Bible verses about grief: 16 passages for when you have lost someone

Jesus wept.

Jesus already knew he would raise Lazarus within minutes, and he wept anyway. Tears are not a lack of faith. They are what love does at a grave.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Jesus calls mourners blessed, not because loss is good, but because they will be comforted. The comfort is promised to people who are still mourning.

Brothers, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who are without hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, we also believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in Him.

Paul does not say do not grieve. He says do not grieve like those without hope. Speaking of death as sleep was a common early Christian way of saying they expected a waking.

The LORD is near to the brokenhearted; He saves the contrite in spirit.

When grief crushes you, the promise is not an explanation but nearness. God comes closest to those who are most broken.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

Many people hear this psalm at funerals. The shepherd is not waiting at the far end of the dark valley; he walks through it with you.

You have taken account of my wanderings. Put my tears in Your bottle— are they not in Your book?

David pictures God keeping every tear, as if in a bottle, and writing each one down. None of your grief goes unseen or uncounted.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

Binding up wounds is careful, close work, the work of someone who stays. The next verse says God numbers the stars and names each one (Psalm 147:4). He is vast and gentle at once.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. Surely He took on our infirmities and carried our sorrows; yet we considered Him stricken by God, struck down and afflicted.

A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Christians have long read this as a portrait of Jesus. He knows sorrow from the inside, and he carries ours.

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Jesus said this to Martha while her brother was still in the tomb, before any miracle. Then he asked her directly: do you believe this?

When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come to pass: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting?”

Paul borrows from Isaiah and Hosea to taunt death itself. Death still stings now, but it does not have the last word.

Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is dismantled, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.

Paul, a tentmaker by trade (Acts 18:3), compares the body to a tent: good, but temporary. What waits is a house built by God.

‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,’ and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”

God himself wipes away the tears. It is a personal, tender picture, and it lists mourning among the things that will one day be gone for good.

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,

A time to mourn sits beside a time to dance. Grief has its season, and Scripture does not give it a deadline.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.

God is called the God of all comfort. One day the comfort you receive may become something you pass on to someone else in their loss.

Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights, but no one spoke a word to him because they saw how intense his suffering was.

The best thing Job's friends ever did was sit with him in silence for a week. Things went wrong when they started explaining his suffering.

Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.

Weep with those who weep. You do not need the right words. Being present and sharing the sorrow is the command.