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Far Better

by Chris Alexion, Copyright January 29, 2006, all rights reserved. 203 views

This weekend heartache rent our little congregation. Early in the afternoon on Thursday, January 26, a fifteen-year-old boy from the church went for a canoe ride in a creek behind his house. He never returned. He was reported missing around dusk, and my brother and I learned about it around nine PM and joined the search for the rest of Thursday night. The police arrived in force the next morning (a helicopter had been present for some of the night), using search-and-rescue teams, dogs, boats, and the chopper. They searched all day Friday and Saturday and part of Sunday with no success.

The blow staggered his family and our church. Belief in the sovereignty of God is, as the Westminster Confession calls it, an "unspeakable consolation," but it's not a panacea. I've often asked myself how strong my faith in God's divine control of our circumstances would be if tragedy struck my own contented little life. I was blessed to see that this family's faith was strong. They were buckled, but not broken; they really believe that God works all things together for good to those who love Him. This is the comfort, the unspeakable consolation, that those whom tragedy strikes really need. They don't need a lesson in systematic theology or an attempt by Job's counselors to pinpoint some moral error on their part. They need to know that they can trust God.

Tragedy always makes this trust harder. God's control of circumstances is one thing; God's control of this one is another. How could He do this? Why would He? Scripture isn't very detailed about why God works. We know that the "secret things belong to the Lord," but his revealed will (his commands) are for us to know and follow. Job learned that the Lord acts justly and put his hand over his mouth. Paul praises Him whose judgments are unsearchable, and his ways past finding out. God doesn't answer to us; everything He does is free from fault. Why? Because He does it.

But this Reformation hope isn't the same as fatalism. Human injustice can never be blamed on God, but neither does His sovereignty destroy moral distinctions. In an apparent paradox (the key word being apparent), God sometimes decrees things that don't line up with his revealed will (commands). This isn't the place for working out philosophical details, but take one example: a lion and a cheetah both exist by God's decree. But that doesn't make a lion a cheetah.

What this means to us as grieving family, friends, and neighbors is that death, though ultimately conquered, is still a real enemy. Death is not good, natural, or an escape from a bodily prison. It is right that we grieve. It is right to "rage, rage against the dying of the light." When Lazarus died, Jesus, a true man, wept.

But our hope lets us do more than rage against death. We can look in faith to the one who, by His own death, turned death upside-down, disarming it of its sting and securing a future glorious resurrection of the body, a renewal that will restore the creation herself. In the meantime, our loved ones are not forsaken; though they're absent from the body, they're "present with the Lord." They've left us, but they're with Christ. Paul says that's "far better."

Please pray for the Embree family.

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