Death Was Not Part of God’s Plan : A Quote That Gives Me Hope

Michele from our home church lost her son Hezekiah a few months back to anencephaly. In her blog, she wrote about her pregnancy, her baby’s short, yet precious, time on this earth, and now is blogging about her grief. (Will you please pray for her and her family?)

To lose someone you love, especially a when it’s a child, is so jarring.

I keep a basket of little booklets and tracts in my bathroom for anyone who wants to read them. One of them is called Grief: Finding Hope Again by Paul David Tripp.

Today, I was that person who picked up the minibook. When I read these two paragraphs, I thought, “Thanks, God. I knew this, but I needed to hear it again.”

Death Was Not Part of God’s Original Plan

We all feel death’s wrenching finality. Death is so wrong, so completely out of step with life as God planned it. The apostle Paul could think of no better word for it than “enemy” (I Corinthians 15:25-26). Death is the enemy of everything good and beautiful about life. Death should make you morally sad and righteously angry. It is a cruel indicator that the world is broken; it is not functioning according to God’s original design, where life was to give way to life, on into eternity.

It is biblical to treat death as the sad, unnatural thing that it actually is. God encourages you to mourn. Death was simply not meant to be. When you recognize this, you will hunger for the complete restoration of all things. You will long to live with the Lord in a place where the last enemy – death – has been defeated.“

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 ties in well with Tripp’s thoughts:

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. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.

For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.

Therefore comfort one another with these words.

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