ncregister.com
2026-03-14
Francis Bergsma, a 17-year-old boy whose father, John Bergsma, is a widely known professor of biblical theology at Franciscan University in Steubenville, died Feb. 28 following a nearly two-year battle with brain cancer, leaving both his family and friends stricken with grief and incomprehension. Why must someone so young and so dear to so many be made to suffer for so long? Where is the justice in that?
There isn't any. At least not by any human reckoning. But because we live in a fallen world, a world infected by sin and disease, such things, while certainly shocking and deeply dislocating, ought not to come as a surprise. The serpent has long since insinuated its poison into the fruit. Death remains the most banal and predictable of all happenings that will, ineluctably, carry us all off in the end. You can take that to the mortuary. No one gets out alive.
At the same time, however, it remains the most painfully bewildering of all mysteries, an intolerable affront to our dignity as children of a God who neither made death nor delights in the death of the living. It was owing instead to the envy and malice of the devil that death entered the world, thus forcing us to endure that which God never intended from the beginning.