Asleep in Jesus
No scriptural description of death is so suggestive and so consoling as that which is conveyed by the familiar word sleep. It recurs often. Stephen the martyr breathes his sublime prayer, and then uhe fell asleep.” Our Lord said to his disciples, “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep. n Paul, in that transcendently sublime chapter on the resurrection, treats death as but the transient slumber of the body, to be followed by the glorious awakening at the sound of the last trumpet. And then he crowns it with that voice of the divine Spirit, that marvellous utterance which has been said and sobbed and sung in so many a house of bereavement: “I would not have you to be ignorant concerning them which are asleep; for if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.” No three words are inscribed on more tombs or on more hearts than these: c ‘Asleep in Jesus.”
These declarations of God’s Word describe death as simply the temporary suspension of bodily activities. Not a hint is given of a total end, an extinction, or an annihilation. The material body falls asleep, the immortal spirit being meanwhile in full activity; and the time is predicted when the body, called up from the tomb, shall reunite with the deathless spirit, and the man shall live on through eternity. What we call dying is only a momentary process. It is a flitting of the immortal tenant from the frail tent or tabernacle, which is so often racked with pain and waxes old into decay. Paul calls it a departure: uTo depart and be with Christ.” The spiritual tenant shuts up the windows of the earthly house ere he departs; he muffles the knocker at the ear, so that no sound can enter; he extinguishes the fire that glows about the heart, stops the warm currents that flow through the veins, and leaves the deserted house cold, silent, and motionless. We, the survivors, bend over the deserted heart-house; but there is neither voice nor hearing. We kiss the brow, and it is marble. The beloved sleeper is sleeping a sleep that thunders or earthquake cannot disturb. But what is there in this slumber of the body that suggests any fear that the ethereal essence of the spirit has become extinct or even suspended its activities? When the mother lays her darling in its crib, she knows that sleep simply means rest, refreshment, and to-morrow morning’s brighter eye, nimbler foot, and the carol of a lark in her nursery. When you or I drop off into the repose of the night, we understand that the avenues of the five bodily senses are closed for a few hours; but the mind is, meanwhile, as busy as when we wake.
Death means just this: no more and no less. As Maclaren has vigorously said, “Strip the man of the disturbances that come from a fevered body, and he will have a calmer soul. Strip him of the hindrances which come from a body that is like an ojDaque tower around his spirit, with only a narrow crevice here and a narrow door there — five poor senses with which he is connected with the outer universe — and, surely, the spirit will have wider avenues out to God. It will have larger powers of reception, because it has become rid of the closer confinements of the fleshly tabernacle. They who die in Jesus live a larger, fuller, nobler life, by the very cessation of care, change, strife, and struggle. Above all, they live a fuller, grander life, because they ( sleep in yesus ’ and are gathered into his embrace, and wake with him, clothed with white robes, awaiting the adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body.” In God’s good time, the slumbering body shall be resuscitated and shall be fashioned like to Christ’s glorious body — i. e., it shall be transformed into a condition which shall meet the wants of a beatific soul in its celestial dwelling-place. Verily, with this transcendent blaze of revelation pouring into the believer’s death-chamber and his tomb, we ought not to sorrow as they that have no hope.
In this view of death (which is God’s own view) how vivid becomes the apostle’s exclamation, “I am confident and willing rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.”” Who is it that is to be absent? I, Paul — the living Paul — I can be entirely quit from that poor tabernacle of flesh and yet live! My body is no more Paul than the corn-ship was when it went to pieces on the shore of Melita and I escaped safe to land. n Paul was entirely willing that the old scarred and weary body might be put to sleep, so that he might go home and be present with his Lord. Then mortality would be swallowed up of life. Go to sleep, poor, old, hard- worked body, the apostle seems to say, and Jesus will wake thee up in good time, and thou shalt be made like to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he subdues all things unto himself.
Let us not be charged with pushing this Scripture simile too far when we hint that it illustrates the different feelings with which different persons regard the act of dying. When
we are sleepy, we covet the pillow and the couch.
When work is to be done, when the duties of the day are pressing on us, then we are not only broad awake, but the more awake the better. Sleep then is repulsive. Even so do we see aged servants of God, who have finished up their life-work, and many a suffering invalid racked with incurable pains, who honestly long to die. They are sleepy for the rest of the grave and the home beyond it. Yet desire for death is not natural to the young, the vigorous, or especially to the servants of God who are most intent upon their high calling. These recoil from death, however saintly or spiritual they may be, or however strong be their convictions that heaven is infinitely better than this world. It is not merely the natural shrinking from death (which the man Christ Jesus felt in common with us), but the supreme idea of serving their God to the utmost possible limit. For Christ here with Christ yonder, is the highest instinct of the Christian heart. The noble missionary, Judson, phrased it happily when he said, ( ( I am not tired of my workj neither am I tired of the world; yetj when
Christ calls me home, I shall go with the gladness of a boy bounding away from school.” He wanted to toil for souls until he grew sleepy, and then he wanted to lay his body down to rest and to escape into glory.
A” dying-bed is only the spot where the material frame falls asleep. Then we take up the slumbering form and gently bear it to its narrow bed in mother earth. Our very word u cemetery n describes this thought. It is derived from the Greek word Koifipiov (koimeterion), which signifies a sleeping-place. Greenwood is really a vast dormitory in which tens of thousands are laid to their last repose — some in their gorgeous environments of rosewood and marble, and others in the poor little trundle-beds of the paupers’ plot. It is a mingled and promiscuous sleeping-place; but the Master “knoweth them that are his.” They who sleep in him shall awake to be for ever with their Lord.
On this tremendous question of the resurrection of our loved ones and our reunion with them, our yearning hearts are satisfied with nothing less than certainty. Poetic fancies are gossamer: analogies from the sprouting of seeds and bulbs, probabilities, intuitions, and all philosophiings are too shadowy to rear a solid faith on. We demand absolute certainty, and there are just two truths that can give it. The first one is the actual fact of Christ’s own resurrection from the death-slumber; the second is his omnipotent assurance that all they who sleep in him shall be raised up and be where he is for evermore. Those early Christians were wise in their generation when they carved on the tomb of the martyrs u In yesu Christo obdormivity — In Jesus Christ he fell asleep.
“Oh! precious tale of triumph this!
And martyr-blood shed to achieve it,
Of suffering past — of present bliss.
‘In Jesu Christo obdormiviV
“Of cherished dead be mine the trust,
Thrice-blessed solace to believe it,
That I can utter o’er their dust,
‘In Jesu Christo obdormivit’