Comfort food for the soul (3): The dead in Christ shall rise first
“Several decades later we shall meet.”
Those were the final words my dad told me in hospital bed.
I hung on to them.
Two months or so ago my younger brother recalled something I heard for the first time since our mother passed away decades ago:
“Just before she passed away in the hospital, mother kept asking me to pray for her to go to heaven.”
That came as a shock to me.
I never knew her to be religious.
Not even sure she heard of the Gospel.
Guess humans nearing the end have a built-in longing to be there.
For father, I knew he died a believer in Christ.
Mother, I could only hope.
Imagine for someone like me in his waning years, what comfort it will bring to realise
there’s a future for his deceased parents in eternity!
I must admit that I couldn’t sort things out for the next life.
I couldn’t reconcile in heaven being able to recognise and be aware of the presence of one’s parents, but at the same time there is to be no relationship in heaven.
Just recall the classic Jewish struggle of a woman having several husbands who are siblings, when all of them are in heaven!
How embarrassing there?!
Again I reiterate my ignorance in reconciling on one hand one would see the parents, whilst on the other, they will not be his parents!
Better leave it to the higher pay grade!
But where logics can’t reconcile, comfort is still present.
And I draw comfort from what’s written in the Bible, in surprisingly extraordinary details:
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a commanding shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God. First, the believers who have died will rise from their graves. Then, together with them, we who are still alive and remain on the earth will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Then we will be with the Lord forever (1 Thess 4:16-17 NLT) .
That’s likely to be a dramatization of what took place when a king had returned to rescue one of his cities captured by the enemies.
And when the king had overwhelmed the city, and perhaps enemies decapitated or surrendered, the king’s subjects would all venture out to the entrance to meet and greet the victorious king.
Kind of like contemporary local dignitaries went out to the tarmac to wait to welcome a president stepping down (for a particular one, struggling down) the ramp of the presidential aircraft.
It’s always the subjects venturing out to meet the king.
That should be a climax of vindication and wiping away of tears.
That should be what humanity has longed for.
That is what I long for.
For father, I knew he died in the faith.
Mother, I could only hope.
I draw comfort from what’s said in the Bible, comfort for my soul.
Rainbow over the Dead Sea (שרון שלמה, CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons)