A father and son were traveling down a country road one afternoon in the springtime when a bee suddenly flew into the car window. Being deathly allergic to bee stings, the boy began to panic as the bee buzzed all around the inside of the car. Seeing the horror on his child’s face, the father reached out and caught the bee in his hand. Soon, he opened his hand and the bee began to buzz around again. The boy went back into panic mode. It was then that the father reached over to his son, and opened his hand showing him the stinger still in his palm. “Relax, son,” the father said, “I took the sting, the bee can’t hurt you anymore.”
That story makes me think of the blessed promise God has given to us all through His Son, Jesus Christ. He assures us that “death” cannot hurt us anymore because He has taken the “sting” out of it for us. Listen to how the Holy Spirit worded this truth through the Apostle Paul, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” (1 Corinthians 15:55-57 NET)
Over my nearly forty years of pastoral ministry I have been called to help on many occasions when families were in crisis because a loved one was critically ill and very near death. Even after all these years of experiencing these things with heartbroken families, it has never gotten easier for me. The pain that comes from the death of someone’s family member still feels like it did the first time I was called as a new pastor to tell a man his wife had passed away tragically one night while he was at work. I still choke back tears when I see the pain in the faces of the ones who are saying “goodbye” to their dearest on earth. Truthfully, I long for the day when death will be no more and it will be totally “destroyed” so it can never touch the lives of any person ever again.
If you stop and think about it, it really shouldn’t be a wonder to any of us why we celebrate weekly the remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice and the reality of His resurrection. It is our hope (cf. 1 Cor. 15:19) and our help! These momentous works of Christ (His death, burial and resurrection) assure us that our family members are not gone forever. We are sustained by these truths, knowing that we will one day meet on Heaven’s shore in the land where we will never be subject to sin or death again. This Good News we call the Gospel helps us know by faith what God has prepared for all His children. It reminds us that though the unpleasantness of death has visited our family, the grave will not hold our loved ones for long. Why? Because Jesus conquered the grave, and so will the bodies of our deceased family members at Christ’s coming! I cannot imagine what it would be like to face death without the strength and hope that comes through our Savior Who gave His life for us so that we might live with Him eternally.
On many occasions through these years I’ve told grieving and hurting families something that I heard when I was a young minister: “We don’t live by explanations. We live by promises!” If you’ve been through a crisis at any time in your life I think you can probably identify with the sentiment of those two statements. The truth is, there are many things in this life we will never understand and we will never be able to explain. The death of a loved one is one of those conundrums that shakes us to the very core of our being. Why did he/she have to die so soon? Why did the disease progress so quickly when others lived for many years with the same illness? What could possibly be the purpose of a person so young being taken when he/she had so much life before them? Why, when we prayed so diligently for our loved one to be healed, did it not happen? Why couldn’t God have called our loved one home after I arrived to be with him/her rather than just before I got there? The questions of this nature could go on ad infinitum! There are just so many things we can’t understand because our perspective is so terribly limited by our humanity.
What we have to do during our moments of crisis while we are living in the “land of the dying” is hold onto the promises of God that sustain us when explanations aren’t enough or not forthcoming. Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus we have the promise that our loved ones are with Him immediately after their deaths! We have the promise that the grave cannot hold their bodies when Christ comes the second time! We have the promise of a future glorified body like His resurrected one! We have the promise of understanding God’s perfect will in matters that confuse us now! We have the promise of a future reunion when we’ll never have to say “goodbye” to our loved ones again! We have the promise that our family member will never be touched by the cruel and sometimes evil things that exist in this world! We have the promise of His sustaining grace to help us until we meet again on that “heavenly shore!”
Do you see the difference between the two previous paragraphs: the one filled with “question marks” and the other with “exclamation points?” If you didn’t already sense the difference, let me explain to you the contrast between them. Dwelling on questions serves only to deepen our pain, while focusing on promises brings us peace in the midst of our turmoil. And, if it were not for the death and resurrection of Jesus there would be no promises to hold onto in the times of crisis...or any other time for that matter!
Occasionally I’ll hear a person tell me that he or she is an atheist. Upon hearing those words I immediately feel sorrow for them because they have no promises on which to lean or to steady themselves when the earth is shaking beneath their feet. They have no hope of gathering on Heaven’s peaceful shore where happy reunions occur. They have no promise of explanations for things that will never be understood in this life. To the “unbelievers,” life seems to be little more than a matter of happenstance or fate. There is no eternal comfort you can offer them or help that can be rendered through God’s promises. Their lives are one big gamble and for them it’s just “bad luck” that things turned out the way they did...or so they think.
Thank God that we as followers of Jesus don’t have to live that way! We know the cross of Christ is God’s way of paying the penalty for our sins. And the empty tomb? Well, that’s God’s way of saying to us; “Relax, dear son or daughter, I took the sting of death for you and it can’t hurt you anymore.”
