I had to go to my Grandpa’s funeral this past Wednesday. He was the first of my grandparents to go home, so this is about as close to death as I have ever been. The hope of glory has always been real to me. I’ve looked forward to heaven, hoped for it, and dreamed of eternity many times before. But until this week, I’m not sure I ever took quite so much comfort from it, or had to lean quite so heavily on it.

For me—and for my family, too—the week was a weird mixture of sadness and celebration, loss and worship. We thought a lot about Grandpa’s life, we cried with Grandma, and we laughed with each other. And above all, for me at least, it was a week of reminding myself again and again that Grandpa was finally with his Lord Jesus, and that someday soon he would rise again, perfect and glorified, and that gave me enormous comfort. Hope is a glorious thing. 

I gave the eulogy at Grandpa’s funeral. I talked about how strong he was, how he taught me, my brother, and my cousins, and probably my dad and uncle, too, what it meant to be men. I talked about how noble and good he was, how patient, how committed to his ailing wife. We all startled when they fired the twenty-one guns in his honor, we wept when they gave the flag to my Grandma, and I felt proud to be the grandson of such a man. But I also knew that whatever was good and noble in my Grandpa, none of it was natural to him. It was all given to him by his Savior, and in the end his good and noble life said far less about him than it did about the Jesus he loved.

The pastor who preached his funeral said something that will stay with me for a long time. He said, “Sometime Sunday night, between 11:00 and 11:30, God finished his earthly work in Brother Ralph, and He called him home. Brother Ralph fought the good fight. He kept the faith. He finished his race.” Sometimes you can read a passage of Scripture all your life, and think you understand it. But then it sows itself in the soil of real life, in the death of your Grandpa, for instance, and you realize that there’s a depth there that you never saw before. Grandpa finished his race. He finished it well, without stumbling. And O how I want to follow his example. O how I want to finish well, too. 

At the end of the funeral, when everyone was filing by one last time, the pianist played the old song, “The Old Rugged Cross.” I hadn’t heard it in years, and it kind of washed over me for a minute without my giving it a second notice.  But then the words started playing through my mind, and all of a sudden that old song planted itself in my heart and became a treasure to me.

I’ll cherish that old rugged cross,
Till my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it some day for a crown!

That song isn’t precious to me just because I associate it now with my Grandpa. I do, but that’s not the point. The point is that that old song expresses the glorious hope that we cling to so tightly as Christians—the glorious hope that is now sight for my Grandpa. Last Sunday night, my grandfather laid all his trophies down, and once and for all exchanged that old rugged cross for a crown. And by God’s grace, I will some day do the same.

This side of eternity, death is still a powerful and heartrending thing. You can’t hold back that thought when you see that casket being lowered into that muddy hole in the ground. But death is not as powerful, and it is not as heartrending, as our hope in Jesus Christ is glorious.  

I cried when they buried my Grandpa. But there was joy in the sadness, too. I mourned—I still mourn—but not as one who has no hope. No, I mourn as one who knows beyond a shadow of doubt that Jesus died and rose again, and so I know that God will bring with Jesus those who have died in him. One day, one day soon, the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet blast of God.

And then my Grandpa will rise again. He will be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, the mortal will be clothed with immortality, and once and for all, death will be swallowed up in victory. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

So Death, tell me again.  Whatever happened to your sting?