The Tender Love A Father Has: The Christian’s Comfort, Even In Death

by on July 1, 2025 | Comment

A Death-Averse Culture

Our culture is not one that likes to think about death. Culturally, as others have pointed out, we have done away with the traditional churchyard. No longer are we forced to walk past the graves of our family, friends, and neighbors on the way in and out of Lord’s Day worship and, thus, forced to confront our own mortality. We have sanitized death and sent it to the suburbs. While previous generations were familiar with various deathbed rituals, wakes occurring in the home, and the familiar sight of burial plots in churchyards, now cemeteries have been relegated to the neighborhood outskirts—out of sight and out of mind.

Historically, death was a more visible part of life, with many people dying at home and families, including children, participating in death-related rituals like preparing the body or attending funerals. In contrast, modern practices often involve professional funeral services and hospital deaths, which can distance children from the dying process. A 2013 article from The Guardian notes that in earlier times, “the whole cycle of life was played out at home,” with children naturally involved in death rituals, but that contemporary Western culture tends to “sanitize” death, with many adults aiming to protect children from its realities.1 In that article, Liz Mowatt, founder of A Giving Tribute, observes that “dying is less likely than ever to happen in the home and the dead are cared for and stored by a stranger.”2

A 2018 study on funeral transformations notes that by 2010, 77.9% of deaths in Japan occurred in hospitals compared to 12.6% at home, a reversal from the 1950s when 80% died at home. This shift is also observed in Western countries like the U.S.; death increasingly occurs in medical settings rather than at home. The professionalization of funeral services, with funeral homes handling body preparation and ceremonies, means these tasks are outsourced rather than performed by families.3

Death, that tyrannical attendant of sin and foul intruder on God’s good creation, is a stark and bleak reality with which our society seems would prefer not to be confronted, it would seem. Anecdotally, in funeral services I have attended in recent years, I noted that many of the little programs provided by the funeral home have shied away from the language of “birth” and “death” when they list the deceased’s lifespan, opting instead for the language of “sunrise” and “sunset.”

And yet, the Scripture has a remarkably different—indeed, tender—perspective when it comes to death. This notion stood out to me recently while studying for a sermon from Genesis 25 for my congregation, wherein we considered the death of the patriarch, Abraham.

Gathered to His People

In Genesis 25:8–9 we read, “Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people. Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him.”

Note especially that phrase, “He was gathered to his people. (v. 8)” This phrase is used of Ishmael (Gen 25:17), of Isaac (Gen 35:29), of Jacob (Gen.49:33), of Aaron (Num 20:24, 26), and of Moses (Num 27:13; 31:2; Deut 32:50). This gathering is not synonymous with death; it is not just a more poetic way of saying somebody died, for it seems to occur post-death (note especially verse 8). As Ralph Davis observes, “It is not the same as burial in an ancestral grave, because neither Abraham nor Aaron nor Moses was buried with their forefathers. Nor is it synonymous with burial, for verse 9 here seems to indicate that burial is distinct from it.”4

For example, in Genesis 49:33

Jacob is “gathered” but burial is maybe two months or more later [in chapter 50:7]. What does “gathered to his people” imply? Well, if Abraham . . . is gathered to his people, it implies that “his people” still exist in some way even though they are dead. Being “gathered” to one’s people implies that men and women “survive” in some way and join their forebears in the realm of the dead.5

After all, is not that precisely what Jesus said to the Sadducees in Mark 12:26–27 when he quoted Exodus chapter 3? “And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.” Again, Ralph Davis:

[This] clause does intimate that death does not mean annihilation; when you die you do not cease to exist. Why even bother [belaboring this point]? Because we’ve been told by much traditional Old Testament scholarship that the Israelite people were basically existential nincompoops who didn’t concern themselves much about life after death until very, very late in their history [That the notion of life after death was a late theological add-on, a later development in the religion]. And yet here, early on, is an oh-by-the-way recognition of ongoing existence in the face of death, of—one could say—immortality.6

Later on, King David says to the Lord in Psalm 139:8, “And if I should make my bed in Sheol [the realm of the dead], you are there!” Post-death you are not only “gathered to your people” like Abraham was, but are also met by your God.

Asleep in Jesus

What care; what tenderness the Father has. It strikes me that this phrase, “gathered to his people,” is, if you like, almost the Old Testament version of the phrase “asleep in Jesus.” Those “who have fallen asleep” is the phrase from I Thessalonians 4:14, 15; the “dead in Christ” is also how Paul puts it in 1 Thessalonians 4:16. Or in 1 Corinthians 15:18, Paul speaks of “those also who have fallen asleep in Christ.” And far from being a stark or cold description of the state of men and women after this mortal life has ceased, it is a biblical image fraught with God’s tenderness.

I recall a few years ago, when one of our ruling elders was teaching our adult Sunday school class. He had reached chapter thirty-two of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), which teaches about the state of men after death and our anticipation of the future resurrection. And he noted how this phrase “asleep in Jesus”—in the face of the cold starkness of death—evokes this imagery of warm, fatherly, caring tenderness, as if one is tucking a child into bed at night. Patting them in—safe, secure, at rest; simply awaiting that time when they shall awake again, they are now simply “asleep in Jesus.”

As a father tucks his children safely into bed at night, so the Heavenly Father secures the body and soul of his own beloved children—even in death—rendering them safe and eternally secure in Christ, simply passing the time, awaiting that glorious day.

Is it not marvelous how God subverts such things as he does? God takes death, this hellish attendant of sin, this unwelcome tyrant that has intruded upon his creation on account of Adam’s sin, and in the glorious death and resurrection of his son, he has subverted death, that cold despot, and renders it something as innocuous as a child’s bedtime blanket.

The grief will come, and the tears will flow, surely. But the dead in Christ, those belonging to Jesus, though their bodies have expired in this life, are asleep in Jesus. The marvelous reality, as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 15, is that, on account of Christ’s glorious resurrection, death is but God’s errand boy, ushering the believer through the portal unto “the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God” (WCF 32.1). And while that body is placed into the grave, that body is simply held in trust, asleep in Jesus, awaiting that day of future resurrection glory.

Asleep in Jesus; gathered unto his people. The Old Testament tells us in shadow what the New Testament tells us more fully: the soul of the believer is ushered into the company of innumerable saints, the people of God, to behold the face of God, “being made perfect in holiness . . . in light and glory,” as the Confession puts it—gathered unto his people, brought home, right where he belongs, with the people of God.

At Home with the People of God

Genesis is hinting at precisely the sentiment that Psalm 16:3 gets at later: “As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight.” It is as if the psalmist is saying, “This is where I belong; this is my rightful home! Among the people of God! My people!”

Psalm 16:6, 10–11 says, “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance. . . . You will not abandon my soul to Sheol; You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy.”

Happy is the man who gets to spend all his days, in this life and in the life to come, among the people of God! This is a question I posed to the boys and girls [indeed, to all the members!] of our congregation: Do you believe that right here is exactly where you want to be, in the blessed company of God’s people? Do you understand that this worship service is just a tiny picture of what awaits us in eternity, the happy company of the people of God—worshipping him now, and one day forever delighting in the Lord? Is that a longing you have, that one day, when this earthly life is over, you shall be like Abraham and be gathered to your people?

Now, let us be fair. We do believe in progressive revelation. We do believe that the things of God and the Christian faith become more explicit, more clear, as we go on in the Old Testament and transition into the New Testament. We believe that the Old Testament saints only understood in shadow what we understand better from the New Testament. As Ralph Davis notes, Genesis 25 is not 1 Corinthians 15 or 1 Thessalonians 4. Genesis 25 does not pack the punch that the last chapters of the four gospels do—the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus.7

Yet, clearly there is hope here, and God’s covenant people should not neglect any hope that we are given in God’s holy Word. Whether it is a walloping mountain of hope, or just a tidbit—any and all hope is there for the everlasting good and assurance and comfort of God’s people. We do not want to make an exegetical mountain out of a molehill, but even this little note tells us that death is not the end for the people of God. And if that is true—and it is—it means that the Christian need not fear death because the Good Shepherd of Psalm 23 and John 10 will see his children safely through, all the way home to glory. Truly, even in the act and transition of death—that “last enemy” (1 Cor 15:26)—there is sovereign and tender care. For, as Psalm 116:15 says, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.”

Notes

  1. Kate Hilpern, “Should Young Children Go To Funerals?” The Guardian, July 12, 2013.
  2. Hilpern, “Should Young Children Go To Funerals?”
  3. Katsumi Shimane, “Social Bonds with the Dead: How Funerals Transformed in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 373 (2008): 373.
  4. Dale Ralph Davis, Faith of Our Father: Expositions of Genesis 12–25 (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2015), 163.
  5. Davis, Faith of Our Father, 163; emphasis added.
  6. Davis, 163.
  7. Davis, 163.

©Sean Morris. All Rights Reserved.

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  • Sean Morris
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    Sean was educated at Grove City College, Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, MS), Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and the University of Glasgow (Scotland). He earned his PhD from Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. He is an ordained teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, and serves as a minister at the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Oak Ridge, TN. He also serves as the Academic Dean of the Blue Ridge Institute for Theological Education and has published numerous theological and devotional articles. Sean lives in Oak Ridge with his wife, Sarah, and their children.

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