Falling Asleep

Falling Asleep

Excerpted from “Fallen Asleep”

Sermon #2659

Intended for reading on Lord’s Day, January 28, 1900 (C. H. Spurgeon Memorial Sabbath)

Delivered by Spurgeon on Lord’s Day evening, January 29, 1882, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

When someone we love dies or when we look ahead to our final breath, it feels like death is the crushing blow. But for the believer, death no longer has the final say. For all who are in Christ, death is just the moment before we truly wake up.

I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 1 Corinthians 15:3-6

Spurgeon • Witnesses of Christ’s resurrection died as other men did. They had no immunity from death and no extreme old age was granted to them, for the apostle [Paul] said, “Some have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:6).

From this fact, I gather that earthly lives, which appear to us to be extremely necessary, may not be so regarded by God. The Lord sometimes takes away from us those whom we can least spare. This should teach us—if we are wise enough to learn the lesson—to regard the most invaluable person in our own Israel as being only lent to us by the Lord, for a season, and liable to be summoned to higher service at any moment.

I never expect now to come to this place, on two succeeding Sundays, without hearing that some one or other of our friends has departed. Almost every day this truth is impressed upon me: “Some have fallen asleep.”

In the heathen part of the catacombs of Rome, the inscriptions over the place where their dead were buried are full of grief and despair. Indeed, the writers of those inscriptions do not appear to have been able to find words in which they could express their great distress, their agony of heart, at the loss of child or husband or friend. They pile the mournful words together, trying to describe their grief. Sometimes they declare that the light has gone from their sky now that their dear ones are taken from them.

“Alas! Alas!” says the record. “Dear Caius has gone, and with him all joy is quenched forever, for I shall see him no more.” Paganism is hopeless to comfort the bereaved. But when you come into that part of the catacombs which was devoted to Christian burial vaults, everything is different. There you may constantly read these consoling words: “He sleeps in peace.” There is nothing dreadful or despairing in the inscriptions there; they are submissive, they are cheerful, they are even thankful. Frequently they are victorious, and the most common emblem is not the quenched torch, as it is on the heathen side, where the light is supposed to have gone out forever, but the palm branch, to signify that the victory remains eternally with the departed one. It is the glory of the Christian religion to have let light into the grave, to have taken away the sting from death, and in fact, to have made it no more death to die.

The saints in Heaven have a better rest than sleep can give, but sleep is the nearest word we can find to describe the state of the blessed. They have no poverty, no toil, no anguish of spirit, no remorse, no struggling with indwelling sin, no battling with foes without and fears within. “They may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!” (Revelation 14:13).

Oh, what a sweet thing to fall asleep—to enjoy perfect calmness and to be beyond the reach of all influences which make life here to be so sorrowful!

Do not regard your departure out of the world as a thing to be surrounded with horror. Do not conjure up hobgoblins, evil spirits, darkness, and terror. “The valley of the shadow of death,” of which David spoke, I do not think was ever meant to be applied to dying. For it is a valley that he walks through, and he comes out again at the other side. It is not the valley of death, but only of the shadow of death.

I have walked through that valley many times—right through from one end of it to the other—and yet I have not died. The grim shadow of something worse than death has fallen over my spirit, but God has been with me, as he was with David, and his rod and his staff have comforted me. Many here can say the same.

I believe that, often, those who feel great gloom in going through “the valley of the shadow of death” feel no gloom at all when they come to the valley of death itself. There has generally been brightness there for the most sorrowful spirits. And those who, before coming there, have groveled in the dust, have been empowered to mount as on eagles’ wings when they have actually come to the place of their departure into the future state.

Alcorn • The Bible confirms what Spurgeon says—that unbelievers are right to dread death and believers are right to joyfully anticipate where death will bring them. “The dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7, NIV). At death, the human spirit goes either to Heaven or to Hell. There is no third alternative.

Christ depicted Lazarus and the rich man as conscious in Heaven and in Hell, respectively, immediately after they died (Luke 16:22-31). Jesus told the dying thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43, NIV). The apostle Paul says that to die is to be with Christ (Philippians 1:23) and to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8).

These passages make clear that there is no “soul sleep,” a long period of unconsciousness between life on Earth and life in Heaven. Though Spurgeon uses the phrase “fallen asleep,” which is found in 1 Corinthians 15:6 and other passages, sleep is a euphemism for death and describes the body’s outward peaceful appearance. The physical part of us “sleeps” until the Resurrection, while the spiritual part of us immediately relocates to a conscious existence in Heaven (Daniel 12:2-3; 2 Corinthians 5:8).

The book of Revelation describes human beings talking and worshiping in Heaven prior to the resurrection of the dead (Revelation 4:10-11; 5:8; 7:9-11). These examples demonstrate that our spiritual beings are conscious, not sleeping, after death. (Nearly everyone who believes in soul sleep argues that souls are disembodied at death. But it’s not clear how disembodied beings could sleep, because sleeping involves a physical body.)

I’ve read at memorial services the following depiction of a believer’s death. It captures the sense of tranquility Spurgeon sees in the biblical view of death as a sort of sleep:

I’m standing on the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She’s an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and the sky come down to mingle with each other. And then I hear someone at my side saying, “There, she’s gone.”

Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side. And just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “There, she’s gone,” there are other eyes watching her coming, and there are other voices ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”

And that is dying.^a

^a Variously attributed to Henry Scott Holland and Henry Van Dyke; source uncertain.