The death of any of our little ones is pressing hard. We love our children, but we remember that we are only in a position to love them as we ought to because we love our Father in Heaven more than all. Whoever does not love Christ more than family cannot be a disciple, as Jesus plainly taught us (Luke 14:26). We do more than acknowledge this point; we fully embrace it. We yearn to understand it better than we do.
This does not make our grief any less—in one way it actually makes it greater—but it does prevents the grief from ever becoming meaningless. We are not Stoics; we are not without natural affection. We are not resigned to a pain that is pointless, but which must nevertheless be endured. Rather, the kind of grief Christians experience in times like this is the kind of grief you see in airports, where there is going to be a long and undesired separation, followed by reunion. We do not experience the kind of grief you see among those who are without God and without hope in the world—those who are living out their brief and meaningless consciousness on the lip of an everlasting Void. Never that.
So we believe that God is absolutely sovereign over all events, including this one, and that He is utterly and entirely good. We cling to that reality as though it were our everlasting consolation, which in fact it is. The Heidelberg Catechism begins by asking, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer begins, “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” The Heidelberg is a beautiful woman, filled with wisdom, and she also had a beautiful sister in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which begins by asking “what is the chief end of man?” The answer is: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
We do this by surrendering utterly to the will of God, which we can only do through the gospel of Christ, the gospel of our salvation. And in such a submission, no one can have any greater accomplishment than to receive whatever it is that God gives us to do. And so it was that Acts has finished what he was assigned for him to do on this earth, leaving nothing undone behind him, and he has been privileged to enter into fullness of joy, a fullness that he will enjoy forever.
As we come to grips with the reality of this grief, one of the things we might do with profit is turn to some of our fathers in the faith—the Puritans—who had to deal with these things far more frequently than we do. One of our greater blessings is that these tragic events are comparatively rare for us. We are blessed to be inexperienced in this. But in colonial New England, approximately 35 to 40% of children would not live to adulthood. We sometimes think that some of the older prayers that used to be taught to children (e.g. “if I should die before I wake”) were exercises in a pious morbidity. But actually, there were solid grounds for teaching your children how to die, because many of them would in fact die. And one in five women in that day would at some point end their lives in childbirth—the day of delivery really was for them comparable to going into battle.
I say this because one Puritan, a man of considerable poetic force and talent, was named Edward Taylor (c. 1642-1729). At one point in his life he wrote a poem (entitled Upon Wedlock, and the Death of Children) in which he wonderfully and beautifully resigns himself to the will of God in the sad deaths of some of his children.
“Christ would in glory have a flower, choice, prime,
And having choice, chose this my branch forth brought.”
Our children, dying, go to God. We know and understand that they are saints together with us. Paul teaches us that if at least one of the parents is a believer, the children are therefore holy. The word there is hagia, meaning “holy ones.” Overwhelmingly in Scripture when this adjective is applied to people, it is translated as saints. “For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy [saints]” (1 Cor. 7:14).
This is why we can speak with such confidence about how God has taken Acts to be with Him. Paul says in another place that for us to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8). So the reason Acts is not here with us today is that he is present with the Lord. And that means, by the laws of reciprocity, that the Lord is present with him. What this amounts to is that God selected Acts for an early promotion. It is better by far, Paul said, to depart and be with Christ (Phil. 1:23). It is hard for us—pressing hard—but it is nothing but glory for Acts. And in the long run what is glory for him cannot be anything less for the rest of us who are following after.
And so Taylor’s final stanza concludes this way:
“Grief o’re does flow, and nature fault would find
Were not your will my spell, charm, joy, and gem:
That as I said, I say, take, Lord, they’re thine
I piecemeal pass to glory bright in them.
In joy, may I sweet flowers for glory breed,
Whether you get them green, or let them seed.”
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.