God's Unmatched Love for Us

It is particularly fitting for grieving parents to focus on the cross of Jesus Christ as a symbol of God’s unmatched love for us, for the measure of our love for our deceased child is the same measure of love that was poured out, for us, at the cross. The night before my own son unexpectedly lost consciousness, and later died, my wife told her mother, “I love [our son] Micah so much. I can’t imagine the grief that God went through when Jesus died.” If you are a fellow grieving parent, you similarly have a special insight into the level of grief that God the Father must have felt as Jesus was tortured, crucified, forsaken by God the Father, and finally allowed to die. Matthew 27. God’s love for us compelled Him to allow His one and only son to die. “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” 1 John 4:9.

You and I would give everything, including our very lives, for our deceased children. We know how hard it is to lose our child unwillingly; to willingly give up your only child is absolutely unthinkable. But on that Roman Cross two thousand years ago, God’s love for us was proven in how he willing allowed His own son, Jesus Christ, to die for us, that we might be in relationship with Him. If God loved us so much that he allowed Jesus to die, can we not trust His love for us now? About God’s great love for us, Paul wrote, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” Romans 8:32.

The cross is also a demonstration of how God’s love for us transcends life and death. In the very act of dying, Christ demonstrated that love is greater than death, and that he loves us enough to accomplish great purposes on our behalf even through physical death. “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate use from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39. If God allowed His own beloved son to die, can we not also trust that our child’s death is not an indication of our being unloved, or of our child being unloved? In our grief, we must hold fast to the cross, where we can see the full measure of God’s great love for us.