•fl We may tell the story of the Christian's burial no longer in that brief hollow phrase which to the ancients seemed the tenderest allusion that could be made to the deceased, "Nou est," he is not; but in words like those of Bunyan's, so fragrant of heart's-ease and immortelle, — " The pilgrim they laid in a chamber whose window opened towards the sunrising; the name of that chamber was Peace, where he slept till the break of day." ^
^ Notice with what a profound meaning the Apostle, in this very verse, uses the bare, naked word " died " in reference to
^ A. J. Gordon, In Christ, 189.
I THESSALONIANS iv. 13, 14 13
Christ, and the softened one " sleep " in reference to us. " If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep." Ah ! yes ! He died indeed, bearing all that terror with which men's consciences have invested death. He died indeed, bearing on Himself the sins of the world. He died that no man henceforward need ever die in that same fashion. His death makes our death sleep, and His Eesurrection makes our sleep calmly certain of a waking. It is profoundly significant that throughout the whole of the New Testament the plain, naked word " death " is usually applied, not to the physical fact which we ordinarily designate by the name, but to the grim thing of which that physical fact is only the emblem and the parable, viz. the true death which lies in the separation of the soul from God ; whilst predominately the New Testament usage calls the physical fact by some other gentler form of expression.^
V.
The Great Consummation.
1. The one great assurance of the New Testament in regard to the eternal world — an assurance that ought to be satisfactory and sufficient — is that those who have gone before are with God. Let that cheer us. Let us restrain our wondering and curiosity, or be willing that they should not be satisfied, so long as we know with certainty that every soul passing out of this mortal life into the immortal is with the great, true, loving, unforgetting Father. Such souls are in the hands of a mercy that never fails, in the hands of a power that can provide for all the wants of that unknown life. Is there not, in this teaching which St. Paul sent back by Timothy to the Thessalonians, a kind of answer to one of the deepest questions which we ask ? We have here the assurance that there shall be no separation of those who have passed before from those who are left behind. God will gather together all souls, and they shall be together through all eternity.
^ Is it not true that the fact that our beloved are with the Lord is assuredly meant to develop a new gravitation of the soul towards " that world " ? On earth if a dear friend leaves us for the other hemisphere, for a place perhaps of which we
^ Alexander Maclaren.
14 ASLEEP IN JESUS
never heard before, there rises for us a new interest there, a new attraction. We busy ourselves to find out all we can about the locality and the life, and we supplement information with imagination for very love. " Where the treasure is, there is the heart also." We live where our affections are. Even so, will not thought and aspiration be even unconsciously magnetized towards the Home which now holds our holy ones ? Shall we not through them be drawn anew towards the Lord with whom they now converse face to face.^
2. There are inevitably some perplexities which result from the finiteness of our nature, and the impossibility of comprehend- ing the infinite. We have looked in imagination into the other world, and seen it thronged and crowded with the millions in all the ages sweeping into it, and we have said, " How shall we find the few scattered souls that we have known on earth ? " The doubt comes of finiteness. Those few souls are for us essentially the souls of the everlasting life. Next to the Saviour and the Father and the Holy Spirit, the souls through whose ministry our soul has been helped are to us the dwellers in the heavenly world. We shall go to them there as each soul goes to its own degree and place in the life of the New Jerusalem. We come back to the truthfulness of our first impulse, and know that we are to be not only for ever with the Lord, but for ever with all those we love. The question, " Shall we know each other there ? " presses upon the souls of believers in all ages. The Thessalonians longed, as we long, for the everlasting company of those near and dear. And St. Paul's assurance was that God would bring them who had gone before, and fasten their lives to the lives of those whom Christ should find here at His coming. They who had gone before should come, with all the life opened to them in their immortality, and there should be no separation. We cannot think of ourselves apart from those whom we most intimately love. But that which has laid hold on the spirit is part of the spirit. We know it by the way in which we live continually a part of the life of those who have passed to the eternal world. We are not separated from them now. We live in memory of what we know they once were, and in thought of what they are now in the eternal world. We shall not merely