Grief and Peace

Psalm 125

 

“1 Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion,

which cannot be moved, but abides forever.

2 As the mountains surround Jerusalem,

so the LORD surrounds his people,

from this time forth and forevermore.

3 For the scepter of wickedness shall not rest

on the land allotted to the righteous,

lest the righteous stretch out

their hands to do wrong.

4 Do good, O LORD, to those who are good,

and to those who are upright in their hearts!

5 But those who turn aside to their crooked ways

the LORD will lead away with evildoers!

Peace be upon Israel!” 

Our God is a God of peace. God desires us to have his peace. And yet in the midst of grief it can be very difficult to experience that peace that God desires for us to have. With grief can come feelings of pain, emptiness, loneliness, fear, chaos, instability, pressure, stress, and more… none of which are conducive to us being able to experience peace.  

 

But what is beautiful about this psalm is that God’s peace is not bound and subject to the anti-peaceful emotions that we experience in grief. God’s peace exists in the midst of those emotions! The key to this peace is found in the second verse… “As the mountains surround Jerusalem…” Author and pastor Eugene Peterson has noted that the mountains that surrounded Jerusalem made for a very good natural defense system. Jerusalem was naturally a well protected city. So even if Jerusalem was under attack, God’s people could look up and be reminded that just as they were protected by those mountains, they were protected in the same way by God himself. God surrounds his people. God is in control. Evil will not be able to thwart God’s purposes. 

 

Now even in the midst of grief there are circumstances and truths that can bring us peace. We can take comfort perhaps, in the fact that a long painful battle with cancer is over. We can take comfort perhaps, in that the person we have lost is no longer suffering physically. We can especially take comfort when our loved one believed in Jesus Christ as his or her Savior and Lord, because the bible teaches us that our loved one is in heaven, worshipping at the throne of God, and that we will see him or her again! But sometimes there are very few, if any of those peaceful branches for us to land on to find comfort. And we may find that even if one of those branches gives us comfort one day, it may not give us comfort and peace the next day. So ultimately we cannot find lasting peace within our circumstances when dealing with grief. 

 

But what this psalm teaches us is that we do not need to be in peaceful circumstances to experience God’s peace. God always surrounds his people! So we do not need to look desperately for something stable that we might be able to get peace and comfort from. Rather, we can always look to the mountains and see God lovingly and powerfully surrounding us. Regardless of circumstances we can always say that God is in control (Romans 8:28). And therefore, regardless of what grief and pain we are feeling, we can always have peace.

 

Several years ago I was leading a grief support group for several people who were going through a very intense time of loss, dealing with the deaths of multiple family members in a very short timeframe. The pain was deep, and the lack of peace was clearly evident. There was very little, if anything in that situation where one could find peace and comfort! In our group we looked at this psalm on God’s peace. The following week when we met again, one woman in our group shared this: “I realized after last week that I had never asked God for peace. And I asked him for it. And he gave it to me.” This woman was still in deep, deep, pain. But she was very visibly at peace, both in her mind and in her soul. It was and is a peace that can only come from God. And it is truly the only peace that will give us the strength to persevere through our time of grief.