Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted. (Matthew 5:4, NKJV).
Radical Living - Part 003: Blessed Grief
Have you ever studied someone who should be sad and isn't? I don't mean a brave act of "stiff upper lip" camouflaging underlying sadness, or someone a few cards shy of a full deck. I mean someone who is truly not grieving when the circumstances clearly call for it, and shows no sign of being effected. It is creepy because beings in human skin should act like humans.
We are created in God's image. That includes the ability to feel emotion. That gift has been perverted by sin, of course, but the intent behind it is pure and good and differentiates human beings from rocks or worms. Once regenerated by the Holy Spirit at the moment of salvation, our innate ability to feel has been reset, fixed. While far from perfect (everything is this side of death), we are now capable of feeling in some small way like God Himself does. We may find ourselves heartbroken over things that previously weren't even on our personal radar screens. We begin grieving over not only our own losses, but for the tragic consequences of life in a fallen world generally. And because we now have an intuitive understanding of how things SHOULD be, we mourn deeply over how things really ARE.
Look, God feels. That is one the most astounding revelations in Scripture, and why any other so-called religion that envisions God as an impersonal force is hopelessly childish. We love because God is love. We have personhood and emotion because God is a Person who has emotion. And looking at the world around us, and the despair-filled existence of life on earth, even comfortable life with all basic provisions available, we mourn. And in mourning over the things over which God also mourns we are shown to be His children, filled with His Spirit and being conformed into the image of His Son, day by day.
I hear people all the time trumpeting how good life is (balanced of course by a vast army of complainers), and while I can agree that life often has a sufficiency of joy and contentment to enable us to get by and to give us a taste of how things should and will be when the Lord returns, I cannot ignore the current big picture. Christ does not want us to. He wants us to have His heart. And the more we draw near to Him through prayer and fellowship and investment in His word, the more of His heart He gives us. And that heart is overflowing with both immeasurable love and profound grief. He cried at Lazarus's tomb. He wept over Jerusalem. He was a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. God had to suffer an excruciating public execution to make our redemption possible. That He did so is a joy beyond words to express. That he HAD to is "groaning which cannot be uttered", a divine testament to how mournful things truly are.
Christ-followers are blessed as we become more like Him for so many reasons, but the one in view here is simply this - mourning over life in this world now is a prerequisite for joy in the world to come. Seeing the truth of the human condition in the light of Christ is a safeguard, a cure, for the eternally fatal disease of holding onto the things of this world too tightly. There are many reasons to grieve: our own sin, the horrible consequences of sin throughout history including that most grievous of sin's allies, death. And mourning is painful, but the alternative, reptilian self-absorption and scaly selfishness, is infinitely worse because it means you don't know Him, and most likely never will.
