It is a tender and heavy sorrow that has been laid upon you, and men need comfort because they are but men. When the stroke falls suddenly, as an earthquake all of a sudden overthrows a city, so does adversity shake the estate of mortals, and frequently the calamity comes in the form of the loss of one dear to us. Such sudden spoiling of human life and of earthly comfort is no unusual thing in this vale of tears, and your loneliness and mingled thoughts of guilt and frustration are the natural burden of a heart that feels its own frailty.
Yet there is no attribute of God more comforting to His children than the doctrine of Divine Sovereignty. Under the most adverse circumstances, in the most severe troubles, they believe that Sovereignty has ordained their afflictions, that Sovereignty overrules them, and that Sovereignty will sanctify them all. You have well said that no one can add a single second to his life down here, and that nothing happens outside His will and plan. So it is. Our times are in His hand, and whether by secondary causes that are plain to the physician or by a sudden taking away where no diagnosis can be established, the Lord's timing ultimately always prevails. It pleased the Lord to bruise even His own Son, and He put Him to grief, yet not a sparrow falls without your Father. To learn to recognize and admire this sovereignty is to find a sea of comfort, for He does no wrong, and He will do what is right with those whom we love and with ourselves.
You ask for a Rhema Word, a clear Word from the Lord, and for certainty that your loved one is secure in having entered eternity. Hear then what God has spoken already, for it is God's Word that comforts. Why do we look anywhere else for consolation but to God's Word. This is my comfort in my affliction, says the Psalmist, God's own Word quickening the soul within. The blood of Jesus Christ, God's dear Son, cleanses us from all sin, and salvation is through Him alone. Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect, for God has justified them. Who is he that condemns. If your loved one was in Christ, trusting Him alone for salvation, then to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, secure not by our wishes but by His finished work. If we knew not fully the state of the heart, as we cannot search it as God does, we are still to leave that soul in the hands of Him who has said, As I live, says the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dies, but that he turn unto Me and live. He is both just and full of tenderness, and we may with Job resolve, Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him, and find our comfort in the hopes of the next world rather than in our own reasonings.
For your own heart, haunted by loneliness and by guilt alternating with frustration, remember the loneliness of the Savior. He was left alone, alone just when most, as Man, He needed human sympathy, and His disciples could not watch with Him one hour. Yet even amid thick darkness He could say, The Father is with Me. Into this fact He sank as into a sea of comfort. So shall you find that the words of God's Book, made living to you, shall be to your mind as angels, and God Himself shall have fellowship with you. If you lament your loneliness, cure it by seeking heavenly company. And as to guilt, mark that at the very same time that the guilt of sin is taken away and blessedness is bestowed, the forgiven man undergoes a change of nature. The work of the Spirit is linked with the work of the Son, when the Son removes guilt, the Spirit removes guile. Bring your guilt plainly to the cross, and ask not only for pardon but for a true heart, ready to receive even rebuke if it be for your real good, ready to take bitter medicine, for you are anxious to be healed. Great prayer will lift you up where little prayer has let you sink.
God says, I will comfort you. And when He undertakes the work, then we become as conduit pipes that are full, even to bursting, with the drink that you require. Your soul shall be satisfied even out of poor earthen vessels, but it must be God's work. He comforts His people in the very place of their trouble, and I think the place of comfort is the assembly of God's people. Therefore live, not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together, as the manner of some is. Do not expect God to comfort you at home if you refuse to seek Him in His House and by His Word. Fly to this comfort with speed in every time of trouble, get to be familiar with God's Word so that you may do so, and pray earnestly over the Word, that it may quicken you, or otherwise it will not be a comfort to you.
May the Lord Himself speak to you those sweet words of comfort in the wilderness. Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. May He quicken your soul within, so that whatever pain you suffer, whatever grief you endure, you may say, Yet I am a living child of God, and better to be the most afflicted child of God than to be the happy worldling. May He keep you trusting His sovereign will, sanctifying this sudden sorrow to your good, and filling your loneliness with His own presence, until faith shall be sight, in Christ Jesus's precious name. Amen.
