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Music For the Soul
Devotional: April 10th

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REST AND CONSCIOUSNESS

As for me, I shall behold Thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness. - Psalms 17:15

The "sleeper in Christ" is not unconscious. He is parted from the outer world; he is unaware of externals. When Stephen knelt below the old wall, and was surrounded by howling fanatics that slew him, one moment he was gashed with stones and tortured, and the next " he fell on sleep." They might howl, and the stones fly as they would, and he was all unaware of it. Like Jonah sleeping in the hold, what mattered the howling of the storm to him? But separation from externals does not mean suspense of life or of consciousness; and the slumberer often dreams, and is aware of himself persistently throughout his slumber. Nay! some of his faculties are set at liberty to work more energetically because his connection with the outer world is for the time suspended.

Scripture, as it seems to me, distinctly carries this limitation of the emblem. For what does it mean when the Apostle says, "to depart . . . to be with Christ is far better "? Surely he that thus spoke conceived that these two things were contemporaneous, " the departing and the being with Him." And surely he who thus spoke could not have conceived that a millennium-long parenthesis of slumberous unconsciousness was to intervene between the moment of his decease and the moment of his fellowship with Jesus. How could a man prefer that dormant state to the state here, of working for and living with the Lord? Surely, being with Him must mean that we know where we are and who is our companion.

And what does that text mean, " Ye are come unto the spirits of just men made perfect,"’ unless it means that of these two classes of persons who are thus regarded as brought into living fellowship, each is aware of the other? Does perfecting of the spirit mean the smiting of the spirit into unconsciousness? Surely not, and surely in the face of such words as these we must recognize the fact that, however limited and imperfect may be the present connection with the disembodied dead, who sleep in Christ, with external things - they know themselves, they know their home and their companions, and they know the blessedness in which they are lapped.

We have also the idea of awaking. The pagans said, as indeed one of their poets has it, "Suns can sink and return, but for us, when our brief light sinks, there is but one perpetual night of slumber." The Christian idea of death is that it is transitory as a sleep in the morning, and sure to end. As St. Augustine says somewhere, "Wherefore are they called sleepers but because in the day of the Lord they will be re-awakened."

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