THE wish, that one himself might die, is never more ardent in a man, than at the freshly dug grave of the dearest pledge, that he possessed on earth, and which God the Lord took from him.
If your love is divided among many interests, that urge speaks far less strongly; for to follow your dead in death, you would then have to part from what still remained to you. But when you are almost all alone in the world, and you were still so rich in your loneliness, because God had given you a tender wife or as woman a man after your own heart; or because as widow He had left you still an only child; and it happens that then that only object of your love is carried out, yea, then life renders you so mortally weary, and death exercises so wondrous an enchantment, that to die and to follow after your dead, seems bliss to the soul.
Nothing but death between you and the treasure of your love, that sank away in the grave.
O, do you not understand, that it has driven sometimes one shattered in mind to dreadful guilty suicide?
Through the depth of the waters back to him, whom she loved and could not miss.
And though with less passionate love this urge is less strong, and though in a rich possession, that still rested you, that urge finds a wholesome counterweight, yet that deep longing to see again, those who went from you, is so general, so natural, so genuinely human, that, immediately after the dying, at least if there were any love, it almost always asserts itself.
YET do not attach too much to this.
Also your experience has taught, that this longing to see the departed again often seems more than it is.
Shortly after the dying; when all your nerves were tense; and death itself made the tie of blood and the tie of the heart speak most loudly; then, indeed, that longing after seeing again was real.
But let some three, four years pass by, and see what change already then has taken place. For the infant, that God took from you, He has given you other darlings in the place. For the life in the domestic circle, from which a brother or sister was removed by death, by marriage an entirely other life has come in place. How many a widow, who after three, four years already married again, and now devotes her love to another man, and presently to a new-born babe. And then in such a circle rouse for once the remembrances of the dead, and see, how altogether differently that longing after seeing again presents itself.
Not that therefore our dead are necessarily forgotten, or that a lack of reverence for their memory has entered in; and also not, that one would not willingly see him again. But yet the longing after it has then already become so much weaker. And that already after three, four years!
Let us therefore be sober, and always continue mindful, that in the first days after the “dying” and “burial” our life is not normal, and all our life in an unnatural way is concentrated on one point.
There are indeed cases, where this is different.
When love for him whom God took from us was very deeply rooted; when God the Lord made almost everything sink away from us in that one grave; and when presently no change comes in our lot of life to break the bitter desolateness;—O, surely then it seemed, that longing after seeing again rather increased than diminished, and that after ten and twenty years the deep sighing of the soul ever yet went out to that one object of our love, that went from us and left us irrecoverably alone.
BUT also then such longing must stand under the discipline of God’s Word … and God’s Word has almost nothing to say about it.
If it had been the will of the Lord, that, after our death, we would have continued the old communal life with our early departed relatives or friends, Scripture would constantly have held this before you as allurement, to foster homesickness after the eternal fatherland.
But see, this God’s Word does not do.
Scripture truly stimulates in you homesickness after the eternal fatherland, but never by rousing the longing in you after that seeing again, but solely by making you long for your God and His blessed fellowship; by infusing in you a longing of soul after your Savior; by making you thirst after the congregation of the elect; by making the inheritance of the saints in light glisten before you; and by pointing you to the day of glory, which comes with the Maranatha.
Recognition is thereby not excluded. The rich man in the parable recognizes Lazarus and Lazarus him; but when there is mention, of continuing the earthly relation between man and wife in the hereafter, Jesus rejects every such idea, by saying: “In heaven there is no marriage, but all God’s saints are as the angels of God” (S. Matt. 22, 30). And you know, the love of God’s angels goes out to the Lord of hosts and to that eternal Being alone.
And this is the tender point.
Also at the grave of your dearest dead you must ever be mindful of the high commandment, that your first, your deepest, your richest, yea, all your love must draw not to any one creature, but to Him, Who has made you.
Also at the grave of your dead God stands calling with holy jealousy: “Give Me thine heart.”
And neither the bier, nor the grave, nor your overwhelming grief can take anything away from the holy ordinance, that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your powers.
And it is against this holy ordinance, that especially in days of bereavement sometimes so dreadfully, so thoughtlessly, and without any knowledge of sin, sin is committed.
AND yet, that holy jealousy of your God does not exclude therefore the human in the drawing of your heart, but merely demands that your grief shall not stand in the way of your love for your God.
What follows therefrom, you feel yourself.
Even this rule, that every tie, that was sanctified in God, remains, but also that every tie, that was apart from God, by death is loosed forever.
If your child, that God took from you, was nothing to you but a doll to play with, your delight and your enchantment; if there was nothing else and nothing deeper back of your love; if there was no tie in Baptism, no tie in the Covenant, no tie in prayer, no tie that bound you with your child to your God, confess, what then in that eternal life would there be in common between you and your darling?
And as it is with your child, so it is with all your dead. You may have felt yourself, O, so much interested by so much; by so much that was lovely in the external, by so much that was delightful in life, by so much that was friendly and captivating; under the cherishing of all this loveableness you may, as it were, have been welded together, so that your life was interbraided with the life of your dead; and yet, if there operated no higher fellowship in the worship of your God and in the love for your Savior, what then will there ripen from so earthly an inclination for or bloom after among the angels of God?
Surely, there is a resurrection of the flesh, and however glorious the garments of light shall be, in which God’s saints shall dwell on the new earth under the new heaven, there shall be resemblance, and recognition of those whom we have known on earth is not excluded. But you also know, if you come where Lazarus awoke, you can only have fellowship with those who awake where you are. From all others a chasm separates you, which no one can bridge over.
God’s children alone come thus with God’s children together; and they come together without sin, in a state of spiritual perfection, in which the love of all for the Eternal Being shall be perfect.
How then in such a heavenly state would a love, that did not root in God and operated apart from the tie to God, be possible, or also even be thinkable?
AND now you feel the power, that goes out from this exalted viewpoint.
For, there follows from it, that already here on earth you have to see to it, that every tie with husband or wife, of father or mother, of child or friend is not left outside of your love for God.
A heart, that is still divided, is powerless.
And so long as you still have your love for your God on one hand, and on the other an entirely different love for your relatives and friends, there lacks in you that inner harmony, wherein lies the beauty of the soul.
That avenges itself at dying, and not infrequently at the grave you will wage a bitter fight between your love for your God and the love for your dead, and often the passion in your grief pushes then your love for your God into the background.
But if it became different, and your fellowship with your wife and with your child became more and more a fellowship in Christ, a fellowship founded in the love for your God, then that breach does not come, and also at the grave of one most tenderly loved the Soli Deo gloria, in which the greatest part of your heart sank away, is not denied.
Then also at your graves the love for your God continues to excel all else, and when you think of eternity and of your own dying, you do not think first of the seeing again of your dead, but before everything else of the seeing of your Savior and of the vision of your God; and then it is from His love, that you expect back again that fellowship alone with your dead, that can glorify Him and is granted you by His grace.
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