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| Le Massacre des Innocents - Leon Cogniet - 1824 |
This post is a chapter from the book, Hope in the Loss of a Baby: A Deeper Dive into what the Bible says about Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Death, which is the culmination of much study, counseling, and sermons shared over twenty years. Since this book was meant to bless the church I am also making it available on this blog.
If
sadness was a sin,
Jesus never would’ve cried.
But that’s exactly what He did,
When his good friend Lazarus died.
And He knew that He could raise him up
Still the Lord was sad enough to grieve.
If you’ve ever been so overwhelmed that
you can barely breathe,
My friend, you’re in good company. ~ Ross King
Ask any theologian or pastor what Jeremiah chapter 31 is
about, and the instant and correct answer is “The New Covenant!” It’s a
wonderful section of scripture and is quoted in Hebrews 8 to reassure us that
this better covenant saves based not on our efforts but on Christ’s efforts.
Our hope is predicated not on our faithfulness to God but on God’s faithfulness
to his promises.
Another title for the section spanning from Jeremiah chapter
30 to 34 is “The Book of Comfort,” or “The Book of Consolation.” While the
majority of Jeremiah’s prophecies focus on destruction, exile, and violence,
these four chapters are full of hope and an expectation of restoration. These
aren’t the chapters you would look to if you needed a prooftext for weeping or
sadness.
It’s strange then—based on that context—that we pick up here
to read one of the saddest verses in all the Bible,
A voice
is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more. ~ Jeremiah 31:15
Weeping is not foreign to the Bible. Jesus wept (John
11:35). Jeremiah is the weeping prophet. Weeping is heard in Ramah. There is an
entire book called Lamentations. Hannah wept when she could not have a child (1
Samuel 1:8). When a twelve-year-old girl got sick and died during Jesus’s day,
there was great weeping and wailing outside of her house (Mark 5:38). David
described his tears this way,
I am
weary with my moaning;
every night I flood my bed with tears;
I drench my couch with my weeping. ~ Psalm 6:6
All of this weeping
recognizes that there is something horribly wrong in the world. If you’re
reading this book, chances are that you know full well that the world is a
broken place. Our tears are a valid and wonderful way to express to God our
longing for his consolation of history.
If I
can bring Him nothing but my tears, He will put them into His bottle, for He
once wept; if I can bring Him nothing but my groans and sighs, He will accept
these as an acceptable sacrifice, for He once was also a man of sorrows. ~
Charles Spurgeon
The promise of mourning
is that it will lead to comfort (Matthew 5:4). Weeping may last for the night,
but joy comes in the morning. But sometimes, there is bitter weeping in the
night, and consolation seems impossible, and we refuse to be comforted. Is such
deep and inconsolable sorrow a sin? Let’s look at Rachel and find out.
Who Was Rachel?
To understand the context, we need an introduction to Rachel,
one of the wives of Jacob. This vignette on Rachel will be brief because
despite it being her weeping, we’ll see that Jeremiah was speaking of a
different event than her life.
Rachel, her sister Leah, and their husband Jacob had an
awkward and complicated relationship, which was exacerbated by Rachel’s initial
inability to have children. God did eventually open her womb and she had two
sons and she died in childbirth (Genesis 30:23–24, 35:16–20). Her firstborn son
was Joseph. As she lay dying she named her second son Benoni, the son of
sorrow, but Jacob renamed him Benjamin, the son of promise. While this book is
about the loss of babies, I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to
mention that two women are recorded in the Bible as dying in childbirth, Rachel
and Phinehas’s wife. When Phinehas’s wife was dying she named her son Ichabod,
which means “The Glory has Departed” (1 Samuel 4:19–22). Both women saw their
death in childbirth as ominous and hopeless, as evidenced by the naming of
their sons. But God brings life out of death, and his glory still indwells the
sons of men, and God is still fulfilling his promises through his Son.
The Bible doesn’t tell us exactly where Rachel was buried,
but we know it was somewhere between Bethel and Bethlehem (Genesis 35:19–20). It
seems to be close to Ramah, because it could be easily visited by Samuel who
lived in Ramah (confer 1 Samuel 7:17, 1 Samuel 10:2). This fits with the idea
that the voice of lamentation and bitter weeping is heard in Ramah. Charles
Simeon postulates that the volume of her weeping reached not just from the
grave, but could be heard miles away in Ramah.
Notice that the book of Genesis does not record Rachel weeping
for Joseph or Benjamin, though Joseph would be sold into slavery in Egypt much
later (Genesis 37:28), and Benjamin would dwell in Egypt after a famine drove
the family out of the promised land (Genesis 43:1–15).
Rachel’s sons, and Leah’s sons, would go into Egypt and the
danger to them was not that they would die in childhood—because they all
survived to adulthood—the danger was that they would be no more because they
would be assimilated into Egyptian society. Voddie Baucham said, “The danger
for Joseph was not that he would die in prison. The danger for Joseph was that
he would become an Egyptian.” If Rachel were weeping from the grave for her
physical sons, it was for the very real possibility that they would walk away
from the true and living God for the comfort and convenience of Egypt.
Pharaoh gives Joseph an Egyptian
name…and he gives him Asenath, the daughter of Potipherah, priest of On. On was
the center of the worship of the sun god, Ra. This is one of the two most
powerful pagan priesthoods in all of Egypt. Joseph is married into the
high-ranking, pagan, elite aristocracy of Egypt.
Now, he’s having children. Think about the temptation here. He has a pagan wife, he has the prestige, he has the wealth, and now he has a family. Everything in his life is screaming at him to just forget Canaan, forget his father’s house, drop his identity, and just become an Egyptian. It would have been so easy for him to look at his Egyptian wife and his position and say, ‘This is the payoff. I’ve made it.’ ~ Voddie Baucham
Exile was a powerful way to wipe out an enemy, even more
efficient than warfare or genocide. There was a real chance that the sons of
Rachel would become no more in Egypt. The fact that the line of Abraham did not
end right there is a testament to God’s preserving power. Later, the exile into
Assyria would end the Northern Kingdom when they were assimilated and were lost
except to God (1 Chronicles 5:26, Jeremiah 31:31).
Jacob, who believed Joseph had perished, speaks what Rachel
would have said had she been alive, “You have bereaved me of my children:
Joseph is no more…and now you would take Benjamin. All this has come against
me” (Genesis 42:36), and “as for me, if I am bereaved of my children, I am
bereaved” (Genesis 43:14).
Why Was She Weeping?
Rachel’s weeping spans three major events in the Bible. The
first, as we’ve just looked at, was the precarious exile of Joseph and Benjamin
in Egypt.
In this context she would be weeping for spiritual reasons.
While her sons were in real physical danger, the danger to their souls was far
greater. It has been well pointed out that part of Eve’s curse in the pain of
childbirth (Genesis 3:16) was not just physical pain, but the enduring pain of
watching children rebel against God and stray as sheep without a shepherd.
While this is not the intent of this book, to process Rachel’s weeping we must
note that the most important part of raising children is not bringing them into
the world; it’s bringing them to God.
To this Jesus said, “What will it profit a man if he gains
the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:26). If you find yourself
in this circumstance, remember, “They can run from you, they can run from their
upbringing, they can run from the church, they can even run from God, but they
can never run from your prayers.” God preserved Joseph and Benjamin in Egypt
and they became a great nation. Joseph would say about the evil that befell
him,
As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people would be kept alive, as they are today. So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones. ~ Genesis 50:20–21
The second event was the immediate context of Jeremiah 31.
Here the Babylonian exile was in full effect and Judeans were being taken away into
exile all over the Middle and Far East. Ramah, just a few miles north of
Jerusalem, was the staging point for this journey. As they marched hundreds of
miles away from the land of Israel, they practically ceased to exist as far as
the land was concerned. The probability of them being lost like the Northern
Kingdom was immense.
In this case the weeping was for spiritual and physical
reasons. Not only was Judah in real danger of being assimilated into Babylon,
the land of Israel was also deprived of its strongest, wisest, and most capable
men (Isaiah 3:1–3). Lined up in Ramah was everyone from farmers to tradesmen to
prophets to nobles to princes (Jeremiah 27:20, 40:1). It is very likely their
mothers wept as their sons marched out of Ramah as good as dead.
The third occurrence of Rachel’s weeping is when Herod finds
out he has been deceived by the wise men from the east and orders the slaughter
of all of the children in Bethlehem two years old and younger in an effort to
snuff out the infant king of the Jews (Jews is shorthand for Judeans). Matthew
quotes Jeremiah 31:15 here to emphasize the gravity of the event (see Matthew
2:17–18). We’ll spend more time looking at this later when we understand how
much hope Matthew was intending to convey.
This weeping was mostly confined to physical lamentation.
The loss of probably fifty infants just in Bethlehem would have been shockingly
grievous. To this Spurgeon would say,
Rachel is weeping, and she will
not be comforted. You may try to hush her bitter cry, but you cannot; for her
children are not. She looks into the empty cradle, she looks around the
desolate hearth, and her soul refuses all consolation…
Weep With Those Who Weep
Two prominent places tell us not to weep or be grieved (Nehemiah
8:9–11 and Jeremiah 31:16 which we’ll examine in a moment). But many more tell
us to “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). It could seem that weeping and
mourning would be an affront to God for all of his goodness. Shouldn’t we, like
Job, buck up, worship God, and declare, “The Lord
gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be
the name of the Lord” (Job 1:20–21)? Later Job
would declare, “My face is flushed with weeping, and on my eyelids is the
shadow of death” (Job 16:16).
And later Job, in defending his righteous actions, asked,
“Did not I weep for him whose day was hard? Was not my soul grieved for the
needy?” (Job 30:25). Our temptation is to instantly fix everything, meet their
needs and correct their wrong. If we can, we should. One of my favorite
questions when someone is having a hard day is, “What would make it better?”
I’ve seen it bring beauty out of ashes more than a few times when reminded
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you
know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness” (James 1:2–3). But
in Rachel’s case, or Job’s case, there was nothing to fix, and they were inconsolable.
Anna Spafford was aboard the ship, Ville du Havre, when
it sank in twelve minutes and took her four precious daughters with it. She
sent her husband a telegraph that should rend our hearts in twain,
Saved Alone. What shall I do?
Horatio Spafford, her husband, rushed to be with her. While
waiting for him she recalled that she had prayed not to be just be a
fair-weather friend to God and she said, “God gave me four daughters. Now they
have been taken from me. Someday I will understand why.” She would later say
that in that moment she resolved to cling closer to her faith.
When we weep with those who weep we acknowledge their pain
and suffering. The word “compassion” means to “suffer with.” It is to this
effect that Paul tells the church to love one another, for “If one member
suffers, all suffer together…” (1 Corinthians 12:26). To pretend that suffering
doesn’t exist or that the bereaved is overreacting is a cruel response indeed,
and Proverbs 25:20 describes them this way, “Whoever sings songs to a heavy
heart is like one who takes off a garment on a cold day, and like vinegar on
soda.”
It may be apocryphal, but Charles Darwin is reported as
having walked up to the doors of the church after his ten-year-old daughter
Annie died. Upon hearing happy hymns, he turned away never to return. While it
may not be true, imagine how his eternity would be different if someone had
gone and sat with him and cried with him instead of walking into a church that
(possibly) did not seem to acknowledge the suffering that plagues the world.
What certainly is true is when tragedy strikes next, you have the opportunity
to weep with those who weep and share sad songs with those who have a heavy
heart. Or—heaven forbid—if tragedy strikes you, may you have the courage to ask
someone to sit and cry with you.
A song that has touched many grieving parents goes like
this,
I have
unanswered prayers
I have trouble I wish wasn’t there
And I have asked a thousand ways
That you would take my pain away.
When my
world is shaking,
heaven stands
When my heart is breaking,
I never leave your hands. ~ J. J.
Heller
In the military some of the deepest bonding happens during
the most intense suffering. Get a group of military members together and they
won’t tell stories of exotic locations; they’ll recount fixing fighter jets in
the snow, being pinned down under enemy fire, or rucking miles across endless
deserts or jungles. Their bonds were forged in shared suffering.
The bonds of Christianity are forged in the fire of
adversity as well, as Peter says, “know that the same sufferings are
experienced by your brotherhood in the world” (1 Peter 5:9), Paul invites,
“share with me in the sufferings for the gospel according to the power of God”
(2 Timothy 1:8), and look at the Apostles’ response after the Pharisees, “beat
them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. Then
they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to
suffer dishonor for the name” (Acts 5:40–41).
When we suffer with, when we put on compassionate hearts, we
are transformed into the image of Jesus Christ who suffered for us. “Surely he
has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4)! He learned
obedience through what he suffered (Hebrews 5:8), he surely knows that sorrow
is not a sin and he understands what you are feeling (Hebrews 4:14–16). Instead
of commanding you to stop weeping, he invites you to lay your burdens on him
(Matthew 11:28).
God does not rebuke the natural sorrow, but He gives it an immortal cure. He tells the weeping mother that her tears are noticed, her travail remembered, and that her children are safe in a better land. ~ Charles Spurgeon
J. M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan from the perspective of
boys who died, or as he said euphemistically, “fell out of the pram (stroller).”
His thirteen-year-old brother’s death broke their mother’s heart and she was
sure he would never grow up. In a haunting scene one of the Lost Boys tells
Wendy, “I think I had a mother once.” Their bonding over the memory and joy of
mothers brings hope into the story. While Barrie does not say so outright,
there certainly is an expectation of the consolation of history in the growing
up of the Lost Boys.
Weeping reminds us that the world is not as it should be. We
know that no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what
God has prepared for those who love him (1 Corinthians 2:9), but we are not
living there yet. We know the brokenness, the sorrow, the pain, and the
suffering wrought by sin. We understand why Rachel is weeping and why she is
inconsolable. We want to believe like Habakkuk, but the pain is too much.
Though the fig tree should
not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my
salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer’s;
he makes me tread on my high places. ~
Habakkuk 3:17–19
We are caught between the joy of knowing God is in all the
details and the pain that the details seem impossible and endless.
We live in a time saturated by Christianity and we know that
we do “not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). We are
able to sing wonderful songs that say
It is
not death to die,
to leave this weary road,
and join the saints who dwell on high,
who’ve found their home with God.
It is not death to close,
the eyes long dimmed by tears,
and wake in joy before Your throne,
delivered from our fears. ~ Sovereign
Grace Music
But we feel the hurt and death seems so final and so
insurmountable. We believe in the resurrection, but we understand that
inconsolability is a place we could live forever.
And worse, because we live in light of the resurrection, we
forget that death is a bottomless pit for those without hope. Children carried
off into exile, parents torn from their children, and children murdered in the
streets are all horrible circumstances that are hopeless without a loving and
sovereign God. Our culture has healed the wound lightly by declaring that nonviable
babies are not yet people. They have hidden the pain by refusing to talk about
it. They have satiated the appetite of the grave by focusing on the appetite of
the flesh. They have dulled the sinfulness of sin by declaring that time heals
all wounds and that it gets better.
It is the easiest thing in the world to give a man peace when he has no right to it. You may sing him a lullaby, and send him to sleep on the edge of the pit of hell; but what will he say to you when he wakes up in torments? To heal the hurt of the daughter of God’s people slightly is the work of a traitor to Christ. ~ Charles Spurgeon
The reality is that death brings grief and suffering.
“Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not thy law,” saith the
Psalmist in the King James Version (Psalm 119:136).
Rachel refused to be comforted, and for good reason. Death
and destruction throughout history has been horrendous and we do ourselves and
our hearers a disservice when we fail to understand the gravity and pain of
death. If death is just an inconvenience and destruction is just something that
happens to other people, then we have nothing to fear or be saved from. But
when it comes close to our house and we taste the bitterness of death, we learn
what it means to pour out lamentations and weeping as we refuse to be
comforted.
Rachel’s weeping, which originally seemed out of context to
the comfort that God was offering, suddenly becomes purposefully placed as God
dries her tears and restores her soul.
The Consolation of Israel
Rachel’s weeping is mentioned two years after Christ was
born when King Herod orchestrated what has come to be known as “the slaughter
of the innocents.” Matthew quotes Jeremiah 31:15 “Then was fulfilled what was
spoken by the prophet Jeremiah” (Matthew 2:17), but he deliberately does not
quote verse 16 (Compare Matthew 2:17–18). While there is various debate on why
he didn’t quote the entire passage, I believe strongly that he was masterfully
making two points.
The first reason is that the infanticide of Herod is
shockingly evil and just one more opportunity for the mothers of Israel to
mourn for youth cut down far too young. Jesus has not stepped into history
during a safe or convenient time. Sin and death are reigning as fully as ever.
Satan still hates babies and will stop at nothing to bruise the heel of the
promised seed of Eve. The thief is hard at work stealing, killing, and
destroying. Weeping is tarrying long into the night, comfort seems impossible,
and the Hero of History is needed more than ever.
The second reason is much more hopeful. Matthew—writing to
prove that Jesus is the King of the Jews—expects his audience to know the
context of Rachel’s weeping. Matthew knows that the original readers were looking
forward to a day when the Messiah would restore the land of Israel and raise
her children from the dead, and he knows that every reader in his day would be
looking for the same hope.
Thus says the Lord:
“Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears, for there is a reward
for your work, declares the Lord, and they shall come
back from the land of the enemy. There is hope for your future, declares
the Lord, and your children shall come
back to their own country. ~ Jeremiah 31:16–17
Simeon, a prophet in Jerusalem, had been promised that he
would not die until he saw the Lord’s Christ, the consolation of
Israel (Luke 2:25–26). The prophetess Anna, a daughter of the lost tribe of
Asher, spent all her nights and days in fasting and prayer and looking for the
redemption of Jerusalem (Luke 2:36–37). They, along with every faithful Jew,
knew that their hope could only be fulfilled in God’s Messiah coming to rescue
them. They would have understood why Jeremiah would put Rachel’s weeping in the
middle of otherwise wonderful words of hope, because God had promised their
reconciliation.
There is hope in the end, that though they are cut off in the bud, their sorrow shall turn to joy. ~ Matthew Henry
Rachel’s weeping, mentioned in Jeremiah’s “Book of
Consolation” was not a promise of infinite sadness, but of unimaginable
redemption. Joseph and Benjamin went off to Egypt and would have vanished
without God’s intervention, but instead Moses would say to their children,
“Your fathers went down to Egypt seventy persons, and now the Lord
your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven” (Deuteronomy 10:22).
The Judeans went into exile in Babylon as idol worshippers and yet returned
faithful to their God’s promise,
When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. ~ Jeremiah 29:10–11
When the little ones of Bethlehem were so cruelly murdered,
Matthew doesn’t mention Rachel’s weeping as just a hopeless statement of fact,
rather as the coming hope of Israel, the very King that Herod was trying to
assassinate!
But hark! A voice breaks through
the wailing from the eternal throne: ‘Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine
eyes from tears: for their work shall be rewarded, saith the Lord.’ ~ Charles
Spurgeon
Matthew frames Rachel’s weeping as a sign of the dawn of
hope, of the birth of the redeemer of Israel, of a promise of resurrection.
Death is about to be swallowed up in victory! Rachel and her daughters, who
have waited so long to recite Isaiah 25:8, are about to sing in victory,
He will
swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all
faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for
the Lord has spoken. It will be said
on that day, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might
save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let
us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
And declare from Hosea
13:14,
O
Death, where are your plagues?
O Sheol, where is your sting?
Rachel’s weeping, which was inconsolable, found consolation
in the Lord’s Messiah. Her little ones, who
were no more, have been restored through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus
had compassion on the widow of Nain as she was accompanying her deceased son to
his final resting place. He said to her, “Do not weep” (Luke 7:13, compare
Jeremiah 31:16!). Then he raised the young man from the dead and gave him back
to his mother. Here and in many other places we see the prophecy fulfilled from
Jeremiah 31:16–17.
All of the efforts of the world and the evil one to
eradicate these precious babies failed to keep them from the joys of the Lord.
Despite their short time on earth, their God had not forsaken them.
Yet God, who seemed to have
forsaken them, in the midst of that extreme misery opened the door of
redemption. ~ John Calvin
Weeping for God’s Own Son
To be faithful to the text and behold the glory of Christ we
must see the continued weeping. When Jesus was nearing the cross—his scourging
complete—a great multitude of women were following mourning and lamenting for
him. He knew the intense suffering that was set before him. He knew he was
about to drink to the dregs the wrath of God. Yet in this time of intense suffering,
he doesn’t rebuke their weeping, but turns it inwards,
Turning to them Jesus said,
“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for
your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are
the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’
Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills,
‘Cover us!’ For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will
happen when it is dry?” ~ Luke 23:28–31
God had expressly told Rachel to hold back from weeping.
Jesus had told it to the widow of Nain. Matthew had said the prophecy was
fulfilled. So why here does Jesus tell them to weep? Matthew Henry answers
succinctly, “Let us weep for our own sins, the sins of our children, which
caused His death; and weep for fear of the miseries we shall bring upon
ourselves, if we slight His love, and reject His grace.”
Christ went willingly to the cross. He needs no pity. No one
took his life from him; he laid it down of his own accord (John 10:18). He knew
that captives needed to be set free, he knew that God’s wrath must be
satisfied, and he knew that there was no other way for us to be saved. So it is
not for him that we weep, but for our sins that made his death necessary.
Behold
the man upon the cross,
my sin upon his shoulders,
Ashamed I hear my mocking voice,
call out among the scoffers. ~
Stuart Townend
And,
Thus
might I hide my blushing face,
while His dear cross appears.
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
and melt mine eyes to tears. ~ Isaac
Watts
We weep for our sins that bereaved the Father of his only
begotten Son. We are disgusted by the hatred of men towards God. We tremble
that God’s hatred of sin caused him to crush his own Son.
In a glorious twist, we see here the daughters of Rachel
weeping over Jesus who seems to be going the way of all mankind, taken by that
great enemy death, never to be seen again. But, three days later he would come
back from the land of the enemy. He would take his life back up again, and all
who love him will come back to his country with him.
He ascended on high, leading a host of captives in his train
(Psalm 68:18, Ephesians 4:8). Amongst that host of captives were all who died
in Egypt, in Babylon, and the little ones who died in Herod’s slaughter of the
innocents. Jesus always lives to make intercession for those who draw near to
him (Hebrews 7:25), and beloved if you’ve trusted him, you’ll be brought back
from the land of the enemy as well.
But unfortunately we see in Jesus’s speaking to the women
that some will not seek his face or put their trust in him, and these will be
the ones who later “hide themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the
mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the
face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for
the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?’” (Revelation 6:15–17).
If we won’t weep over our sins and call upon the Lamb now to
save us, then weeping and gnashing of teeth will tarry forever.
So beloved, weep for a moment, weep for a night, but know
that joy has dawned, and his favor comes in the morning. Jesus tells you
“Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will
rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy” (John
16:20)!
Our little ones who have departed are not lost forever. They
are held safe in the arms of God. The land of the enemy may have snatched them
away, but Christ knows who are his and they shall come back to a better country
(Hebrews 11:16).
Until we join them, we may still weep, but we do not weep
without hope. Or we may keep our voices from weeping and our eyes from tears. Either
or both is appropriate so long as we’re looking to Jesus who is making all
things new. We know that as we mourn, he understands, and hears from heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for
they shall be comforted. ~ Matthew 5:4
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