---
title: 'Geerhardus Vos on Looking Sorrow in the Face'
type: post
author: 'R. Andrew Myers'
date: 2025-12-09
url: https://confessional.org/blog/2025-geerhardus-vos-on-looking-sorrow-in-the-face
---

# Geerhardus Vos on Looking Sorrow in the Face

“Do we not all remember occasions when we stood outside the grave of our hopes weeping, and did not perceive the hand stretched out to prepare us by the very thing we interpreted as sorrow for a higher joy? From Mary’s experience let us learn to do better. What the Lord expects from us at such seasons is not to abandon ourselves to unreasoning sorrow, but trustingly to look sorrow in the face, to scan its features, to search for the help and hope, which, as surely as God is our Father, must be there. In such trials there can be no comfort for us so long as we stand outside weeping. If only we will take the courage to fix our gaze deliberately upon the stern countenance of grief, and enter unafraid into the darkest recesses of our trouble, we shall find the terror gone, because the Lord has been there before us, and, coming out again, has left the place transfigured, making out of it by the grace of his resurrection a house of life, the very gate of heaven.” — [**Geerhardus Vos**](/authors/geerhardus-vos), “Rabboni!” in *Grace and Glory: Sermons Preached in the Chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary* (1922), pp. 94-95