I know that many of you think I’m a big cry baby. I really don’t cry all that often. Really you can ask my wife (back me up, dear!). There are few things that move me to tears. Chief among them is remembering how God has lavished his saving love upon me in Christ. I also tear up when I see sick kids in the hospital. I hate that. The other cause for the formation of liquid in my eyes is when I think about the death of a fellow believer. This past Sunday I shared about the death of a fellow believer with the congregation and I couldn’t stop myself from crying. Try as I might, I was unsuccessful. I even tried to use the biblical language of having “fallen asleep” in Christ, to comfort and remind myself that my brother has now passed into glory and has been made perfectly in holiness.

I so appreciate Paul’s use of that phrase, “fallen asleep,” in 1 Thessalonians 4:13. It is a gentle way to describe death. Think about the idea of sleep for a moment. It’s so comforting and comfortable, isn’t it? Nearly every night, my wife and I slip into our kids’ rooms to kiss them one last time before we go to bed. When we see our kids sleeping, they seem so peaceful, calm, and comfortable. In using the euphemism of sleep, Paul is substituting the harsh reality of death for an image which is so incredibly gentle. Paul is implicitly teaching that for those who believe in Christ, death has in fact lost its sting (1 Corinthians 15:54-57).

Though death has lost its sting for a believer, because it does not bring us before God in judgment, there is still something so unnatural and jarring about death, even the death of a believer. As Richard Gaffin has said, “Bodily death, though a transition to greater blessing, is not as such, in itself, a blessing” (Gaffin, By Faith, Not by Sight, p.104). Death tells us that everything is not as it should be. And this is why I am so often moved to tears. Physical death is God’s judicial response to human sin, not to a single person’s sin, but everyone’s sin in Adam. When death occurs, it brings wreckage. It makes me concerned for the family and friends left behind. It makes me concerned for the sheep who are without a shepherd. I trust in the Lord’s sovereignty. He knows what he is doing, and yet I think there is room (acceptable and God glorifying room) in the Christian life to grieve when a believer dies. We may grieve, and if we do, then we must grieve as those who have hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13).

As I said, death tells us that everything is not as it should be, but if we’re thinking biblically about a believer’s death, it also tells us that everything is not as it will be. We have to look beyond the grave, but even if we are to look beyond the grave, we cannot do so without looking into it. While physical death is God’s judicial response to sin, we know that death is not the end. While death is not the end, its destructive force has not yet come to an end. Until Christ returns, “we must go down in order to go up,” as Thomas Boston once said. He is worth quoting at length here,

“You must indeed, O believer, grapple with death, and shall get the first fall – but you shall rise again, and come off victorious at last. You must go down to the grave; but, though it be your long home, it will not be your everlasting home. You will not hear the voice of your friends there; but you shall hear the voice of Christ there. You may be carried there with mourning, but you shall come up from it rejoicing. Your friends, indeed, will leave you there, but your God will not. What God said to Jacob, concerning his going down to Egypt (Gen. 46:3, 4), he says to you, on your going down to the grave, ‘Fear not to go down – I will go down with you – and I will also surely bring you up again.’ O solid comfort! O glorious hopes! ‘Therefore comfort’ yourselves, and ‘one another with these words’ (1 Thess. 4:18).” [Thomas Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State]

Though we go down to the grave in Christ, we will come up in him too.