From a funeral sermon.
As you all well know, Cheryl suffered a great deal in these past several months; all that time in the hospital, all those tests, all the reports (usually bad), all the pain and anxiety, all the uncertainty, all the surgeries, and everything else she went through. And for you, the family, there were all the trips to the hospital, all the long days and nights; and all the signs of improvement and glimmers of hope, and then, all hopes dashed; again and again. These last three weeks were the worst. After Cheryl finally got back home and was making such remarkable improvement; to then again get so sick, fail so rapidly, and die. What a heartbreaker; to go through so much, and then still lose your loved one at such a young age.
Family and friends gather on a day like this to express their sympathy and to show their support. That is right and good, but it won’t take away the pain and the loss. My job is to stand up here for a little while and attempt to bring a word of comfort and hope. But even after 35 years of doing this, I don’t have any more to offer now than when I started; something not from myself, but from God. As always, I have just a few words from God’s Word.
What I want to bring you today from God’s Word is some bad news and some good news; and, oddly enough, it is the same message that comes as both bad and good news. The message for today is that “God is in control.” That is a statement that is often quoted carelessly and applied wrongly. I’ll try to get it right. “God is in control” is not a Bible verse. Nowhere is it put exactly like that, but that is indeed the message of the entire Bible. God is in control.
However, on a day like today, that message comes, first of all, as bad news. If God holds all the cards, and God really is in control, we might think that He did not do a very good job of it for Cheryl in these last several months. Why put someone through all that, only to let it end like this? We all like the old hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” but sometimes He doesn’t seem too friendly. Theologically we can talk about the difference between what God causes and what God allows; we can talk about the redemptive purposes of suffering; and we can talk about a lot of other important and Biblical and true things. But on a day like today, we are still sad and confused.
However, there is in the Bible the vision of God’s kingdom and God’s power that extends far beyond the confines of this little world, these frail bodies, and this brief life. It is with this broader understanding that we can begin to see the message that God is in control as the good news that it really is. God IS in control, he does hold all the cards in his hands, and death is not the last card to be played. Death is never the last word from God. The Bible opens our eyes to an eternity in which God is able to work out his purposes and make things right, even those things that now seem to be so very wrong. The message God is in control may at first come to our limited vision as bad news. But when we remember God’s promise of an eternity in which to work out that control, that message becomes the very best news.
Lying in that hospital bed Cheryl had a lot of time to think, and she wondered about all this. More than once, she asked me, “What purpose do you think God has in all of this suffering that I am going through?” Cheryl believed in Jesus, so she was asking that question as a believer. She was not shaking her fist in anger and declaring “I can’t believe in a God that would allow this!” Rather, she was humbly asking about the God she believed in. “What purpose does God have for me in all of this?” she wondered. She didn’t know, and I don’t know either; but Cheryl did not let go of God. She just left it as an unanswered question. I was able to tell her about a time when Jesus was here and many people were also confused by what he was saying and doing; even then, when he was right there with them. John chapter six tells the story. Beginning in verse 66 it says, “At this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed Jesus.” Jesus then turned and asked his closest disciples, “Do you want to leave too?” Simon Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Only you have the words of eternal life. We believe and we know that you are the Holy One of God.”
They were saying what we can say on a day like today: “We don’t always get it, Jesus, but where else are we going to get a message like the one we get from you?” The message of Jesus is a word and a promise that transcends all our questions, even all of life, and even this whole world. I don’t know the answer, I told Cheryl, but we know the One who does know the answer, and He is the only one who can make this all right in the end; if not in this life, then in the life to come.
Last Tuesday when I visited Cheryl I read some words from the Bible, said a prayer, and then the Lord’s prayer. I then added one last prayer. I prayed for Cheryl who could no longer say the words, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” That night Cheryl fell asleep, never to awaken again. When I say she did not wake up, I mean she did not wake up here, but as the prayer says, we believe that even if we die here, that is not the end. “I pray the Lord my soul to take,” or as Jesus said in John 14, “I will come back for you and take you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also.”
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“Faith in Jesus sees death as not just a biological necessity, but as God tucking us in at bedtime so that we can rise to new life in the morning.”
–Peter Kreeft in Knowing the Truth About God’s Love
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