We have a good God who does good. Psalm 145 tells us:
The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made.
Psalm 145:10
You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing.
Psalm 145:16
The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desire of those who fear him; he also hears their cry and saves them.
Psalm 145:18–19
That is not how the eyes of our grieving hearts always see God. We may cry out with the psalmist:
Why, O LORD, do you stand afar off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
Psalm 10:1
I want to tell you today that your grief is real to a real God, its reality can be felt by you and by others around you. It is real. I want you to know that God is a promise keeper. While this fact will not take away your grief, it can help you to see its purpose. God does not waste suffering. He uses grief for his glory just as he does every other form of suffering.
It is important that we reflect on truth when we are grieving. The Truth about grief begins with grief.
Genesis 3 records the most horrific moment in history: the fall of mankind. In the children’s book The Garden, the Curtain, and the Cross by Carl Laferton the illustrations you find depicting this moment in time are remarkable. Adam and Eve are horrified.
Genesis 3 then tells of the most wonderful promise in history: the rise of a New Man (Romans 4) fulfilled in the scriptural account we call the Christmas story. The book I mentioned above also expresses this well in its art.
Genesis 3 reveals the cause of our deepest grief and the cause of our wildest hope. Christmas, for the grieving, takes this dichotomous situation and crams it into our hearts. We not only continue to experience the deep grief we have been carrying with us but now we are experiencing a spiritual conundrum. Our hearts are smeared with a guilty confusion. Where is the joy that I should be feeling as a Christian and why am I not feeling it especially at Christmas?
Grief signifies loss.
What you have lost is dear to you, a loved one perhaps, maybe it is a loss of time by abuse or even spiritual wandering from the Lord. Whatever it is think about this please: have you built into your heart an allegiance to that grief? This creates an ungodly focus on grief rather than a godly, freeing-yet-painful hope in the One who overcomes grief.
Sister, grieving is absolutely a good thing. Hoping in grief rather than hoping in the promise of Genesis 3 which is expressed vividly at Christmas is not a good thing. Hoping in grief is what causes us to sit next to the Christmas tree sobbing without any sense of closure. It is what causes us to throw the cookie dough out instead of having a good cry and finishing the batch with tear-stained cheeks.
Christmas is the promise fulfilled. Christmas is the closure to the grief that grips your heart. What happened in the Garden has been reversed!
In Genesis 3:15 God tells the serpent:
I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring, he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
emphasis added
The birth of Jesus the Christ sets this in motion. God has fulfilled the most profound promise ever promised in all of history: The freedom of man from the grips of sin.
Grief has purpose. I see 2 secondary purposes and 1 purpose that supersedes those and is the result of understanding them in your heart. (Stay with me.)
The first secondary purpose I see is taught to us most fervently in the Psalms. We read in the Psalms how to respond emotionally to the trials God brings into our lives. This is a practical teaching manual for our emotions. It teaches us how to draw near to a holy God. Grief directed by God softens us, giving us this opportunity. We can learn this in the Psalms.
The second secondary purpose is grief teaches us this world is not our home. Jesus was a man of sorrows here on earth. The brokenness of the effects of the sins of man bore down on his heart as it should upon ours. With great hope Scripture teaches us that in heaven we will not weep out of grief (Luke 6:21; Revelation 21, especially verse 4; Isaiah 25:8). Grief is a result of sin. There is no sin in heaven…this is a simple and wonderful logic statement: therefore, there is no grief in heaven.
When we understand these 2 secondary truths, we can begin to understand the purpose that supersedes them. Grief is for the glory of God:
When we grieve without hope – refuse consolation, throw out the cookie dough, shake angry fists at God we cannot draw near to God. Grief, when we hope in the promise that we remember at Christmas, helps us draw near to God.
When we look beyond, not our grief, but the cement walls of allegiance to it, we can look to our heavenly home. This is not disremembering what caused our grief but rather trusting in the promise that was made in Genesis 3 and fulfilled in the account of Christmas.
Draw near to God, trust his promise. He is good and he gives us good works, that we can walk in them (Ephesians 2:10) like baking Christmas cookies for those loved ones who are with you currently.
This year has been filled with grief for many of us. I have had to sometimes renew my mind hourly with the above truths. I have boiled it down to this as I have sobbed beneath the Christmas tree and tried to refuse to make Christmas cookies:
Trust God and Do Good (Psalm 37:4-5).