“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
— Genesis 1:26–27 (ESV)
“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to His heart. So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.’”
— Genesis 6:5–7 (ESV)
On September 13, 2025, I lost a dear friend in ministry.
The earliest beginnings of this piece belong to that loss. More than a year later, I am returning to it as All Saints’ Day approaches—not because the passing of time has supplied a sufficient explanation, but because the church is coming again to a day that asks us to remember.
There is a difference between having something to say about grief and being ready to say it honestly. A theological outline can be assembled quickly. Learning how to bring an actual loss before God is slower work.
And loss comes in more forms than a funeral. We grieve people who have died. We grieve relationships that have fractured, bodies that no longer do what they once could, ministries that have ended, and futures we had quietly assumed would become our own. These losses are not interchangeable. But each can leave us searching for words our ordinary habits of worship have not taught us to speak.
In many of our churches, we know how to announce a victory. We are less certain what to do with a sorrow that remains unresolved. We want to move toward the testimony, toward the lesson, toward the sentence that assures everyone the difficulty has already been redeemed into something useful.
Scripture is more patient than we are.
Before it asks us what we have learned from grief, it shows us something we might not have expected: the God in whose image we were made is Himself grieved to His heart.
The first word about humanity is not failure. It is likeness.
Genesis places men and women within creation as bearers of God’s image, entrusted with the work of representing His rule and caring for what He has made. The imago Dei is larger than any single human faculty. It cannot be reduced to intelligence, authority, relationship, or emotion alone. But neither does it require us to imagine that faithful humanity is emotionally vacant.
The God revealed in Scripture loves, delights, has compassion, and grieves. Our affections belong within the life we offer Him. To become holy is not to become incapable of feeling. It is to have our loves, desires, joys, and sorrows increasingly ordered toward what He calls good.
That distinction matters because the fall has disordered our emotional lives along with everything else. Not every impulse is trustworthy simply because it is sincere. Anger can defend the vulnerable or protect our pride. Sorrow can open us toward another person’s suffering or turn us inward until we can see nothing else.
Emotions are good servants and poor masters. The answer, however, is not suppression. It is formation.
We bring what we feel into the presence of God so that He may teach us what to do with it. We learn to rejoice without possession, to love without control, and to grieve without surrendering our neighbor to our pain.
A church that makes no room for tears is not necessarily forming stronger disciples. It may simply be teaching image-bearers to conceal part of their humanity at the door.
Genesis 6 is not describing ordinary disappointment. The earth has become a place of pervasive corruption and violence. The creatures commissioned to bear God’s image have turned against the life they were entrusted to cultivate.
And God grieves.
The language is deliberately searching: it grieved Him to His heart. We should not flatten those words into indifference in order to protect God’s sovereignty. Nor should we imagine Him as a creature overwhelmed by circumstances He cannot govern. Scripture speaks truthfully of divine sorrow while refusing to reduce the Creator to our limitations.
His grief is holy. It is not wounded vanity. It is not resentment at having lost control. It is the opposition of perfect love to the destruction of what is good.
The judgment that follows means we cannot turn Genesis 6 into a gentle observation about shared feelings. God’s sorrow is morally serious. He does not merely sympathize with a violent world; He judges its violence. The God who loves His creation will not call its ruin acceptable.
Our grief and His are not identical. Bereavement is not the same thing as God’s grief over human wickedness. But the passage unsettles the assumption that sorrow itself must be evidence of spiritual failure. The Holy One is not indifferent to devastation. We do not honor Him by pretending that we are.
This is where the title of this piece needs care. The loss of someone we love is not something we must rename a gift. Death remains an enemy. Violence remains evil. A broken relationship does not become good because we can construct a lesson around it.
The gift is what God may give within grief: His presence, the permission to speak truthfully, and the slow formation of a love that refuses both denial and despair. And, if we are willing to receive it, grief can return us to the knowledge of our own image-bearing nature—we grieve because He grieves.
Holy grief does not require us to admire the wound. It teaches us to bring the wound before Him.
“How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?”
— Psalm 13:1 (ESV)
That is Scripture’s language of prayer.
Not the language of someone who has already resolved every question. Not the voice of a believer carefully editing out whatever might sound uncomfortable in a worship service. It is the cry of someone who knows whom to address even when he cannot understand what God is doing.
Biblical lament gives suffering a form in which it can be spoken before God. Often there is an address, a complaint, a petition, and an expression of trust or a promise of praise. Psalm 13 moves through those elements with remarkable economy. But the pattern is not a formula that forces every sorrow to resolve on schedule. Psalm 88 ends in darkness. Psalm 90 closes with petitions still being offered. Scripture makes room for prayer whose circumstances have not yet changed.
Lament is therefore not the opposite of faith. It is one way faith speaks when the distance between God’s promises and our present experience has become painfully difficult to bear.
The complaint is real. So is the relationship.
Job helps us here. His friends assume that suffering must be explainable if they can only locate the right failure. They defend their account of the world at the expense of the person sitting in front of them. Their silence at the beginning serves him better than much of what they eventually say.
The book does not give Job the explanation his friends are determined to supply. It brings him into encounter with God. The questions are not all answered, but Job is not left with a theological mechanism in place of the living Lord.
We need that restraint in ministry. Sometimes the faithful response is to sit down, listen, and resist the urge to make another person’s loss intelligible. We can pray with someone without explaining why the suffering occurred. We can carry a meal, remember a name, or remain present after the funeral without pretending these acts remove the grief.
And we can learn to pray honestly ourselves. Name the loss. Ask for what is needed. Borrow the words of a psalm when our own words fail. Allow silence without treating it as failure. Return tomorrow if the same sorrow remains.
The Spirit who helps us in our weakness does not require an eloquent performance before He receives our groaning (Romans 8:26–27).
Lament need not turn us toward a quick lesson. It turns us toward God.
“Then He said to them, ‘My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with Me.’ And going a little farther He fell on His face and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.’”
— Matthew 26:38–39 (ESV)
Gethsemane will not allow us to confuse obedience with emotional detachment.
Jesus names His sorrow. He asks His friends to remain near. He brings His petition to the Father. His submission is not the absence of anguish; it is faithful obedience within it.
At the cross, He takes the opening words of Psalm 22 upon His lips: the cry of one who feels forsaken, addressed still to My God. We must neither empty that cry of its anguish nor turn it into a claim that the Trinity has broken apart. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not divided against one another in the work of redemption.
And the psalm Jesus invokes contains more than its first question:
“For He has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and He has not hidden His face from him, but has heard, when he cried to Him.”
— Psalm 22:24 (ESV)
The movement toward trust does not make the opening anguish unreal. It locates that anguish within a prayer that will finally declare God’s faithfulness. Jesus enters the depths of human suffering without making suffering the final truth about God.
The cross is not an illustration offered from a safe distance. The Son gives Himself for sinners. In His death and resurrection, He confronts the sin and death beneath the world’s grief and opens the way to reconciliation with God.
Nor does resurrection hope make His tears at Lazarus’s tomb unnecessary. Jesus knows He will call Lazarus out, and still He weeps. His knowledge of what comes next does not make Him indifferent to the sorrow before Him.
This is the shape our grief may begin to take in union with Christ: truthful, prayerful, unwilling to make another person pay for our pain, and open to the work of love even while sorrow remains.
We are not asked to become less human to follow Him. We are drawn near to the One who shows us faithful humanity in its fullness.
All Saints’ Day gives the church an occasion to remember those who have died in Christ. Not as distant figures whose faithfulness has become polished beyond recognition, but as people through whom we received something of God’s grace.
Their lives were particular. So is the loss of them.
Christian remembrance need not turn them into flawless people in order to give thanks. Nor must gratitude silence the ache of their absence. We can tell the truth about the person, the gift of having known them, and the sorrow that they are no longer here.
“But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep.”
— 1 Thessalonians 4:13–14 (ESV)
Paul does not say that Christians do not grieve. He says our grief is not without hope. The distinction preserves both the sorrow and the promise. We miss those we have lost because their lives mattered. We hope because Christ has risen, not because we have learned to feel their absence less.
As this day approaches, perhaps our first act of remembrance can be simple. Speak a name before God. Give thanks for something real about that person’s life. Name what is missed without apologizing for the tears. Then remember someone who is carrying a loss that the rest of the world may already have stopped asking about.
There are sorrows in every congregation that have no anniversary on the church calendar. All Saints’ Day does not gather every kind of loss into the same category, but it can teach us a hospitality of remembrance that extends beyond one service. A church willing to remember its dead can also learn to sit patiently beside its living.
That is part of our vocation as image-bearers: not merely to explain the goodness of God, but to reflect His compassion toward the people before us.
More than a year after the loss that first prompted these notes, I am not returning to grief as a problem a blog can solve. I am returning to the God before whom grief can be spoken.
He is not offended by the names we still struggle to say without tears. He does not ask us to hurry past love’s particular losses. He gives us words for lament, a people with whom to pray them, and a risen Son whose victory is larger than the grave.
The church’s final hope is not that we will become better at forgetting. It is that God will make all things new.
Until then, we remember. We lament. We remain near to one another.
And we entrust those we love—and the grief we still carry—to Him.
In memory of Gary Johnson and Hiram Johnson—brothers, Kingdom laborers, faithful servants, saints.
From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27