“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Isaiah 55:9
Praise be to you, O Heavenly Father, our wise and all-knowing God. Your perspective is high and wide, long and deep. You understand and know all the aspects of every situation. You have seen all the past, you already see what will happen in the future.
You know all the facts and your will is fully informed. Therefore, whatever you decree, whatever you allow, whatever you choose to bring is good, a part of your overall plan.
Your decisions may be painful to us, the opposite of what we desire, but because you are God–the Good, Great, Glorious and Gracious One–we can trust you in each situation.
Psalm 116:5 says, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.” Most of the time, death is a bitter experience for human beings; for those who do not follow Jesus, it is an end without hope. In you, however, death is full of hope.
You, Lord Jesus have defeated death, you have broken through the wall of hopelessness, making a doorway into eternal life. In God’s eyes, the death of a believer (all of whom are saints) is a precious and wonderful thing.
You are in the process of bringing them from a narrow, restricted, painful, difficult situation into a rich, broad, powerfully pleasant, gloriously positive, wonderfully wide place.
To move from this sin-shackled, superficial, sullied and selfish world, twisted and warped by the fall, into the perfect, sinless, holy and pure heaven, into the presence of the Great King of all, the Creator, the Sustainer, the Ender of time—what a wonderful happening the death of a saint is!
God knows the contrast: to bring another one of His children out of the darkness and dust of the dungeon of death on earth into the light and lavishness of our loving Lord—what better thing can He do for us?
So we have no need to fear death, but can positively anticipate it, like my friend Norm West, who, when he was told after he got cancer that he had only 6 months to live, responded, “Praise God, I’m going home!” This is living in faith, something we should all do.
