^ If we quit the living Christ, we quit all hold of the higher life. " If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." Heaven becomes a dumb picture ; and death • — euphemize it as we may — merely blank annihilation. We may say of our dear ones, as we lay them in the dust, that they have fallen asleep ; but the gentle words have no true meaning. The sleep is without an awakening. The higher and hopeful side of the image is cut away. The night becomes a perpetual slumber, on which no morning shall ever arise. It is only in the light of the resurrection of Christ that the phrase represents a reality, and the idea of death is transfigured into a nobler life. Let us believe that behind the veil of physical change tliere is a spiritual Power from which we have come — one who is the Kesurrection and the Life — in whom, if we believe, we shall never die, — and we
I THESSALONIANS iv. 13, 14 11
may wait our change, not only with resignation, but with hope, and carry our personal affections and aspirations forward to another and a better state of being, in which they may be satisfied and made perfect.^
^ What do the words " bring with him " signify ? Say, if you will, they are too high for us, we cannot attain to them, — and you speak truly. But do not cast them aside because they are too high for you. The sun which shows you all that is at your feet is always too high for you to ascend to it, too bright for you to gaze upon it. These words may be full of illumination to us, in some of our dreariest and darkest hom's, though they must be fulfilled to us, before the mists which rise from below to obscure them to us can be entirely scattered.^
IV.
The Name for Death,
1. It is to Jesus primarily that the New Testament writers owe their use of sleep as the gracious emblem of death. The word was twice upon our Lord's lips; once when over the twelve-year-old maid, from whom life had barely ebbed away. He said, " She is not dead, but sleepeth " ; and once when in reference to the man Lazarus, from whom life had removed further, He said, " Our friend sleepeth, but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." But Jesus was not the originator of the expression. We find it in the Old Testament, where the prophet Daniel, speaking of the end of the days and the bodily resurrec- tion, designates those who share in it as " them that sleep in the dust of the earth." And the Old Testament was not the sole origin of the phrase. For it is too natural, too much in accord- ance with the visibilities of death, not to have suggested itself to many hearts, and to have been shrined in many languages. Many an inscription of Greek and Eoman date speaks of death under this figure ; but almost always it is with the added, deepened note of despair, that it is a sleep which knows no waking, but lasts through eternal night.
* Priucipal Tulloch, Some Facts of Religion and of Life, 138. ' F. D. Maurice, Christmas Day, 405.
12 ASLEEP IN JESUS
2. The expression in the text " them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus," suggests a very tender and wonderful thought of closeness and union between our Lord and the living dead, so close that He is, as it were, the atmosphere in which they move, or the house in which they dwell. But, tender and wonderful as the thought is, it is not exactly the Apostle's idea here. For, accur- ately rendered, the words run, " them which sleep through Jesus." They " sleep through Him." It is by reason of Christ and His work, and by reason of that alone, that death's darkness is made beautiful, and death's grimness is softened down to this. What we call death is a complex thing — a bodily phenomenon plus conscience, the sense of sin, the certainty of retribution in the dim beyond. The mere physical fact of death is a trifle. Look at it as you see it in the animals ; look at it as you see it in men when they actually come to it. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is painless and easy, and men sink into slumber. Strange, is it not, that so small a reality should have power to cast over human life so immense and obscuring a shadow ! Why is it ? Because, as St. Paul says, " the sting of death is sin," and if you can take the sting out of it then there is very little to fear, and it comes down to be an insignificant and transient element in our experience. Now, the death of Jesus Christ takes away the nimbus of apprehension and dread arising from conscience and sin, and the forecast of retribution. Jesus Christ has abolished death, leaving the mere shell, but taking all the substance out of it. It has become a different thing to men, because in that death of His He has exhausted the bitterness, and has made it possible that we should pass into the shadow, and not fear either conscience or sin or judgment.