What Does The Bible Say About Grief?

The Conversation No One Wants to Have

Grief is one of those subjects that most of us would rather avoid. We do not like to think about death — our own or anyone else's. And yet it is one of the few things that is absolutely guaranteed to touch every single human life. So what happens when we actually stop and face it?

In this episode of Crowd Church, Matt Edmundson is joined by Dan Orange to hear Anna Kettle speak honestly and movingly about what the Bible has to say about grief. Anna is not speaking from theory. She has walked through recurrent miscarriage, losing two babies in the space of less than six months. Her perspective is hard-won and deeply personal.

Everyone Grieves

Anna's first point is disarmingly simple: everyone grieves. It sounds obvious, but culturally we are not great at acknowledging it. We do not talk about death much, and when it arrives, we are often unprepared — emotionally and practically.

Anna shares that before her own experience of loss, she "didn't really have the emotional tools or the ability to know how to process grief well." She also found that many people around her did not know how to respond. Some said nothing. Some simply avoided her for a season.

She quotes Ecclesiastes 9:2: "Everyone will die someday. Death comes to godly and sinful people alike." It is not a comfortable verse, but it makes the case for why grief is worth talking about — not just for ourselves, but so we can support the people around us who are already in the thick of it.

When Pain Raises Big Questions

Loss has a way of surfacing the questions we normally keep buried. Who is God? Why did he let this happen? Why me? Why now? How can I believe God loves me when he allows me to feel so much pain?

Anna is refreshingly honest about not having neat answers. "I don't have fully formed answers for all of them," she says. "I wish I did, because there's certainly questions that I've asked in my seasons of grief. But I don't, because I'm not God."

What she does point out is that even Jesus questioned God in the face of death. His last words on the cross, recorded in Matthew 27:46, were: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" If the divine can question the divine in the face of suffering, Anna suggests, it must be acceptable for us to bring our questions too.

Death Was Not the Original Plan

One of the most helpful reframes Anna offers is that death was never part of God's original design for humanity. In Genesis, Adam and Eve were made to live eternally in relationship with God — no pain, no sickness, no grief. It was only when that relationship broke down that death entered the picture.

This matters, Anna argues, because it helps explain why grief feels so wrong, so unnatural. "That's why we struggle to deal with it," she says. We were not built for it. And knowing that goes some way towards answering the questions that grief inevitably raises.

God Does Not Leave Us to Grieve Alone

The Bible repeatedly promises that God draws close to those who are grieving. Anna highlights Psalm 34:18 — "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves all those who are crushed in spirit" — and the beautifully intimate image from Psalm 56:8: "You keep track of all my sorrows. You've collected all my tears in a bottle."

She also points to the shortest verse in the Bible: John 11:35, "Jesus wept." Written about the death of his close friend Lazarus, it is a powerful reminder that in Jesus, we do not have a distant God who merely sympathises from afar. He has been there. He knows what it is to lose someone he loves.

Perhaps the most challenging verse Anna raises is Matthew 5:4: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." She wrestles with this openly. When you are in the middle of grief, it does not feel like a blessing. Her conclusion is that the blessing is not in the grief itself, but in the invitation it presents — "to experience God's comforting presence in a much deeper, fuller, more rich way than perhaps we've ever needed to know before."

Grieving With Hope

Anna is clear that grieving is hard. It takes time. There is no shortcut through the anger, sadness, confusion, and shock. But she argues that as a Christian, it is possible to walk through all of those emotions while also holding on to an underlying sense of hope.

That hope is rooted in the belief that death is not the final word. She quotes 1 Thessalonians 4:13: "We want you to know what will happen to the believers who have died, so you will not grieve like those who have no hope."

This does not mean the sadness disappears. "Of course we'll still miss that person being with us here and now," Anna says. But there is, she believes, an incredible comfort in looking forward and knowing we will see them again.

When Grief Becomes Something New

Anna's final point is perhaps the most striking. Grief, she says, can be transforming — but only if we choose to let it be.

She quotes 2 Corinthians 1:3-4: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God."

It is not just comfort for ourselves. It is comfort that overflows into the lives of others. Anna shares that her own grief led her to help set up a miscarriage network to support other women facing similar loss — something she would never have done before walking through that experience herself.

"We can either get bitter or we can get better in our pain," she says. The difference lies in whether we take our pain to God and allow him to work with it, or whether we let it push us away from him.

A Question Worth Sitting With

In the conversation afterwards, Matt and Dan reflect on how moved they were by Anna's talk. Dan highlights her vulnerability and the way her experience has equipped her to help others. Matt notes the remarkable softness of heart and humility she brings to such a painful subject.

The question Anna leaves us with is this: will we allow God to enter into our pain and our sadness? Will we trust him with all of those breaking pieces of our heart and allow him to create something new from them?

It is not a question with an easy answer. But it is one worth asking — whether grief is something you are facing right now, or something you are carrying from the past, or something that has not yet arrived but inevitably will.