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Music For the Soul
Devotional: April 12th

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THE SLEEP OF DEATH

Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep. - John 11:11

It is to Jesus primarily that the New Testament writers owe their use of this gracious emblem of sleep. For, as you remember, 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 regard of the man Lazarus, from whom life had removed further, he said, " Our friend sleepeth, but I go that I may awake him out of his sleep." But Jesus was not the originator of the expression. You find it in the Old Testament, where the prophet Daniel, speaking of the end of the days and the bodily resurrection, 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 accordance with the visibilities of death, not to have suggested itself to many hearts and been shrined in many tongues. Many an inscription of Greek and Roman date speaks sadly 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.

Now, the Christian thought associated with this emblem is the precise opposite of the pagan one. The pagan heart shrank from the ugly thing because it was so ugly. So dark and deep a dread coiled round the man as he contemplated it that he sought to drape the grimness in some kind of thin transparent veil, and to put the buffer of a word between him and its ugliness. But the Christian’s motive for the use of the word is the precise opposite. He uses the gentler expression because the thing has become gentler.

You find one class of representations in the New Testament which speak of death as being a departing and a being with Christ; or which call it, as one of the Apostles does, an "exodus," where it is softened down to be merely a change of environment, a change of locality. Then another class of representations speak of it as "putting off this my tabernacle," or, the dissolution of the " earthly house" - where there is a broad, firm line of demarcation drawn between the inhabitant and the habitation, and the thing is softened down to be a mere change of dwelling. Again, another class of expressions speak of it as being an "offering," where the main idea is that of a voluntary surrender, a sacrifice or libation of myself, and my life poured out upon the altar of God.

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