All Saint’s Day 2020
The peace of our Lord Jesus be with all of you who are mourning the death of a loved one. Later we will commemorate the faithful departed from this congregation, and though that number may be small, I know of many other deaths on your minds.
For you grieving, it’s one thing to receive sympathies and prayers from others. It is entirely another thing to feel true comfort and relief from your pain. Death at times may seem a blessed resolution for those who have long been ill or suffering, but death always brings more questions than answers. Most notably: Where is my loved one now?
On the one hand, we know that the scriptures teach that we are looking forward to the Last Day, Christ’s second coming, when all of the faithful will be brought into a New Heavens and a New Earth, a place with no more sin.
On the other hand, that day hasn’t come yet, and we want to be assured that our loved ones are in a good place. So we often talk about them abstractly as being up in “heaven”, often it’s said they are like angels now, looking down upon us, as if that is the eternal life that God has called us to. Well, that isn’t quite what the scriptures teach us.
I have found that the simplest, most articulate answer to where the faithful departed are now, was in the words of the last hymn stanza we just sang together. Now, it’s man-written poetry, it’s not all a direct quote from God’s Word, yet it beautifully summarizes what all the scriptures teach about the dead in Christ. The first phrase said this:
Lord, let at last Thine angels come,
To Abram’s bosom bear me home,
That I may die unfearing;
This is a reference to Jesus teaching about the Rich Man and Lazarus. Lazarus was poor, and longed to be given any scraps of food from the Rich Man’s table. It is evident the Rich Man is proud and trusts in his own riches, whereas the poor man Lazarus could only pray to God to provide for him. At their deaths, the Rich Man was cast into the fires of torment. But Lazarus, Jesus said was carried up by the Angels to be with Abraham, our Father in the Faith. To be with Abraham means Lazarus would also be with God our heavenly Father. So in words of this hymn, we pray that we would be faithful and trusting of God at our death, that we too would be carried by the angels to rest without fear with Our Father.
The hymn stanza continued;
And in its narrow chamber keep
My body safe in peaceful sleep
Until Thy reappearing.
It acknowledges that while our soul or spirit may be carried up to rest with God now, our bodies still clearly here remain, for now. So we pray that our bodies, whatever may remain, may rest in peace, just as our Lord Jesus’ body was placed in a tomb and rested 3 days. Our departed loved ones have been resting more than 3 days, but nevertheless, they await Jesus’ return so that we all might have our own Easter resurrection.
And when Jesus appears again on the last day, the hymn continues:
And then from death awaken me,
That these mine eyes with joy may see,
O Son of God, Thy glorious face,
My Savior and my fount of grace.
Throughout the scriptures, death is described as being a spiritual sleep. St. Paul refers to those who have fallen asleep in Christ in 1. Thess. 4. Likewise, when Jesus goes to raise the other Lazarus in John 11, he says to his disciples “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him.”
The fact that our souls are at rest with God while our bodies here rest in the earth simultaneously should give us calming peace of the salvation we have in Jesus, but should also make us eagerly long for that day when our bodies and souls will be reunited. God made us to be both body and soul, both physical and spiritual. Our physical bodies may have been corrupted by sin in this world, but part of God creating a new heavens and a new earth is returning everything back to a sinless state.
We pray for the last day when we all will be awakened from the sleep of death to behold our
savior Jesus face to face, seeing his physical and resurrected body with our own physical eyes, our bodies resurrected to perfection. As our epistle reading from 1 John 3 said: 2 Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
On that day, we will take a part of the picture we saw in our reading from Revelation 7. We will be among the multitude of peoples from all around the world, praising our savior. We will be among those who wear robes of radiant white, washed and purified in the righteous blood of our lamb Jesus. We will hunger and thirst no more, there will be no more tears or mourning or grief. Jesus will be the shepherd who protects us forever.
Until that day, when the faithful die, their souls are at rest with our God. And just as it seems one moment we fall asleep at night and the next moment wake up with sunshine of a new day, so too our spiritual rest will not be a painful wait.
Consider the Old Testament saints, the faithful ones who died trusting in God long before the time of Jesus. They have been at rest for 1000’s and 1000’s of years, but it has not been an agonizing wait. It has been a spiritual rest with our God, a true Sabbath rest, a rest we all need from this sinful world.
If you are mourning the death of a faithful loved, do not worry about where they are. Their souls are resting peacefully with our Lord. It’s good for us to mourn and have grief that Satan brought the pain of death into this world, but St. Paul tells us that we do not grieve as those who do not have have hope. We have a sure hope. God has given his innocent Son to die for our sins. And if God raised the sacrificial lamb back to life, how much more will God surely raise us who the lamb was sacrificed for? If he would not raise us, then putting his son to death was done in vain.
We, all the faithful, will awaken front the sleep of death to behold our savior Jesus’ face.
And our hymn concluded:
Lord Jesus Christ, my prayer attend, my prayer attend,
And I will praise Thee without end.
Indeed, our Lord Jesus attends and brings our prayers crying for salvation before our Father in heaven, who hears them, and most assuredly will grant us what we ask. And on that day, we will praise our Loving God without end. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.