The Hope for Believers After Death

Since a family member of someone in our church has recently died, I have been thinking about the reality of death and how Christians may be comforted especially in the death of other clear believers. This contemplation reminded me of one of my favorite quotes on death. It is from Loraine Boettner’s book, Immortality (p. 30): “I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and the sky come down to meet each other. Then someone at my side says, ‘There, she is gone.’ Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and just as able to bear her load of living weights to its place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her; and just at the moment when someone at my side says, ‘There, she is gone,’ on that distant shore there are other eyes watching for her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, ‘Here she comes’--and such is dying.” How comforting this truth is to Christians who grieve the death of other believers! As Jesus said to the converted thief on the cross, “Assuredly, I say to you, today, you will be with Me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). As the beggar Lazarus was carried by angels to Abraham’s bosom, so too all believers will be escorted by angels to Glory (Luke 16:22). To know that your loved one, who is trusting in Christ, is not gone, only gone before you in order to be with the Lord and with the rest of your departed brethren—you shortly to join with him or her—what a tremendous comfort to those who grieve over the departed presence of their loved ones! As the Hymn “Ten Thousand Times Ten Thousand” by Henry Alford goes, “O then what raptured greetings on Canaan’s happy shore; what knitting severed friendships up where partings are no more! Then eyes with joy shall sparkle, that brimmed with tears of late; orphans no longer fatherless, nor widows desolate.”

How important it is, then, to know you trust the Lord Jesus for salvation and will be there among the rest of God’s family! How important it is for your family members and loved ones to know where you stand with the Lord so that they can be certain of where you have gone after death!