God's Grief

This is a chapter from my book The Faith I Highly Recommend: Adventist Spirituality for Thinkers and Seekers published by the Review and Herald Publishing Association.

It was also in the earlier version of that book published by Adventist Today under the Title: Fifth Generation: The Spiritual Treasures of Mature Adventism.

I'm posting it here because of a reference to it in a chapter in my memoir, God, Rocks and Souls. 

I had been in my new church just a few weeks and was making my rounds getting acquainted. It was not very many minutes into my visit with Lois when she began telling me about the great hole in her life left by the death of her daughter, Angela. Her grief was sharp and fresh like Angela had died just yesterday.

I listened closely as details spilled out. Angela had drowned. She had been a beautiful girl, sweet, thoughtful. It was a hot summer day. She and some friends had gone to the lake.

It did not quite make sense to me. The way Lois talked, I was sure the accident had occurred only a short time ago. But Angela sounded like a teenager. And Lois was eighty years old. Finally Lois mentioned the detail I had been listening for. Angela had died on her sixteenth birthday, more than forty years before.

A mother’s heart does not forget. Her grief does not go away.

According to traditional Christian teaching, when someone dies, he or she goes immediately into the presence of God or enters the torments of hell. And in modern American funerals, it is nearly always assumed someone who dies is headed for heaven. In this view, before death, God is limited in his interaction with people by the separation between heaven and earth, but death erases this separation and leads immediately to the joy of unhindered fellowship between God and his children. So for God, death is a great boon. We who are left bereft on earth may be wracked by grief, but God’s heart is gladdened by the homeward flight of his child.

The Adventist understanding of what happens when people die paints an entirely different picture of God. When someone dies, the person ceases to exist as a conscious, communicating personality. Certainly the person is not lost to the heart or memory of God. But as an active, thinking, loving, talking human being, the person no longer exists. In the language of the Bible, the person “sleeps” (John 11:11-14). A dead person has no awareness of anything. The person remains “unconscious” until the resurrection. At the second coming all of God’s people are united and taken into the presence of God together. They all arrive at the heavenly party together (Hebrews 11:39-40).

In this view, God himself is as deprived of the living companionship of a person who dies as are the grieving family and friends. Instead of death being a boon to God, death robs God of the worship of his people (Psalm 115:17). When people die, the heavenly Father no longer hears the voices of his children in praise and prayer. He has memories to cherish, but he is not in fellowship with their vital, interactive “souls.”

In the story of Jesus’ friend, Lazarus, we read that moments before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he wept. Given Jesus’ divinity, this incident portrays God’s identification with human pain. Jesus knew that Lazarus was not going to remain dead, but the heartbreak of his friends brought Jesus himself to tears. It is a truism that when children hurt, their moms and dads hurt as much as or more than the young one. And God, our heavenly parent, hurts for his children. When grief batters our hearts and wets our eyes, God hurts because we hurt. But there’s more.

God’s grief is not simply the response of his heart to the arrows of pain that wound us. God himself is wounded by the separation caused by death. Death interrupts God’s own conversation with his child. God bears the emotional cost of the system he has designed and allows to continue even in its broken condition. When it comes to enduring pain, God asks nothing of us that he does not require of himself.

This perspective of God as a grieving parent has large implications for how we view the “delay of the Advent.” Why Jesus hasn’t come back to earth as he promised? What’s taking him so long? Explanations include: God is waiting because he wants to save more people. He is waiting for some predetermined time or for evil to reach its full flower or for the gospel to be preached in all the world or for the character of Christ to be perfectly reproduced in his people.

Each of these theories has something to recommend it, and each has problems. The Adventist understanding of the nature of death does not answer the question, why does God wait? It does, however, change the emotional content of the question. In addition to asking why God doesn’t hurry up and rescue us from our trouble (a very good and proper question), this picture of God’s grief prompts us to ask as well, why doesn’t God spare himself? If the redeemed are sleeping in their graves waiting the great resurrection morning described so vividly in the New Testament, then every day God delays the second coming is another day he carries the wounds of a bereaved parent. Since God loves every human more intensely than a mother loves her only child, the Adventist understanding of death is a picture of a brokenhearted God.

So why does God continue to put off the end of human history? I don’t know. But knowing the pain the delay causes him gives me increased confidence that there must be some powerfully compelling reason. If God’s heart is as tender as the heart of Angela’s mother, then the delay must cost him terribly. If he misses his children who died four hundred years ago as much as Lois misses her girl who died forty years ago, then the enormity of his grief is beyond imagination.

In the traditional view of death, there is little motivation for God to bring human history to an end. Every day God is finding fresh delight in the addition of earthlings to the heavenly court. Every day he is welcoming children home. But in the Adventist view, every day that passes adds to the grief that weighs on God’s heart.

God does not ask us to bear burden he himself does not carry. He does not encourage us to be brave in the face of pain that he himself does not feel.

I remember sitting in the back at a funeral in Akron, Ohio. The front row included four or five kids. The coffin held an eight-year-old boy, killed when the front wheel of his bicycle hit a rock and he swerved in front of a car.

The preacher was trying to make sense of this senseless tragedy. He spoke directly to the young people on the front row. “Try not to take your brother’s death too hard. I know you miss him, but God needed him up in heaven and that’s why he took him. God must have some very important job in mind for your brother up there. Stay close to Jesus and some day you’ll join your brother in heaven, and he’ll show you around the New Jerusalem and tell you all about what he’s been doing while you were down here working for Jesus.”

I respect the pastor’s effort to find meaning in a senseless and heart-numbing accident. He was doing what a pastor is supposed to do–mining the spiritual and theological resources of his community for all the comfort and solace he could find. But sitting there on the back row, it was all I could do to keep from jumping up and interrupting.

“So are you telling me,” I imagined shouting, “that every time God runs low on kitchen help in the heavenly cafeteria he throws rocks in front of little kids’ bike tires? Is God really that hard up for help in heaven? When they run short of tenors in the heavenly choir does he tell an angel to go knock off another kid? What kind of God is that?”

The pastor was trying to announce good news, but the picture of God he painted was repugnant to me. If I were to take his words seriously it would mean our deepest wounds bring great joy to God. People who are the most lovable and leave the greatest hole here on earth when they die, bring instant joy in the courts of heaven. We on earth bear all the cost of improving heaven’s work force.

The traditional view of death does give some comfort. It places those who have died in a good place far from all pain. And for the person who dies, this traditional view accurately describes his or her experience. When a believer dies, the very next moment in their experience will be the resurrection and the presence of God. The time in the grave that we who are alive feel all too keenly aware of does not exist in the experience of the one who has died. Believers die, and the very next instant, as far as they know, is resurrection morning.

The Adventist view, on the other hand, addresses the reality of pain confronted by those who are still alive. For those who survive the death of a loved one, the only “immediate” reality is grief and hurt. And the Adventist view of death shows that one of the survivors, one of the mourners is God himself. There is no benefit for God in the death of his children. He is not knocking off children to fill the heavenly kitchens. He does not forget our grief in the great joy of his communion with his children who have escaped into his presence from their earthly prisons. Instead God enters the very depth of our grief. In fact, our purest, deepest grief is in reality a mirror of his own.

The deeper our grief, the closer we come to understanding one aspect of the mystery of God.