Austin's Blog

I need to be honest and admit I wince when I think about Gabe being dead. The language itself is harsh and horrifying, much less the reality of it all. I often shudder and bristle at the mere thought of it. It doesn’t even seem real sometimes. He was so alive, so full of joy, and so radically and truly present. But, now he is counted as one of the dead and not the living. I was encouraged recently by the Scriptures. Paul the Apostle writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” He is dead but he is dead “in Christ”. 

The New Testament calls people “Christians” only three different times. The dominant way it describes Christians is we are “in Christ.” In fact, it uses the language of being “in Christ, in Him, or in the Lord” over 150 times in Paul’s writings alone. John Stott remarks, “To be “in Christ” does not mean to be inside Christ, as tools are in a box or our clothes in a closet, but to be organically united to Christ, as a limb is in the body or a branch is in the tree. It is this personal relationship with Christ that is the distinctive mark of his authentic followers.” Death does not sever this relationship because neither death nor life separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:39). I’m still deeply connected to my son because we are both “in Christ.” 

J.R. Miller discusses our children who have died saying, “…they are kept safe and secure for us, in the home of God. We really have not lost them, although they have been taken out of our sight. They lose nothing of their beauty or their excellence of character in passing through death. The things in them which made them dear to us in this world, they will have when we shall see them again. Indeed, they will have grown into rarer beauty and into greater dearness when we find them again.” Indeed, being “in Christ” is the true “home of God” for His people. Gabriel is now one of the “spirits of the righteous made perfect” located in the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb. 12:22-24). He is a part of the great cloud of witnesses celebrating and cheering us on (Heb. 12:1). We are inseparably and irrevocably linked forever because we are both “in Christ.” There is a physical break between us now but it is only for a little while.