Knowing Your Family in Heaven · Lesson 6 of 6

The One Who Does Not Come

The hardest question in the series, four answers we refuse, and where Scripture stops

If the promise is a table with your people at it, then the promise has an edge. Luke 13:28 puts the weeping on the outside of the family table, in sight of it. Daniel 12:2 has “shame and everlasting contempt” in the same sentence as everlasting life. Revelation 20:15 is not ambiguous.

So: what becomes of the sorrow of the saved for the lost they loved?

This is where most teaching on this subject becomes dishonest, and it usually becomes dishonest out of kindness. We are going to name the four evasions first, because a grieving person can hear the true thing only after the false comforts have been cleared away.
Four Answers Scripture Will Not Let Us Give

(a) “Everyone will be there in the end.” This is universalism, and Pleasant Springs does not teach it. It cannot be reconciled with Daniel 12:2, Matthew 8:12, Luke 13:28 or Revelation 20:15 without emptying those texts. Saying it to a grieving family is a kindness that costs them the Scriptures.

(b) “You will not remember them.” This is the most common answer, and it has a text behind it — Isaiah 65:17, “the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind,” and, in the non-canonical Psalms of Solomon 3:11, the sinner “will not be remembered when he visits the righteous.”

Psalms of Solomon 3:11 (non-canonical)

ἡ ἀπώλεια τοῦ ἁμαρτωλοῦ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα καὶ οὐ μνησθήσεται ὅταν ἐπισκέπτηται δικαίους

Isaiah 65:17 (ESV)

17“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind.

But Isaiah 65:17 is not about people. Read the verse in its paragraph: the context is Jerusalem’s former troubles — the weeping and distress of the city — not the erasure of persons from the minds of the redeemed. And the wider promise cuts the other way: Revelation 21:4 says God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” You do not wipe a tear from a face that is not crying. The image is not amnesia. It is a hand, and a face, and someone doing something about it.

(c) “You will not care.” This is the cruellest of the four, because it says that glorification will make you less loving than you are now. That is the opposite of everything Scripture says sanctification does. And note the strange evidence from Luke 16: even the man in torment still cared about his five brothers. A doctrine in which the damned love their families and the redeemed do not has gone badly wrong somewhere.

(d) “You already know who is lost.” You do not, and neither do we. This matters more than the other three put together, because most of the grief this series is written for is grief over someone whose standing before God was never actually knowable.

What Scripture Does Let Us Say
1. You do not have the list, and you are not the judge

Luke 23:43 (ESV)

43And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

The point

The thief on the cross had a conversion that no one on earth would have recorded. No baptism, no membership roll, no witnesses but soldiers and the dying. If he had been your brother, you would have buried him as one of the lost.

Between a person’s last conscious moment and God there is a space you cannot see into. Deathbed faith, private faith, the faith of the confused and the ill and the very afraid — none of it files a report with the family. The honest position on most individual cases is agnosticism, and agnosticism is not a consolation prize here. It is the truth, and it is a great deal roomier than despair.

2. Guilt is not inherited — and neither is righteousness

Pleasant Springs teaches ancestral sin, not inherited guilt: what passes down a family line is consequence and corruption, not transferred culpability.

Deuteronomy 24:16 (ESV)

16“Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.

Ezekiel 18:20 (ESV)

20The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.

Septuagint — Jeremiah 38:29 (= Jer 31:29)

ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις οὐ μὴ εἴπωσιν οἱ πατέρες ἔφαγον ὄμφακα καὶ οἱ ὀδόντες τῶν τέκνων ᾑμωδίασαν

Jeremiah 31:29–30 (ESV)

29In those days they shall no longer say: “‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ 30But everyone shall die for his own iniquity. Each man who eats sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge.

author

Ezekiel — a priest deported to Babylon in 597 BC.

audience

Exiles who were saying precisely that they were being punished for their parents’ sins.

occasion

Ezekiel 18 exists to destroy that proverb. The chapter is God’s insistence that each person stands on their own account.

But it cuts both ways, and we must say so. The same principle that frees you from your father’s guilt means your faith cannot be credited to your brother. Ezekiel says this too, and brutally:

Ezekiel 14:14 (ESV)

14even if these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness, declares the Lord GOD.

Ezekiel 14:20 (ESV)

20even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, declares the Lord GOD, they would deliver neither son nor daughter. They would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness.

That is the Old Testament’s answer to “surely God will save him for my sake.” He will not. And the reason is the same reason your own sins are not your mother’s fault.

3. Grief for the lost is modelled by Christ himself

John 11:35 (ESV)

35Jesus wept.

Luke 19:41–42 (ESV)

41And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.

Jesus wept at a grave he was about to open — which means his tears were not ignorance of the outcome; they were grief at the fact of death itself. And he wept over a city that would not come. That second one is the precise emotion this lesson is about, and it is in the Lord.
4. Paul: unbreakable security and unceasing anguish, in consecutive chapters
This is the most important thing in this lesson.

Paul finishes Romans 8 with the most absolute assurance in Scripture — nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Then, with no transition worth the name, he writes this:

Greek — Romans 9:2–3

ὅτι λύπη μοί ἐστιν μεγάλη καὶ ἀδιάλειπτος ὀδύνη τῇ καρδίᾳ μου· ηὐχόμην γὰρ ἀνάθεμα εἶναι αὐτὸς ἐγὼ ἀπὸ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ὑπὲρ τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου τῶν συγγενῶν μου κατὰ σάρκα,

Romans 9:1–3 (ESV)

1I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit—2that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.

author

Paul.

date

Around AD 57.

audience

A mixed Jewish and Gentile church in Rome that he had not yet visited.

occasion

Chapters 9–11 are his agonised argument about his own people’s unbelief.

Read the vocabulary.

ἀδιάλειπτοςadialeiptos

Unceasing — the same word Paul uses for how he prays.

συγγενῶν κατὰ σάρκαsyngenōn kata sarka

Kinsmen according to the flesh. This is literally a statement about biological family.

ἀνάθεμαanathema

He would take the curse himself if it could be transferred. It cannot — see point 2 above — and Paul knows it. The wish is the measure of the grief, not a proposal.

So here is the settled apostolic position, and it is not a resolution — it is a posture. The man who wrote that nothing can separate him from the love of God carried, at the same time and without contradiction, unceasing anguish over his unsaved family. He does not resolve it. He does not apologise for it. He does not tell himself he will stop caring. He holds both, and then spends three chapters praying and arguing for them (Romans 10:1).

If you are carrying both right now, you are in the best company the New Testament has.

Romans 10:1 (ESV)

1Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.

Romans 8:29 (ESV)

29For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

5. God is not less merciful than you are

You want your brother saved. God is not the obstacle to that — he “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4), and he is “not wishing that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9).

Pleasant Springs holds a Molinist account of how God’s sovereignty and real human freedom fit together. On that account, God knows what each person would freely do in every set of circumstances, and has arranged this world accordingly. The practical consequence for a grieving family is this: if your brother could have been freely won by any arrangement of circumstances consistent with his freedom, God knew it, and God is good. That is not a promise that he was saved. It is a guarantee that nothing was withheld.
6. The tears are dealt with by God, personally

Isaiah 25:6–8 (ESV)

6On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. 7And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. 8He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.

Revelation 21:3–4 (ESV)

3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Notice the grammar of the promise. It is not “there will have been nothing to cry about.” It is not “you will be incapable of tears.” It is that God will wipe them away — an action, done by him, to a specific face. The promise presupposes the tears and then addresses them personally. Whatever the redeemed carry into that morning, the last hands on it are God’s.
7. Therefore: do the work now

The one thing every witness in this series agrees on — canonical and non-canonical alike — is that the time to act is now.

  1. The rich man’s instinct in torment is to get a warning to his five brothers (Luke 16:28).
  2. 4 Ezra 7:112–115 (non-canonical) reasons that intercession works in this age precisely because this age is not the end.
  3. Paul’s response to unceasing anguish is prayer and argument, not resignation (Romans 10:1).
If this series moves you, the response is not to feel comforted. It is to go and talk to your family while talking is still possible. That is the only conclusion every source here shares.
Where We Stop

Scripture does not tell us how the redeemed hold the loss of those who are not there. It does not say. Pleasant Springs’ standing rule is that where Scripture gives no reason, we say so and stop — because manufacturing a resolution teaches people that the Bible must always be tidy, and that belief breaks the first time it meets a passage that is not.

Christians have proposed three answers, and none of the three is taught in Scripture:

  1. The memory answer — the redeemed will not remember. (Rests on Isaiah 65:17, which is about Jerusalem’s troubles, not persons; and is in tension with Revelation 21:4.)
  2. The perspective answer — the redeemed will see God’s justice so clearly that the grief resolves. (Has a long pedigree; has no text.)
  3. The reordered-affection answer — love for God will so exceed every other love that the loss is absorbed rather than erased. (The most careful of the three; still not stated anywhere in Scripture.)
We will not choose between them, and we will not present any of them as the Bible’s answer. What we have is what Revelation 21:4 actually says: there will be no more mourning, and God himself will be the one who deals with the tears. How he does that is not revealed. That is a real gap, and we would rather hand you a real gap than a comfortable invention.
If You Are Reading This in Grief
  1. You are not required to know where they are. You almost certainly cannot. That uncertainty is not faithlessness; it is accuracy.
  2. You are not required to stop grieving. Paul assumes you will (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Jesus wept. Augustine, certain his mother was saved, wept anyway — and then grieved that he was grieving, which is the trap. Do not add a second sorrow on top of the first by treating the first as a sin.
  3. You are not required to defend God. He has not asked you to.
  4. Pray for them. For the living, urgently and by name — every witness in this series agrees that now is when it counts.
  5. Talk to someone. Pleasant Springs has people whose job is to sit with this. Contact us.
Father, you are the God of the living, and you call the dead by name. Thank you that nothing love has made is lost to you. For the ones we have buried, we give you thanks. For the ones we fear for, we will not stop asking. And for the sorrow we cannot put down, we trust your own promise — that you will wipe away every tear from our eyes, with your own hand. Until then, make us the kind of family that talks while there is still time. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
For Discussion
1.Which of the four evasions have you been told? Which have you told someone else?
2.“You do not have the list.” Does that help, or does uncertainty feel worse than a hard answer?
3.Paul held absolute assurance and unceasing anguish at the same time. Is that possible for you — or does one always cancel the other?
4.We refused to choose between the three proposed answers. Was that right, or should a church give a firmer answer than that?
5.Who is the phone call you have been putting off?
← Lesson 5All 6 lessonsAll studies →

Pleasant Springs Church — Discipleship School