In the end, we must yield to the finiteness of our understanding in light of the sovereign purposes of the One who holds all things in his hands.

A couple of months ago, I was visiting family in the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia. My sister and I went out for dinner in the town of Clarkesville. Before we went to the restaurant, she wanted to take me to see something in the old cemetery in the center of town. We walked past uneven rows and broken markers from burials almost two hundred years old. We came up to one headstone she wanted me to see. I had to read it twice. It said,

Moses Harshaw
1794-1858
Died
and
Gone to Hell

I got over the shock through dinner and was compelled to find out how this gentleman had earned his epitaph. It turns out that Moses Harshaw was known locally as “the meanest man in Georgia.” He was a lawyer, rich gold miner, and plantation owner. He was known to be a cruel slaveholder, a heartless husband and father, and a contentious coot to apparently everyone he met. He spent his life caught up in lawsuits over things he did or accused others of doing. Local historians said his wife put up the tombstone and wrote the epitaph when he died.

I can only imagine what his funeral must have been like. It got me thinking. I’ve been to a lot of funerals and officiated a number as well. I’ve never been to one where everyone was confident the deceased person was not in “a better place.” Thankfully, I’ve been to memorial services that were joyous celebrations of a person’s fruit and impact as a professing Christian—services that radiated confidence in our eternal hope. However, I’ve also been to many where there was uncertainty: services where those gathered seemed to be groping for some assurance that their departed loved one was in heaven. These are the hardest ones of all for me.

Hard Questions in Vulnerable Times

Encountering unbiblical hopes for departed loved ones is hard if we are in a position of care for grieving people. It is even harder if we are grieving ourselves. If there is no evident fruit of saving faith, no active testimony of Christ, or if the person’s words, actions, and choices demonstrate that something other than the worship of God has been their life’s pursuit, we are left with the awful implication of Moses Harshaw. Maybe not as stark, but just as final all the same. So we scour the person’s life, and we press our doctrinal convictions as far as they will stretch that maybe, just maybe, this person has made it to the other side safe in the arms of Jesus. But we’re not entirely sure how our Bibles get us there.

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