Caskets and Crowns: Grieving with Hope through Heaven’s Eyes

Ten unexpected deaths in three consecutive months. My Filipino community experienced this ordeal during the recent pandemic. With little warning, godly family members and faithful church partners were suddenly gone: a ministry ally and his mother and brother; a former pastor; a close cousin, and another cousin and his wife; a cousin’s mother-in-law; my brother’s mother-in-law; and my own brother. The harrowing series of losses seemed relentless, the weight of grief and pain too deep and stupefying for words.

The apostle Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians 4:13–17 so that we would

not grieve like the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also we believe that God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep as Christians. . . . For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a shout of command, 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, who are left, will be suddenly caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord. (NET)

How do we bring our Christian hope to bear on these tragic circumstances? Is that hope even real, and is the “peace of God that surpasses all understanding” (Phil 4:7) within reach from the fathomless depths of mourning?

The Place of Healing

I wept for months over these multiple losses, but the death that affected me the most was my brother’s. Don was more than an older brother to me; he was my counselor, mentor, ministry partner, protector, and best friend. He had committed his life unreservedly to the Lord and his kingdom. Why did he die at age fifty-six, despite the intense prayers going up for him? Even from his hospital bed, he helped other people fight the deadly virus, arranging for medications and oxygen equipment for them. Looking at his cold, lifeless body in the morgue, our anguished question was, “Lord, why didn’t you heal Don?” It took a while for me to realize that God did heal Don—not here on earth with us, but in heaven with him. God delivered my brother from his illness and suffering with full, perfect, permanent healing, far better than any recovery here on earth. Answers to prayers are determined more by God’s perfect will than by our imperfect faith. No matter the depth of faith from which we speak our prayers, we still cannot see the full scope of what God sees. He sees not only the end from the beginning of the main storyline but also all the overarching, underlying, and intertwining subplots and branchings-off, past, present, and future. We see only from this place, right now, not through all eternity like he does.

Earthbound versus Heavenbound

Death, as a consequence of sin, shows us that nothing in our physical existence is meant to last forever. For the child of God, life moves in the direction of heaven. But we are so earthbound in our perspective that we live and plan as though we were meant to remain on earth forever. We resist any change that threatens how we think our lives should be. We instinctively cling to people and things in a futile attempt to ensure and maintain our version of “forever.”

Our expectations of God are myopic when we see only physical restoration on earth as answered prayer but overlook the healing and deliverance in heaven. We move in the direction of our eternal destiny, but like Lot’s wife, we often look back to where we were rather than looking forward to where we are ultimately headed. As believers in Christ, earth is not our destiny—heaven is.

Still, we’re left with the aching void of pain on earth that won’t be completely filled until we experience absolute wholeness in glory. Intellectually, we may accept the right theology about God, but emotionally, we feel the agony and trauma of losing a loved one (albeit momentarily). This is part of the “now and not yet” tension in the heart of every believer as we await full glorification on the other side of eternity. Being grounded in God’s Word, his character, and his promises is essential to making our pain not only bearable but also transcendent. Armed with confident faith in God’s utmost trustworthiness, we can rise above our pain to see what is unseen and to embrace, in advance, all that Scripture promises “for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28).

Our loved ones don’t belong to us—they belong to the Lord. And so do we. Living and dying are simplified by Romans 14:7–8: “For none of us lives for himself and none of us dies for himself. If we live, we live for the Lord; if we die, we die for the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.”

The Who beyond the Why

When the miracle we sought for my brother did not happen, a part of me felt tremendously let down, even abandoned, by God. But I had to distinguish between that feeling and what I knew for a fact about God, realigning my emotions with the truth of his Being: holy, just, righteous, faithful, loving, and perfect in all his ways (Deut 32:4; Ps 18:30; Ps 145). I needed to bring what I did not know and understand about God under the canopy of what I did know about him. We must let what God has made clear to us shed light on what is unclear, not allowing the darkness of the unknown to obscure or corrupt what he has chosen to clearly reveal. By God’s grace through the Holy Spirit, Christ lives in us (Gal 2:20), enabling us to do what we cannot do on our own. Without the work of the Spirit in us, the enemy can find a foothold in our honest doubts, if these questions do not lead us back to God. We need the uncertainties to lead us not so much to “answers” as to a Person—who and what he is, more than the why of our circumstances. The more intimately we know the who, the less we will need to understand the why behind our losses and suffering.

We will always have unanswered questions this side of heaven, and that’s all right, because our lives and eternal destiny don’t depend on answered questions but on the Person of God and the finished work of Jesus Christ.

No Contest

First Corinthians 2:9–10 says, “‘Things that no eye has seen, or ear heard, or mind imagined are the things God has prepared for those who love him.’ God has revealed these to us by the Spirit.” There is simply no contest between heaven and earth. Our finite concept of “perfect” does not even come close to all that God is preparing for us. What is only a future hope for us is already a present, irreversible, and timeless reality for departed saints.

Think about it: our eternal reunion will be infinitely longer than our brief and temporary separation. In heaven, our untarnished experience of God and his glory will be so boundless that the past momentary grief will hardly matter in retrospect. Memories of earthly sorrows will be healed by the full, majestic presence of the Lord.

The Resurrection and the Life

Our Lord Jesus Christ not only knows the way—he is the Way. His decisive, unequivocal promise fortifies the grieving heart and settles every fear: “because I live, you will live too” (John 14:19). The fact of our risen Lord is the crux of our hope and foundation of peace in the face of death and loss. Jesus’s resurrection—the very heart of our Christian faith and hope—ensures our own resurrection, guaranteeing that blessed day when caskets of decay will give way to eternal crowns of victory.  

I have not yet “arrived.” Grieving through heaven’s eyes is a lifetime’s journey. Healing from profound loss must be perfected in heaven, but the Lord can restore and empower us enough here that we can joyfully love, serve, and honor him even in and through our deepest pain. “One may experience sorrow during the night, but joy arrives in the morning” (Ps 30:5).