The large room was comfortably filled with people, friends and family, friends that are family. A slideshow played on large screens, the reel of a life filled with meaning. The background murmur of many conversations was occasionally interrupted by a laugh or sob, in the irony of grief mingled with fun memories.
Standing a few yards from the casket, I asked a friend how he was doing. “I’m okay.” He shared funny stories and final memories of his friendship with a dear brother. Then his voice failed and his eyes filled. He shook his head and managed three more words. “It ain’t right.”
True statement. It ain’t. We know this.
We know it when a mother loses her boy, and her heart is never the same.
We know it when a tiny casket is lowered into the ground, and with it hopes and dreams for a life gone at its beginning.
We know it when one rocking chair is robbed of its occupant, and another beside it creaks with the weight of lonely longing.
We know it when every graduation, birthday, holiday, or wedding rolls around, and joy is always mingled with the ache of who is missing from the pictures.
Death is never “right.” He is always the villain. If his approach is swift and surprising, or if he slowly saunters closer with sluggishly suffocating grasp, we always wrestle and recoil in rage or horror.
People created for eternal life always die too soon. My friend at the funeral home knew it. I know it. You know it.
Is that okay to say? Can we agree “it ain’t right?” We don’t mean that as a moral judgment, but as acknowledgement that death disrupts what we were created for: bearing the image of eternally living God. Death displays the end of our fall from this design.
But death is not the end.
“It ain’t right,” he stammered. My brother is not a man of many words, but after a long pause and a hard swallow, he had three more. “But God knows.”
What does that mean? It means everything. God knows.
He knows that death “ain’t right.” He knows the sting of death. The Father watched His Son tortured, abused, and murdered. He added to the agony, pouring out righteous wrath for my sin on His perfect Son. The just One died for the unjust, the most unfair death in history. God knows the horror of dying.
He also knows the end of death.
Jesus lay in cold, stony tomb as His followers caved to despair and grief. Yet before His body decayed (His body like ours, of bone, tendon, muscle, vein, and nerve), death was reversed. His heart leaped to life, beating, pounding, pulsing blood through His arteries. His diaphragm contracted, and air rushed into His lungs. The miracle of perfusion restored strength to limbs and thought to mind. His eyes opened, and He sat up. Freed from graveclothes, He folded them into a tidy pile and left them on the bed of death.
Light blazing, thunder roaring, earth quaking – the stone rolled away from the door. The sentinels guarding a dead Man became as dead men when He stepped out from His grave, the LORD of LIFE.
Jesus entered everything that “ain’t right” in our world. He faced our greatest enemies, took their most devastating blows, and then decimated them.
Curse, be cursed. Death, be damned. You are vanquished, and Jesus is Victor.
God knows, the beginning and the end of death. He shows us the first glimpse of resurrection, eternal life, in Jesus. And He knows everything in between, every step that brings His people closer home.
In this between, why do we still die? If Jesus is Lord, and we live in Him, why do we still gather at funerals? Because He has already redeemed us from the grave, but not yet completed the work of restoring all things.
As He does this, even death is servant to the Lord of Life. How could it be otherwise, when death’s terror unleashed on Jesus accomplished its own destruction and the eternal blessing of God’s people?
“But God knows” is a posture of humble trust in this sovereign Lord. He does know best. His wisdom surpasses mine. When He deals the undesired answer, will I bow in worship to gratefully receive His gifts, trusting the goodness of His heart – His heart that knows the sting of death?
Because of Jesus, not even death can separate us from His love. It ain’t right. But He knows. And He is near.