Nov. 18, 1999

v.13 "fall asleep" a euphemism like "pass away"

Mr. Hanson chose our text. But he didn’t say why. I would like to be able to ask him, because it is not the most obvious choice. It is true, the text concerns those who die in the Lord and reminds us not to grieve as the rest of men who have no hope. But, the reason given, is quite different from what most Christians think about at death and what most Christian ministers speak about at death.

When believers die, their Christian love ones comfort themselves, as well they might, with the knowledge that the dead in Christ are with the Lord. Paul teaches us unmistakably and emphatically that they are.

"To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord."

"…to live is Christ and to die is gain" and why is that? Because

the believer who dies "departs to be with Christ which is better by far than life in this world."

And there are many other texts to the same point, all of them summed up in the Lord’s magnificent promise to the penitent thief on the cross next to his as he hung dying for our sins: "Today, you will be with me in Paradise!"

I worked in a Funeral Home for three years while in seminary and I noticed that virtually without exception, without exception so far as I can remember, this was the hope of people regarding their loved ones now dead and gone. "That is not Mom, or Dad, or brother, or sister," they would say, looking over the open casket. "Mom is in heaven with the Lord." "Dad is rejoicing to the see the Lord."

And, without a doubt that is true! Wonderfully true! Insupportably wonderfully true! The life of man finally without sin – to have hearts finally pure and clean before God and man. To behold in some way the glory of God. To be comforted at Abraham’s side in the beautiful image the Lord uses in Luke 16. To be completely and utterly at peace. And to be with God and Christ. These are things magnificent beyond our power to comprehend.

But that is not the hope that Paul gives to the Thessalonians here. You might well have expected him to say something like that. "Don’t grieve for those who have fallen asleep," he might have said, "your loved ones are far happier now than they were and far happier to be with Christ than they were to be with you." That would be legitimate comfort, to be sure. But he doesn’t say that. Quite the contrary.

He speaks about the dead in Christ only in regard to their bodies, which lie in the graves where they have been laid. Paul’s comfort for those left behind in the world is not the present state of the dead in Christ but the assurance that, at the resurrection, those who have already died, will not be left behind.

And frankly, this is usually the Bible’s perspective. For whatever reason, the Bible usually throws our attention forward to the day of resurrection, to the second coming; it does not focus on the presence of the saints who have died with Christ in heaven now.

It is more interested in the consummation of salvation at the resurrection of the body than even these marvelous comforts of what theologians call "the intermediate state", that is, the state of the soul in heaven, while it awaits the resurrection of the body.

I tell you the truth, that day and that time and that condition of life and that fullness of joy and that completeness of humanity must be something unspeakably wonderful if Paul draws the attention of the mourning Thessalonian Christians to it and passes over in silence all that is true of the life of their souls already. The Bible does not regard salvation as complete, not at all complete, when the soul is in heaven without the body. No, God made us to be psycho-physical beings and he saved us to be forever psycho-physical beings. That is what we are. Paul even says in 2 Cor. 5 that there is a kind of groaning that goes on in heaven as souls, unclothed, long to be clothed with their bodies once again.

And that is what awaits every believer, both those who will have died before the return of Christ and those who are in the world when he returns. Meantime the bodies of the saints rest in their graves, awaiting the resurrection.

And that too is our faith in the hour of death, a looking forward to a great day not so far away as anyone thinks. And so we say, not only that Mr. Hanson’s soul is with the Lord, but with Isaac Watts,

God my Redeemer lives

And often from the skies

Looks down and watches all my dust

Till he shall bid it rise.

Or Anne Cousin from Samuel Rutherford.

I shall sleep sound in Jesus,

Fill’d with his likeness rise,

To live and to adore Him,

To see Him with these eyes.

‘Tween me and resurrection

But Paradise doth stand;

Then-then for glory dwelling

In Immanuel’s land.

Or Chesterton:

People, if you have any prayers,

Say prayers for me:

And lay me under a Christian stone

In that lost land I thought my own,

To wait till the holy horn is blown,

And all poor men are free.

Or John Henry Newman:

The Fathers are in the dust, yet live to God,

So says the Truth; as if the motionless clay

Still hold the seeds of life beneath the sod,

Smoldering and struggling till the judgment day.

Sophist may urge his cunning test, and deem

That they are earth; but they are heavenly shrines.

It is even more important in the Bible that we look to that day and expect that day, the full consummation of salvation, than that we console ourselves in the knowledge that the souls of the believing dead are in Paradise as we speak. We don’t know what the life of the soul without a body would be like. We take the Bible’s word for it that it is wonderful in heaven, even for a disembodied soul. But it is nothing to be compared to the fullness of human life that will be given to all who love the Lord Jesus when their bodies rise.

Here is just one scene painted by one preacher long ago to whet our appetite and comfort our souls in the hour of death with the prospect of the coming day. He is speaking, of course, of the dead in Christ.

"The dead are rising!… Magnificent mausoleums are bursting in which lie inurned the ashes of sceptered monarchs; moss-covered sepulchers are cleaving, beneath which molder the remains of priests and high-priests, nobles and princes, legislators and warriors, philosophers, orators, and poets; while the grass-gorwn mounds under which the slave and the peasant repose in death are not disobedient to the heavenly call.

From dim cathedral aisles, from every crowded churchyard, from forest burying grounds, from profoundest ocean depths, the long-forgotten dead are starting into new, immortal being amidst the thrilling realities of the judgment day. The solitary traveler rises from the lonely grave which he found in a land far distant from home; while from the narrow beds in which they slept side by side in the populous cemetery whole families rise together…the mother once more clasps in her arms the babe that had slumbered with her in the same grave, and mingled its dust with hers. [John Girardeau in Kelly, 162]

And among them, rising to life and not to death, The Rev. Mr. James E. Hanson. How absolutely right that we not grieve as the rest of men who have no hope. And how right that you and I should encourage one another with these words.