“Lord why did THEY have to die?”
Luke 7:11-16
The time of year was Christmas and my family and I were gathering together to celebrate. We were at my mother’s home in Arkansas. My sister came in; she had her son with her. He was about to turn one. I asked where her husband and she said he wasn’t feeling well and decided to stay home. Some sort of inner ear problem she thought. So we had our family time together and she went back to her home. What happened at that point changed my sister’s life completely. When she arrived at home he had fallen and required immediate medical attention. He was taken to the hospital by ambulance and they made the immediate decision to fly him to Memphis. I drove to Memphis and later that evening we received terrible news. Apparently he had a blood clot and part of it went to the brain. The surgeon told us that he had a 50 % chance of survival.
Later the next day the news got worse. We lost him. He died that day which happened to be his birthday. He would have been 32 years old. Married to my sister for 10 years. He was the only guy she had ever dated. My sister’s life was turned upside down. In our Questions for God series we are dealing with the question of death and the question that came to me was this: “why did _______ have to die? My sister’s life has not been the same since and I don’t see the evidence of any purpose in this. Then the person writes, I’m sorry God…I’m not questioning you.”
Many if not all of us have been through times like this when we lose someone and it causes us to question God. Lord….
• Why did they have to die? More specifically..
• Why did they have to die at such a young age?
• Why did it have to happen the way it did?
• Why did it have to happen now?
We do not lack for scriptures that speak to this topic. Let’s look at a few.
(1) Job . Job was a very righteous man. In fact the Bible says that he was blameless and that he feared God and stayed away from evil. A messenger shows up and gives him all kinds of bad news. Your oxen are dead. So are your sheep. Now your servants are dead. Then his sons and daugters. 7 sons. 3 daughters. All dead. Can you imagine.
(2) David, the psalmist. 2nd Samuel 12:18 we see that his son became sick and died when he was only 7 days old.
(3) We see it in the gospels. And the first thing we learn from these stories is that Jesus had a soft spot for those who were grieving. On 3 occasions Jesus is confronted with the news that someone has died an untimely death. (1) The young daughter of Jairus. Jairus was the ruler of the synagogue. His daughter was only 12. Jesus insists she is only sleeping and brings her back to life. (2) Then the well-known story of Lazarus. Jesus learns of his sickness and the seriousness of his illness. Yet the Bible says that he remained where he was for two days. And when Jesus finally gets there he finds out that Lazarus has been in the tomb for 4 days. So He goes to the tomb and he calls him out. “Lazarus come forth!” Perhaps He had to call him by name or everyone in the cemetery would have come out. Jesus ruined every funeral he ever attended. Because the dead didn’t stay dead! He is the only one who can take death and turn into life and that is what He does in the resurrection.
(3) Then the passage we read today….concerning the widow from the city of Nain, a small town just south of Nazareth. Being a widow she likely depended on her son for many things.
When someone dies especially when they are young we want God to undo death. The first stage we go through when we are grieving is denial. We don’t want to believe it and we want God to undo what has happened. We want a miracle. Then we go through anger. We grieve for all of the things that never were and for the things that never will be. But let me tell you something that we really need to take hold of….. Death is not final. It is awful. It defies description but it is not final. Having faith does not mean that we will not grieve. But it does mean that the grave does not have the final word. Martha who was the brother of Lazarus said to Jesus when He arrived, Lord if you had been here my brother would not have died. It is almost as though she is saying Lord, where were you when we needed you. You could have prevented this. And it is a feeling many of us have when we lose someone we love. Lord where were You when this happened and where are you now?
Several things we should pay attention to in this passage. Don’t miss these 3 things. (1) Don’t miss the fact that God’s heart is moved when we lose someone we love. Death moves Him with compassion. In the case of Lazarus, Jesus even wept. When you lose someone you love, never come to the conclusion that Jesus doesn’t care. Never think that He has forgotten about you or that He is too busy to bring you comfort. Never think that death is not important to God.
(2) Don’t miss the fact that God will speak words of comfort to us when we lose someone. Because if you don’t know that, you may not be listening for those words. Notice that His heart went out to her and He said, don’t cry. This sounds a bit strange at first. Because it sounds almost as though Jesus is saying don’t cry, everything will be fine. Listen Jesus wasn’t telling her that not to cry because it wasn’t OK to cry. He was telling her not to cry because He was about to take care of things. He was about to bring her son back to life. What He was saying was this…don’t cry, things will get better. You see, Death does not have the final word.
At this point of my ministry I have performed far too many funerals. Hundreds. I have been on call with 7 different funeral homes locally to help when a family does not have a pastor. And one thing I have seen in every service is this …every family has questions…no one has it all figured out and no family is completely prepared to give them up. And as a result many times the family is angry. Angry with God, with another family member; angry with the doctor. Just plain mad. I spoke at a funeral yesterday for a woman who was only 39 and her fiancé was devastated and also very angry and he told me so.
Most of so don’t entirely know what to say to someone who is facing the loss of a loved one. When I sat with my sister during the loss of her husband, her pastor who held a doctoral degree told her two things in trying to comfort her….. (1) God took your husband because He was trying to prevent something worse from happening. God has others ways of preventing something if He wants to. He’s God. Then he told her that (2) God took her husband because He needed some more 32 year olds in heaven. Garbage. So my sister found little comfort in what her pastor told her that day.
(3) Don’t miss the picture we see here of the resurrection. This is of course an amazing miracle we see. Throughout the scripture we have seen Jesus perform all kinds of miracles, bring sight to the blind, turn water to wine, heal people with leprosy, cast out demons, walk on water but to me there is no miracle greater than when he takes someone who is dead and brings them back to life. And this is the picture we get at the time of baptism. We saw it in our video this morning. We are buried with Christ and we are raised to a new life.
Barbara Johnson has written many books and she deals with the subject of grief in several of them. And she speaks from first-hand experience. In 1968, her eighteen-year-old son joined the Marines and was killed in Vietnam. Exactly five years later, another son died in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. Barbara managed to move through these crises with her emotional health intact. People noticed her ability to handle her grief and they asked her how do you do it? She said there are 3 things that help us all. (1) Time. No one grieves at the same pace. Some will take a few months. For some, years. Give people the time they need. (2) Tears help. Many generations have told their sons, don’t cry. Men don’t cry. But Jesus wept. And He was a man’s man. Tears help. (3) Talk. Too many times we think we will get better if we just ignore it, don’t talk about it. But grief doesn’t work that way. You may ignore it but grief will not ignore you. Deal with it or grief will deal with you.
The Bible has verse after verse, chapter after chapter dealing with the topic of death and what life will be like after death. I was going to list all of the passages in your notes today so I went to my computer and looked them up and realized that it would take 114 pages to print them all. So you will just have to read the book.
In 1815 General Wellington faced Napoleon at Waterloo. When the battle was over they wanted to let everyone know asap so they came up with a system of flashing lights from one church tower to another all over the country. England had won and they sent this message:
WELLINGTON DEFEATED NAPOLEON. But when they sent it out across the English channel there was so much fog that only part of the message came through. It said WELLINGTON DEFEATED. That’s a different message. For the next couple of hours until the fog lifted, they thought England had lost. Fortunately the fog finally lifted and they were able to see the truth. WELLINGTON DEFEATED NAPOLEON.
On the day we call good Friday there were many who could only see part of the message. It looked like this. JESUS DIED. JESUS DEFEATED. And that is all they saw. But when the fog lifted on Sunday morning they got the full message. JESUS DIED. JESUS DEFEATED DEATH.
The apostle Paul reminds us if this fact when he tells us “now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror. Then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” When we lose someone it can put us in a fog. We can’t see clearly. And if you feel like you are still in a fog it may because you haven’t gotten the full message.
JESUS DEFEATED DEATH. JESUS WON THE BATTLE.
Death does not have the final word. Jesus does. So let Him have the final word in your life as well.
