The NIV 365 Day Devotional

Lessons of Loss

The Holmes and Rahe Life Stress Scale lists 43 stressful life events and the value of each. At 100 points, the death of a spouse tops the list of life stresses.

No wonder. As James D. Berkeley so poignantly wrote in “Called into Crisis” (Christianity Today, 1989), “Gone is the dear companion, the keeper of books, the vacation partner, the purchaser of groceries, the maker of dinner or the fixer of cars. Gone is the one who shares sunsets or midnight diaperings or pet jokes or holiday traditions. Gone. In one final moment, it’s all gone, to be replaced by grief, a miserable substitute.”

Now imagine this: The Lord speaks to you directly and says that he is about to take away “the delight of your eyes.” If that’s not terrible enough, you are not to mourn. No crying. No black clothes. No sign whatsoever that you are grieving. If you must groan, keep that to yourself. Carry on as if nothing happened, and do it in the public eye.

That is the dark assignment God gave to the prophet Ezekiel as he was proclaiming God’s message to fellow Israelites who had been exiled to Babylon prior to the fall of Jerusalem. At first, you might think this demand unworthy of a loving God, but it actually illustrates the profound ache in the heart of God because his people simply would not take seriously his warnings about their sin (see Ezekiel 24:13–14).

God’s point was that his people were going to be overwhelmed by their losses. They would lose the temple where they worshiped God—“The stronghold in which you take pride, the delight of your eyes, the object of your affection” (verse 21). Not only that, but they would also lose their sons and daughters who had remained in Jerusalem.

Incredibly, they would not mourn—at least not in the typical way. Verse 23 tells us that the people had become so numbed to sin and its consequences that they could only groan when sin finally made them “waste away” (a Hebrew word that could also mean “rot”). They would have to live with the knowledge that their home country’s destruction had been foretold by the prophets and judgment was to be expected.

Now, if you were to lose as much as these Israelites lost, what would your grief be like? If you knew that not only your children but virtually all the children of the next generation would be lost, how would you feel?

God uses marriage to help us grasp the intimacy, emotion and treasure of our relationship with him. If we sense that we (like Israel) could not grieve because of our remorse, the reason may well be that sin has dulled our senses to what matters in life. We have forgotten that our relationship with God must be more deeply loving and devoted than a spouse’s. Our response, of course, should not be to try to feel sadder about loss but rather to deal with the soul-deadening sin in our lives.

One of God’s great gifts to us is our life’s partner. This sad story in Ezekiel reminds us how we need to help one another keep hot and bright our love for the Lord our God, as well as for each other.

• What do we learn about the consequences of sin from this story?
• What do we learn about God from this story?
• What could we do to help each other be more sensitive to sin in our lives? How can we encourage each other to walk closer with the Lord?

Taken from the NIV Couple’s Devotional Bible.