Vacationing in a Cemetery
In the fall of 2006, my wife and I did something we had dreamed about for years. We took in the beauty of the northeast United States. We enjoyed seeing Niagara Falls and the breathtaking Fall foliage of New York, New Hampshire and Vermont. We also enjoyed visiting the church in Northampton, Massachusetts, where the great theologian Jonathan Edwards served as pastor.
Oddly enough, the highlight of the trip for me was a cemetery in Arlington, Vermont, where we had journeyed to see the Norman Rockwell museum. The cemetery was very old, with some graves dating back to the late 1700’s.
One of the gravestones immediately caught my attention. It marked the resting place of a Daniel Ellsworth, who died in 1832, at the age of 50. I was glad to read these words on the marker:
Thus saith the Comforter,
Earth has no sorrows
Which Heaven cannot heal.
Another stone marked the grave of Samuel Ellsworth, who died in 1819, at the age of 65. At the bottom of this marker was this verse of Scripture: “And what I say unto you I say unto all, ‘Watch’” (Mark 13:37).
As we toured the cemetery, we found that almost every gravestone had words expressing faith in Christ. The inscription I liked best was at the grave of Captain John Gray, who died at age 79 in 1806:
When Christ appears in yonder Cloud,
With all his numerous throng.
This believer then shall rise and sing
And Christ shall be the song.
Another stone contained these words:
Friends nor Physicians could not save
My mortal body from the grave;
Nor can the grave confine me here,
When Christ my Savior shall appear.
As I walked away from that cemetery, the words of Hebrews 11:4 came to mind: ‘ … he being dead still speaks.’ The believers whose graves I visited were still speaking hundreds of years after death. They died with the realization that their gravestones would be read by hundreds and thousands from future generations. They wanted even in death to speak plainly to the living about the brevity of life, the certainty of death, and the urgent need to prepare to meet God. They also wanted to bear witness to the only way to stand acceptably in the presence of God, namely, through faith in the saving work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Still further, they intended in death to taunt death. Death could claim them, but not hold them. They went to their graves with the unswerving confidence that the very Christ in whom they trusted would come again, call their bodies from those graves, re-unite those bodies to their souls (which went to be with the Lord at the time of death – 2 Cor. 5:8), and personally escort them to share in His eternal glory.
I left that cemetery with gratitude swelling up in my heart for the strong and unwavering testimony of those saints of God. I also left with the prayer that unbelievers, who visit there, would realize both the brevity of this life, the certainty of eternity, and the sufficiency of Jesus Christ to prepare them for eternity.
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