Hurt Help Hope: A 5-Day Grief Devotional for TeensSample

The End Is a Beginning

Hope?! How could Paul, the writer of this letter, possibly use the words death and hope in the same sentence? After losing a loved one, life feels like the opposite of hope: sadness, confusion, despair. It seems as though all we can see ahead is darkness. However, since our citizenship is in heaven, we do not operate as the world does, and that includes the way that we grieve.

In this passage, Paul gives us a clue about death that can give us hope and set us apart from the way that others grieve. Paul reminds us in verse 14 of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Notice that he doesn’t say Jesus’ life and death. Instead, he notes his death first and then reminds us of his victory over it. The bad precedes the good.

The Bible is full of God working this way, starting his work in a manner that often feels to us like an ending. In creation, the days are marked by the morning rising out of darkness. In the Old Testament, God brings his people Israel out of slavery and into their own land. And now, Paul uses Jesus’ story to tell us that this is just the way God works when we face the deaths of those we love.

God doesn’t end the day with darkness, he doesn’t leave his people in slavery, and he doesn’t let death have the last word. Instead, Paul reminds us that our pain, suffering, and even death itself are really a beginning. We do not have a God who is powerless in the face of darkness, but who sees it as a canvas on which to write his redemption story. One day, God will also raise us in his glorious resurrection over death. Even as you grieve, he’s starting that resurrection work right now.

Because of this, it makes sense that Paul would talk about death and hope as if they go together. They do! As Christians, death does not leave us empty and despairing, rather it points us forward to the resurrection of our bodies and of those we love, and to spending all of eternity with God. Darkness is only where your God begins.