Chapter 19
Rebecca wakes at three in the morning again. She has been waking at three for two years, ever since her father died. She lies in the dark and the same question rises like a tide that will not go out: Was Dad a believer? She does not know. She does not know if she will ever know.
She remembers him at the breakfast table when she was a child, reading a worn brown Bible before he poured his coffee. She remembers him in a pew, singing the hymns in a low quiet voice. She also remembers the year the Bible disappeared from the table. She was thirteen. Nobody talked about why. He kept driving them to church for a few more years, then stopped that too. He never said a word against Jesus. He never said a word for Him. He worked his job. He paid his taxes. He loved her mother. He died on a Tuesday afternoon in March of an aneurysm, in his recliner, alone in the house.
Rebecca has scoured every memory. The cross above the kitchen door — was it his idea or her mother's? The night he prayed at her grandmother's funeral — was that a real prayer or the kind of prayer a polite man offers because someone has to say something? She has prayed every night for two years for an answer that will not come. She is in the pastor's office now. She is asking the question she cannot stop asking.
"Pastor," she says, "where is he?"
Chapter Thesis: Many bereaved Christians carry the particular ache of not knowing where their loved one stood with God. Was the faith real? What does the silence in the final years mean? This chapter does not pretend to give certainty where none exists. It does offer something better than certainty pretended at: a framework of biblical hope, honest humility, and trust in a God whose love is wider than our knowledge. You do not need an answer to that 3 a.m. question. You need permission not to have one — and reasons, grounded in Scripture, to keep hoping anyway.
The first thing to say to Rebecca, and to every reader who has lived in her question, is this: the not-knowing is not a failure of faith. It is the actual situation of many Christians who have buried someone they love. Perhaps most. Pastors who have walked with grieving families for thirty years will tell you that the grief which comes labeled "my mother was a saint, I'll see her again" is rarer than the grief which comes labeled "I don't know what he believed, and I am dying inside trying to figure it out."1
The temptation in Christian community is to push the not-knowing griever toward one of two confident answers. Some friends will tell her, with gentle smiles, that her father was surely saved — he was a good man, he came to church when she was little, God knows the heart. Other friends will say, more grimly, that anyone who walked away from the faith and never came back is in hell. Both answers feel certain. Both spare the speaker the discomfort of sitting in mystery. Neither is honest.
Rebecca does not need a confident answer. She needs a place to stand while she does not have one. The Bible offers her a place to stand. It is not a guess. It is not a hope thrown into the dark. It is a structure built of what God has actually said about Himself, what He has actually said about the limits of human knowledge, and what He has actually said about the reach of His love. The rest of this chapter walks you onto that ground.
The Bible is unflinching about the limits of human knowledge of another person's heart. When the prophet Samuel was sent to anoint a king from the sons of Jesse, he looked at the oldest son, tall and handsome, and assumed this was the Lord's chosen. The Lord corrected him.
"But the LORD said to Samuel, 'Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart'" (1 Samuel 16:7, ESV).2
This is not a verse about kingship. It is a verse about the ceiling on what people can perceive about other people. We see externals. We see church attendance, or its absence. We see the words a man speaks and the words he refuses to speak. We see the Bible on the shelf or off the shelf. The depths of his actual standing before God — what he believed in his heart at thirty-eight when nobody was watching, what he prayed when the cancer scan came back, what passed between his soul and his Maker in the last conscious moment of his life — those things are sealed against us.
Even within marriage, this ceiling holds. A wife of fifty years may not know what her husband finally believed. Even within parenting. Even within siblings who shared a bedroom for two decades. This is not a flaw in our perception. It is the actual reach of being human. Only God reads the heart (Jeremiah 17:10).3
Hear what this means pastorally. If you do not know where your father stood with God, you are not a poor daughter. You are not less observant than the woman in the next pew who claims certainty about her father. You are honest. The not-knowing is the human condition when the loved one is gone. Sit with it. It is sacred ground.
If we cannot read the human heart, what can we know? Three things, all of them grounded deep in Scripture, all of them about God Himself.
"Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:8). Love is not just something God does. It is the deepest thing about who God is.4 When the Bible says God is love, it means that the One who decides the fate of your father is not a cold judge weighing a transcript. He is a loving Father who has been pursuing your father longer than you have been alive.
When Abraham heard that judgment was coming on Sodom, he said something extraordinary to God. "Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked. … Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (Genesis 18:25). Abraham believed two things at once. God is the Judge. And the Judge will do right. Whatever happens to your father at the bar of God will be just. Not flippant. Not mechanical. Just. And the standard of justice is set by the One who is love.
Two passages, side by side. "The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). And: God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4).5
Read those two verses again. Whatever you have been told, hear them. God's desire in the case of your father was your father's salvation. The God who decides your father's eternity is not neutral about it. He is not against your father. He is for him. He has been for him since before he was born.
And do not forget the parable Jesus told about the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). The father in that story does not wait politely for the son to come back. He is watching the road. He sees him "while he was still a long way off," and runs. Whatever your father did or did not do in his last decades, this is the Father he was running from, or wandering toward, or not knowing about. This is the God who held him at the moment of death.
What we can know with confidence: God is love (1 John 4:8). God is just (Genesis 18:25). God desires that none should perish (2 Peter 3:9; 1 Timothy 2:4). The God who holds your loved one's eternity is the same God who runs down the road to meet prodigals.
Chapter 13 of this book treats in fuller depth a teaching held by significant voices across Christian history: that God's pursuit of the lost may not stop at the moment of biological death. This is sometimes called postmortem opportunity. Briefly here: the doctrine is grounded in passages such as 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 (Christ preaching to the spirits) and Romans 14:9 (Christ Lord of the dead and the living), and it claims that the love that pursued your loved one all his life did not stop pursuing him when his heart stopped beating.6
Postmortem opportunity is not universalism. It does not claim everyone is saved. It does not claim the gospel is unimportant. It does not claim earthly mission can be postponed.7 What it does claim is that the God of perfect love and perfect justice does not slam a door shut on a soul because the body lost its pulse. It claims, modestly, that the pursuit continues — at the dying, in the intermediate state, perhaps until the final judgment — until the soul finally and irrevocably refuses Christ.
Held in this way, postmortem opportunity does not erase the not-knowing. It widens the circle of warranted hope inside the not-knowing. If your father lived a quiet life with quiet doubts, if he never spoke against Christ but never publicly knelt before Him, if he was the kind of decent, conflicted man whose internal weather no one ever fully saw — then the same Christ who pursued him through your mother's prayers, through the hymn in his ear when he was twelve, through the deathbed kindness of a hospice nurse, has not finished His work. The widow Augustine's mother was. The thief on the cross was. The waiting room of grace may be larger than we have imagined.
If you cannot embrace this view, that is fair. It is not the only Christian way to read the texts. But for many bereaved Christians, this teaching has been the difference between despair and a hope they can carry. Read Beilby. Read Jonathan. Read Walls and Pinnock. Decide before God.8
Even setting postmortem opportunity aside, Scripture itself testifies that earthly faith is often more hidden than the church recognizes. Many believers never speak their faith aloud. Some are pulled away in their twenties and return in their seventies in ways no one sees. The thief on the cross, hours before death, had not "lived a Christian life." He believed in his last hour. Jesus said, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43).9
When the prophet Elijah collapsed under the broom tree and complained that he was the only believer left in Israel, God answered him: "Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him" (1 Kings 19:18). Elijah did not know they existed. Seven thousand of them. Hidden faith, hidden from prophets, never hidden from God.
The growing body of research on near-death experiences offers something pastorally striking here as well. Researchers have found cases in which people who in their earthly lives did not speak of Christ — Christians who had drifted, doubters, unchurched men and women — encountered Jesus during a near-death state and emerged radically changed.10 This is not the same as postmortem opportunity, since these experiencers came back to bodily life. But it raises a quieter possibility: that the meeting between the human soul and the risen Christ may sometimes be a more private affair than the church on Sunday morning sees, and that some who did not appear to know Christ in life may, in the moments at the threshold, have known Him better than anyone watching could have guessed.
A Note on Discernment. This chapter is not asking you to invent a deathbed conversion. Do not tell yourself a story you did not witness. Do not soothe yourself with fiction. The hope offered here is not certainty about your loved one's eternity; it is the wider mercy of the God who is love, who alone knows, and who alone judges rightly. Hope is not the same as pretending to know.
Three practices can help you carry this question without being crushed by it.
First, pray for your loved one. The question of whether prayers for the dead are biblical is debated among faithful Christians, and you should engage that debate humbly.11 Some traditions affirm such prayer; others discourage it. What can be said gently is this: nowhere does Scripture condemn the bereaved for bringing their loved one before God. If you find yourself in tears at midnight whispering your father's name and asking the Lord to be merciful to him, you have not sinned. You have grieved like a child of God. Whether such prayer changes anything in his case is in the Lord's hands. Whether it changes you — softens you, opens you, holds you — is unmistakable.
Second, trust God's love and justice. This is not a fallback. This is the entire ground. The God who handles your father's case is not less merciful than you are. He is not less just than you are. He has access to information you do not have — every prayer your father ever prayed, every flicker of repentance in the silence of a Tuesday afternoon. Trust Him with what you cannot see.
Third, refuse both presumption and despair. Presumption says, "Of course he's saved; he was a good man." Despair says, "He never said the words; he is lost." Both close a door God has not closed. The faithful posture is open-handed hope: Lord, I do not know. You do. Have mercy.
So when Rebecca asks her pastor where her father is, the pastor does not lie. He does not say, "He's surely in heaven." He does not say, "We have to trust God" in the dismissive tone that means stop asking. He leans forward.
"Rebecca, I do not know. That is the honest answer. But I will tell you what I do know. The God who loves your father far more than you do has been pursuing him every day of his life. He pursued him in your prayers. He pursued him through the kindness of your mother. He pursued him at the moment of death, in a way none of us saw. And the Christ who welcomed a thief in his last hour is fully able to welcome a quiet man who never made a public profession. You may grieve and hope at the same time. You may not know and still rest. The Judge of all the earth will do right. Trust Him with your father. Walk."
This is what hope sounds like when honest people speak it. It is enough to live on. It is enough to sleep on at three in the morning.
Sit with these questions. There are no right answers. Let them open you, not test you.
1. Who in your life is the loved one whose spiritual state you do not know? What is the specific shape of the not-knowing — silence, drift, a complicated last decade?
2. Which of the two errors are you more tempted toward — confident salvation (presumption) or confident damnation (despair)? What might it look like to step into open-handed hope instead?
3. Which of the three things we can know about God — His love, His justice, His desire that none should perish — do you most need to hold onto right now?
4. Have you been carrying any sentence spoken by another Christian about your loved one's eternity that you suspect was spoken without warrant? What would it cost you to set that sentence down?
5. If you could pray one honest sentence for your loved one tonight, what would it be?
6. What has the not-knowing taught you about the limits of your own knowledge — and the goodness of a God who knows what you cannot?
7. What is one specific way you can refuse both presumption and despair this week?
The not-knowing griever is one of the most theologically isolated people in your congregation, and you may not realize it. She does not bring her question to the women's Bible study because she does not want to hear someone else's confident answer. She does not bring it to her small group because she has tried that and been wounded. She brings it to the funeral, and to her pillow, and sometimes — if you have earned the trust — to your office door. Notice her. She rarely announces herself.
Two pastoral observations. First, when a bereaved person asks "Are they okay?" about a loved one whose faith was unclear, what they usually mean is something more layered than the question sounds: Did I do enough? Could I have done more? Will I see them again? Is the God I serve the kind of God who would condemn my father? Hear the underlayer. Second, this not-knowing, if it is met only with platitudes or only with grim certainty, can entrench into long-term spiritual dryness or even quiet apostasy. The bereaved who feels lectured about her dead father is on a path away from the church. Walk gently.
What to say. "I don't know with certainty where your loved one is. I do know that the God who loves him has been pursuing him longer than any of us has been alive, and is pursuing him still, in ways we cannot see." Or: "You don't have to choose between honesty and hope. You can hold both." Or simply: "Tell me about him."
What NOT to say. Avoid "I'm sure he's in a better place" — it can feel like cheap comfort, and the bereaved often hears it as evasion of the very question that is killing her. Avoid "We just have to trust God," especially when said in a tone that means stop asking; trust is the answer, but not as a way to shut the conversation down. And do not say "Well, he never made a profession of faith, so…" — even if you believe in moment-of-death cutoff, you do not know what passed between his soul and his Maker. Speak of God's love and pursuit, not of your guesses about another's eternity.
Watch-outs. First, beware of well-meaning lay theologians in your congregation who will tell the bereaved confident things about her father that you would never say. Be willing to gently undo damage they have done. Second, watch for the bereaved who has begun to doubt the church itself because of careless words spoken at the funeral; this is a pastoral emergency, not a discipleship problem.
Next steps. If the bereaved is theologically curious, walk with her into a serious treatment. James Beilby's Postmortem Opportunity is rigorous and accessible. Stephen Jonathan's Grace Beyond the Grave is shorter and warmer. Jerry Walls offers another thoughtful angle. Read alongside her — do not assign her homework. And keep coming back. The not-knowing griever needs a pastor who will not flinch when the question comes up again at month six, month twelve, month twenty-four. It will come up again. Be there.
James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Possibility of Salvation After Death — the most rigorous evangelical defense of the doctrine, exegetically careful and pastorally aware.
Stephen Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave — a warmer, shorter pastoral treatment of the same hope, well-suited to the bereaved reader who is not a scholar.
Jerry Walls, Does God Love Everyone? The Heart of What's Wrong with Calvinism — a philosophical case for a wide-mercy reading of God's love that is relevant to not-knowing grief.
Clark Pinnock, A Wideness in God's Mercy — an older but still valuable evangelical argument for hope in cases of unclear or absent earthly faith.
Nancy Guthrie, Holding On to Hope — for the heart, not the head; reread when the not-knowing is at its loudest.
1 Pastoral observation drawn from the literature of grief ministry. See Jerry Sittser, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss, 20th anniversary ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021), chap. 4. Sittser writes pastorally about the layered loss that includes loss of certainty about the deceased. ↩
2 All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted. The Hebrew of 1 Samuel 16:7 contrasts ʿênayim (עֵינַיִם, "eyes") with lēbāb (לֵבָב, "heart"); the contrast is not optical but epistemic — what is accessible to human perception versus what is reserved to God. ↩
3 "I the LORD search the heart and test the mind" (Jer. 17:10). On the biblical doctrine of God's exclusive knowledge of the human heart, see Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), chap. 4, "The Soul." ↩
4 On the predication "God is love" as a statement about the divine nature rather than a divine activity merely, see John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), chap. 8. ↩
5 The Greek of 1 Timothy 2:4, thelei (θέλει, "desires/wills"), with pantas anthrōpous (πάντας ἀνθρώπους, "all people"), has long been recognized as a key text in discussions of the scope of God's saving will. See Clark H. Pinnock, A Wideness in God's Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), chap. 1. ↩
6 The fullest evangelical treatment is James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Possibility of Salvation After Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021). For the exegetical treatment of 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 and Romans 14:9, see chaps. 5–6. ↩
7 Beilby is explicit on this point. Postmortem opportunity does not entail universal salvation, and it does not undermine the urgency of present mission. See Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, chap. 9. Cf. also Stephen Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife? (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014), chap. 7. ↩
8 Jerry L. Walls, Does God Love Everyone? The Heart of What's Wrong with Calvinism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016); Pinnock, A Wideness in God's Mercy. The doctrine has historic warrant in patristic figures including Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa, though they apply it with varying scope. See Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, chap. 3, on the historical witness. ↩
9 The fullest treatment of Luke 23:42–43 in this volume is in Chapter 2; see also John Burke, Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2015), chap. 2, "Cynthia's Heaven Encounter," for pastoral reflection on the welcome of the unlikely. ↩
10 The most extensive Christian-engagement treatment of the data is J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2022), chap. 6, "The Surprising Presence of Jesus." Miller documents cases in which non-believers, drifters, and the unchurched encountered a figure they identified as Jesus during a near-death state. The pastoral implication is modest but real: the meeting between the soul and the risen Christ may be more private than the visible church can perceive. ↩
11 The historic Christian practice of prayer for the dead is debated. The Reformation tradition has generally been wary of any practice that might suggest purgatorial intercession; Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions have retained it in differentiated forms. For an irenic engagement, see Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, chap. 10, and Walls, Does God Love Everyone?, chap. 5. The pastoral counsel offered here is modest: nowhere does Scripture forbid the bereaved from bringing their loved one before God in lament and petition, and such prayer is distinct from the divinatory consultation of the dead prohibited in Deut. 18:10–12 (treated more fully in Chapter 25). ↩
12 Genesis 18:25 — Abraham's question, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" — is one of the great anchor verses for grief that does not know. Its rhetorical force is that the answer must be yes; God's justice is the bedrock under all uncertainty. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 9, on divine justice and the intermediate state. ↩
13 1 Kings 19:18. The "seven thousand" Elijah did not know existed remain a touchstone for pastoral reflection on hidden faith. For broader theological reflection on hiddenness in Israel and the church, see N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), chap. 3 — though this volume disputes Wright's minimizing of the conscious intermediate state (cf. Chapter 2 of the present volume). ↩
14 On the prodigal parable and the divine "running" toward the lost, see Tim Keller, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (New York: Dutton, 2008). Keller's central insight — that the parable is more about the Father's pursuit than the son's wandering — is directly applicable to the not-knowing grief addressed in this chapter. ↩
15 The pastoral observation that the bereaved often hear "in a better place" as evasion is well documented in grief literature. See George A. Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss (New York: Basic Books, 2009), chap. 6, on the pastoral and social dynamics of inadequate consolation. ↩
16 Nancy Guthrie, Holding On to Hope: A Pathway Through Suffering to the Heart of God (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2002), chap. 5. Guthrie's pastoral instinct that "hope is not certainty about outcomes; it is certainty about God's character" is the operating premise of this chapter. ↩
17 On the pastoral danger of leaving the not-knowing griever theologically isolated, see Sittser, A Grace Disguised, chap. 8, and the broader pastoral counsel in Tim Keller, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering (New York: Dutton, 2013), Part Three. ↩
18 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 9, on the conscious intermediate state and divine encounter at death; cf. Chapter 2 of the present volume. The point relevant here is that whatever happens to the human person at death includes a meeting with God, even where the moment was unobserved. ↩
Beilby, James. Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Possibility of Salvation After Death. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021.
Bonanno, George A. The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2015.
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.
Farris, Joshua R. An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020.
Guthrie, Nancy. Holding On to Hope: A Pathway Through Suffering to the Heart of God. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2002.
Jonathan, Stephen. Grace Beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife? Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014.
Keller, Timothy. The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith. New York: Dutton, 2008.
Keller, Timothy. Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering. New York: Dutton, 2013.
Miller, J. Steve. Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2022.
Pinnock, Clark H. A Wideness in God's Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992.
Sittser, Jerry. A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss. 20th anniversary ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021.
Walls, Jerry L. Does God Love Everyone? The Heart of What's Wrong with Calvinism. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016.
Wright, N. T. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. New York: HarperOne, 2008.