of those who believed He was alive were willing to die themselves because of that truth. Banishment, ridicule, lions, the stake, the rack, the sword, a cross—the very worst that human beings and demons could cook up couldn’t dissuade believers from affirming that Jesus was alive and from living according to that belief. Could anything less than the truth have provided them that kind of unquenchable “blessed hope”? Jesus said, “Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:19), and the early Christians believed it.
Most of us Christians take it for granted that Jesus rose again. But imagine for a moment if that were not true. As Paul said, “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. . . . And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:14, 17–19). The reality of Jesus’ resurrection changes everything, especially the reality surrounding physical death.
The early believers grieved over their loved ones who died, but they knew death would not have the last word. “The last enemy that will be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26, MEV). Death would die. “Then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’” (1 Cor. 15:54–55). Because of Jesus’ resurrection, death is not the end. That changed the way the early believers saw death. They understood that sin in the world as a whole resulted in death—physical death and spiritual death. Jesus’ death on the cross had dealt with it all—sin, death, evil, all of it. And now because of His resurrection, all that mess, including the death we mourn, was temporary. Painful beyond expression, yes, but temporary. And even the worst pain can be survived if it’s temporary.
Present with the Lord
There’s one more important understanding the early believers had about death: to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. “Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:6–8). This is not the time to engage in theological arguments trying to explain this in human terms, but it is a precious truth. Paul was actually expressing his preference to go away and be with the Lord. Somehow, when this earthly body ends its existence, the real person is with the Lord.
Because of Jesus’ resurrection, death is not the end. It’s only temporary. And even the worst pain can be survived if it’s temporary.
You may struggle with that same desire—to die too and be “with the Lord.” Paul says nothing about that desire being wrong in itself. But he hastens to add that voluntarily acting on that desire (causing one’s own death) is not God’s plan. (If your loved died as a result of suicide, we’ll talk about that more in chapter 9.) Paul wrote, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body” (Phil. 1:21–24). Paul still had a job to do, and he embraced the mission God had for him as long as he was needed here on earth.
If you’re breathing, God still has something for you to do here. You may not know what that is right now, and that’s OK. The death of a loved one is one of those times when the meaning of life becomes very important to many people. When you’re hurting so badly, it may seem preferable to forgo your purpose and just quit. But I can assure you, and others who have walked this journey before you can assure you too, that you won’t always feel as you do right now. In wrestling with this myself, I’ve come to the decision that I’m OK with sticking around as long as God needs me here and not one moment longer. I believe that’s the decision Paul came to, and I pray it’s the decision you come to also. And it makes me even more determined to make what time I have left fully count for the kingdom of God. I pray you’ll do the same.
Dear grieving friend, all you may be able to see right now is death. Death has robbed you of someone you loved, and your world appears to have ended. It may seem as though nothing could possibly be bigger than death. I understand as much as a fellow grieving human being can. Jesus understands completely. Your heart is broken into a million pieces, and you can’t imagine it ever being any other way.
But while I have my arm around you and mix my tears with yours, I also bid you to look up! There is One who voluntarily entered death’s territory for the purpose of destroying sin, fear, sickness, evil, bondage—and death. He deliberately and knowingly entered the open jaws of death, walked up to the keeper of the prison house of the grave, and wrested the keys from his hands. Then He walked out of His own grave, holding death’s keys in His wounded hands and leading a train of freed captives behind Him as He declared the death of death.
Can’t you see? The black and dark and universal enemy that has stolen your loved one is only a temporary and defeated foe. Hold on to that. This is the truth that allowed the early believers to grieve differently and to go cheerfully to their own physical deaths. And this is the truth that will allow you to ride the waves of hope that are offered to your soul even as the waves of grief wash over you. This pain is temporary, my dear friend. It’s temporary! There’s no bigger difference between believers and those who grieve without hope than this absolute and unshakable truth.
Our human view of death is understandable. Life on this earth has a 100 percent mortality rate. But Jesus entered death’s territory for the purpose of destroying the cause, the results, and the very existence of death. His life on earth demonstrated that in His presence death has no power. And His resurrection declared forever the death of death. In the meantime Jesus views you who are grieving with overwhelming compassion and identifies deeply with your pain.
Early believers came to understand that because Jesus is alive, they too would live. In fact, in the ultimate sense they could never die. Earthly death and everything surrounding it, while painful, is temporary. And for the believer, when one’s existence in this earthly body ends, one is then present with the Lord. While we may not fully understand what that means, we can receive comfort and hope in affirming that reality.
1. Imagine yourself as Mary or Martha, mourning their brother’s death. Imagine what Jesus would be saying to you right now. Write your thoughts in your journal.
2. What does “present with the Lord” mean to you? Based on what Scripture says about the concept, does that idea bring you any comfort?