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I have struggled for weeks to write this article. As I write in the dark, early-morning hours from my study at home, I am reflecting on the memorial and graveside services I conducted yesterday for a friend and member of our church. A few days ago, I was speaking with a dear couple whose son died in a car accident when he was sixteen. The next day, I learned of the passing of a very close friend’s grandmother, who was like a mother to him, and just yesterday morning his dear mother-in-law, who lives with him and his family, was admitted to the emergency room. Two months ago, my precious mother passed away, and her memorial service took place only two weeks after the memorial service for my stepfather. Both had been diagnosed last spring with different types of dementia. Last month marked the thirty-second anniversary of the passing of my father in 1992 at the age of 68, whose first son was killed in a hunting accident at the age of sixteen. My father would have turned 100 years old in 2024. My experiences are not unique. The harsh realities of disease and death surround us. Death and disease come to every family, and all of us mourn. Our stories and experiences with disease and death are all similar because we are all sons and daughters of Adam, in whom we all died because we all sinned in him and fell into a state of sin and misery with him. Thomas Watson said, “We spend our years with sighing. It is a valley of tears. But death is the funeral of all our sorrows.”
Yet although we all mourn, we do not grieve as those who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13). For we who are united to Christ alone through faith alone by the grace of God alone rejoice in the sure and certain hope that to live is Christ, and to die is gain (Phil. 1:21). Therefore, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:6–8). The gospel of Jesus Christ makes us no longer fear the grave. Indeed, as George Herbert wrote, “Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel has made him just a gardener.”