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The suffering brought by the death of a loved one has no creaturely cure. Beyond the state of our loved ones or how we miss them, we grieve for the unnaturalness of death. Death gruesomely exposes how our world is out of joint due to sin. We may be reeling and crippled by the death of a loved one, feeling unable to escape the shadow of that death. If the hope we grasp falls short of the true hope we have in Christ, death may drown out that insufficient hope and we won’t grieve with hope (1 Thess. 4:13).
Sin, which brought both spiritual and physical death (Rom. 5:12), skewed our view of reality, so sometimes we grasp a false hope or blame God for allowing death, for its timing, or for how it happens. Because of how sin affects us, sometimes we place our hope in our loved ones, and when they die we feel hopeless. At times we may grasp a scriptural hope, such as believing that loved ones are in a better place or that we will be reunited with them (1 Thess. 4:14–16), which gives us a measure of comfort. At other times, we cannot find such comfort, as reunion or being in a better place isn’t our hope if a loved one died without Christ.
Our hope is the union with God that Christ’s work accomplished for us. He took on flesh, experienced suffering, including death, and can sympathize with us (Heb. 2:14–17), but He also rose again and is in the Father’s presence as our representative and intercessor (4:14–15). The union we now have with God in Christ will be perfected at the consummation, when our wills will be perfectly aligned with God’s and every consequence of sin (including death and the sinful impulse to blame God for our sin) will be eliminated. Our ultimate hope is not being sinless and immortal, or with loved ones, but that “we will always be with the Lord” (1 Thess. 4:17). Our hope is God Himself, our portion and inheritance (Pss. 16:5–6; 42:5; Lam. 3:24; Rom. 8:17). Our union now, which is sin-proof and death-proof (Rom. 8:33–39; 1 Cor. 15:55–57), guarantees the coming perfection of our union with God.
Once our union with God is perfected, we will see that He is neither unjust nor unloving despite allowing death in our lives. We will not be sighing on account of those who are in hell, not because we will become unloving but because we will rest in God, and therefore in the beauty of His justice, despite the damnation of unbelieving loved ones.
Therefore, let us hold to God our hope. Let us look to our Father who demonstrated His love by sending His beloved Son to save us; to Christ, who did not deserve death but tasted death to make us, who deserve death, permanently united to God; and to the Holy Spirit, through whom the Father works and reveals the power of resurrection already at work in us (Rom. 8:10–11; Eph. 1:16–20).