Heath Lambert: We have listeners to Truth and Love all over the world. But this week in the United States, we are celebrating Memorial Day. That is a federal holiday in the United States to commemorate the loss of loved ones, particularly those who have died in War. Memorial Day began in the 1860s called Decoration Day, as Union soldiers were commemorated for their death in the American Civil War and the ensuing decades. Confederate soldiers began to have their deaths be commemorated. And by the twentieth century, it was made a national holiday for all Veterans of all foreign wars. Many take the opportunity on Memorial Day not just to commemorate the deaths of men and women who have died in battle but to remember all of those who they care about who have died in years past. It’s really valuable for us to remember the importance of this holiday because so many in America use it as the official start of summer. And we’re happy for the rejoicing in the cookouts and the pool parties that are going to happen this week. But we also want to remember the very important roots of the holiday. The producer of Truth and Love. Amy Evensen is here to talk to us about Memorial Day. Amy, happy Memorial Day.
Question: Same to you. So, Memorial Day gets us thinking about loved ones that we’ve lost. How should we think about grieving those that we’ve lost?
Heath Lambert: Yes, the reason I think that’s a really important question is because, in pastoral ministry, I have known many people who have felt guilty for the grief that they’ve experienced and in the loss of a loved one, in the aftermath of the death. Sometimes Christians can think that they are unholy or ungodly if they’re sad. Sometimes they can think that a full-blown trust in the sovereign care of God. I will lead them to an embrace of his providence and in a way that is devoid of any kind of grief or sorrow. And it’s important for us to remember that is not a Biblical approach to grief. I think of a couple of different texts. One passage is Genesis 2:17, and their God says to Adam and Eve, “but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall I shall not eat for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” That is an important text for this issue because it lets us know that death is something that is abnormal. It’s to be expected. Once you eat from the tree, you’re going to usher in a world of death. It’s to be expected. And so, after Adam and Eve, do partake of the forbidden fruit, they usher in a world of death. And so it is to be expected, but it’s also abnormal. This is something that human beings bring into the creation. It’s not something that is a part of God’s created good. So even though we anticipate it, even though we know, it’s coming for all of God’s creatures. It is something because it’s unusual because it’s a fruit of sin. It is something that is a legitimate source of pain. Perhaps, there’s no other texts in Scripture that show us the goodness of grief over loss, then in the account of Lazarus, where Jesus in John 11:35 is described as weeping. The verse says, “Jesus wept.” We remember that as the shortest verse in the Bible, but the words are more profound than simply being the shortest verse in the Bible. They are words that legitimize grief. So, Jesus, the Son of God, who we know is getting ready to breathe life back into Lazarus after he’s been dead for four days. We know he’s getting ready to do that, and yet, Jesus looks at the people who are grieving, he thinks about his friend, and he cries. Jesus cannot be charged with a lack of trust. He cannot be charged with a lack of joy, and yet he grieves. And he demonstrates his grief in his sorrow and in his tears. And so, we would say that grief is Christlike. We are like Jesus when we are sad at the loss of a precious loved one. So, we want to legitimize grief because grief is legitimized in the Bible, but there’s another thing I think that we could say that helps us to think about grief. And in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, it says, “but we do not want you to be uninformed brethren about those who are asleep so, that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope.” Paul, here, also talks about grief. He wants Christians to grieve, but he wants them to have the kind of information that allows them to grieve with hope. Unbelievers grieve without hope, believers grieve with hope. And he goes on to give us confidence that Jesus Christ is going to return in glory and resurrect all those who died in him. And so, for Christians, when we grieve the loss of a fellow Christian, that is rightly painful. But we can also do it with hope knowing that for all Christians, death is not the end of the story. But Jesus, who is the resurrection and the life, will restore eternal life to all who have lost it in physical death.
Question: So, all of that makes sense for the person who is a believer, but what if someone’s lost a person that they don’t believe to be a Christian?
Heath Lambert: Well, that’s right. And what Paul is saying is written to believers who have lost to death, other believers. And so, the grieving with hope is the hope that is in Christ and that only belongs to those who legitimately trust Jesus. And so, when we face the loss of a loved one who has died apart from Christ, we have to think about it a little differently. And you know, there are a lot of things that we could say here, but one passage that comes to mind when I think about this is Psalm 119:68, and there it says, “you are good and do good, teach me your statutes.” Now, this is a text; it doesn’t talk about grief, it doesn’t talk about death, but actually talks about the character and behavior of God. And though the source of pain in so many cases when we’re grieving the loss of someone who’s died, we think apart from Christ, is we’re really tempted to challenge the character and the actions of God. We are tempted to be angry or disappointed with God. And so, this text, even though it doesn’t mention grief or death per se, is all about the struggle we’re experiencing when we deal with one of those issues. So, it begins with, “you are good.” The psalmist has a rock-solid conviction that the character of God is good. It is unassailable. We have to come to the painful loss of someone who has died apart from Christ, believing that God is good. This is all about character. This is important for parents. It’s important for bosses, we can trust our bosses, and we can trust our parents on a human level. Even when we don’t understand what they’re doing, we’re able to trust them if we know that they are good, if we know that they have our best interest at heart. And this is what God does here, far above any human authority. God is infinitely good, infinitely perfect, and we are urged here to trust that he is good. It says, “you are good,” God you are good, and it says, “you do good,” so the things that God does are good. This is hard for us to understand when we don’t like what God does when we would prefer him not to do it, and he does it. Then we wonder if what he did was really good. But this is where the character part is important. We can look at the circumstances, we can look at the event and wonder about it, but if we trust that God is good, then we can have confidence that what he’s doing is good. So, an example that I think of is my daughter Chloe and she had fallen at church one night and had a cut on her head. And it was really, really sensitive to pain, and I needed to rinse off the cut. Because you know how, when you get a cut on your head, there’s a lot of blood. It’s hard to tell whether it’s a really bad cut or just a small nick. And so, I needed to get rid of some of the blood and the dirt that was there. And Chloe was screaming, she didn’t want me to touch her head, and I said, “Chloe, do you know that I love you?” And she said, “yes.” And I said, “do you think that I want to do anything to hurt you?” And she said, “no,” and I said, “so I know your head hurts, but do you think you could trust me to rinse your head off?” And she said, “sure, daddy.” And so, she was crying, and she was sad, and she was nervous, but she laid there while I rinsed her head off in the tub, and it turned out she was fine. And it didn’t hurt like she thought it was going to. And so, she came to trust the action I was doing, not because she understood everything about what I was doing, but because when she thought about it, she trusted me. And so, we will trust that what God does is good when we believe that he is good. And then the third thing, it says there in verse 68, is “teach me your statutes.” God is good and does good. We are bad and do bad as human beings, and so the person who needs to learn in adversity, the person who needs to learn and trial, the person who needs to learn what goodness is at the funeral home is a sinner like you and me. God is good; we are not. God does Good. We don’t. We need to learn from him. He doesn’t need to learn from us. And so, what loss and pain actually wind up doing is they wind up being an opportunity for us to depend on God to depend on God when he’s done something that we would not do if it were up to us. But to trust that he is better, wiser, and more loving than we could ever be and that he would never do something bad. He doesn’t even know how to do it. And so what we have to do when we lose someone, and we don’t understand why we’ve lost them, or when we lose someone, and we think they might not be a believer is we have to by grace and by God’s mercy, turn our eyes from looking at merely the circumstances; and use the good character and the good providence of God as the lenses through which we would see everything that’s happening and trust him.
