Acts 7:60 And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep. Asleep amid a storm! "He felt asleep" — not, he died, or he breathed his last, but he fell asleep. "Death is but a sleep; we need no more shrink from dying than from our nightly beds; we may lie down to die with just as sure a hope of rising; we may look forward to it as the release from all the cares, all the work of life." Moses of old had been warned of the time when he should "sleep with his fathers" (Deuteronomy 31:16). The wise man talks of Samuel's "long sleep" (Ecclesiastes 46:19). David, we read, "fell on sleep" (Acts 12:36). Monarch after monarch is laid in his tomb, by the sacred writer, with the short epitaph, that he "slept with his fathers." Daniel prophesies of the time, when "those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake" (Daniel 12:2). Amid the convulsions by which Nature testified her horror at the dread hour of the Passion, "the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose" (Matthew 27:52). So St. Paul (1 Corinthians 15:18, 20; 1 Thessalonians 4:13, 14). Such a faith speaks still upon the walls of the ancient cemeteries in the catacombs of Rome, where to this day the simple inscriptions are preserved, by which faith and affection marked the remains of their lost, in the first and second centuries after Christ. On one we read two words, "Victoria sleeps" — or, "Saturninus sleeps in peace." — "Zoticus is laid here to sleep." — "Domitian, artless soul, sleeps in peace." — "Antonia, sweet soul, in peace. May God refresh her." — "Arethusa sleeps in God." — "He sleeps, but lives." — Laurinia, sweeter than honey, rests in peace." — "On the 5th of November was placed here to sleep, Gregory, friend of all, the enemy of none." — Or, with a studied conciseness, "Clementia, tortured, dead, sleeps; will rise again." Faith loved to dwell upon an image which represented so sweetly her hope in dying. But reason here comes in aid of Faith; and the more closely we look into the nature of sleep and of death, the more exact is the resemblance we shall discern. 1. Sleep, first of all, is a mystery to us. What wonder death should be? Sleep is one of the greatest mysteries of our existence here, so mysterious that were it not so familiar to us, we should every day be wondering about it, that out of the short life God has given us for our probation, full one-third should be spent in a state of inaction, when we can do neither good nor bad. Even so shall we lie inactive in our graves. Is it a mystery, again, how we die? And who can understand how we fall asleep? It comes upon us, we know not how. We cannot recollect it afterwards. Our consciousness dissolves, and we are asleep. And so it may be at death. We lie uneasily on our bed; we try to die: on a moment the last tie is loosed; and, we know not how, we are away. Sleep soothes every pain, forgets every care; angry tempers, disappointments, want, unkindness, all the miseries of life are left behind in a moment. And so it will be at death. A parting struggle or two, one last breath, and "there is neither sorrow nor sighing, neither any more pain, for the former things are passed away." 2. The hours of sleep level all the inequalities of life, and make the poor man as happy as the king (Job 3:17-19). 3. Sleep unlooses all the ties of life, and death breaks them. In sleep the soul is disengaged from the trammels of the body; and thus we may form a conjecture how it will exist separately from it hereafter. We lie asleep, the eyes are closed, the ears are deaf, the hands lie uselessly by our side; but the mind is busily at work, and revolves within itself all those images which have been conveyed into it in our waking hours. We can so, I say, guess how, amid the darkness and silence of the grave, the soul will be able to rehearse to itself all the experience of life; and with the avenue of the senses then cut off, will have material enough within itself for incessant activity and thought. 4. Sleep, instead of contracting the powers of the mind, gives keenness to the memory, and wings to the imagination. And will not this again help us to understand how, when we have left this material world behind us, and the sheath of the body no longer encases the soul and dulls her edge, that the emancipated spirit then will be able at a glance to recall with the exactest truth the entire history of life? And when we read of the books being opened, and the judgment set, and the dead, both small and great, being judged out of the things that were written in the books; what else may be intended here, than this book of memory and conscience, with every old impression revived afresh, so that the sinner sees all his sins before his face, and goes away to his own place, speechless and without appeal, self-condemned? In sleep the mind is emancipated from the restrictions of bodily life, and the limitation of time and space. A succession of images crowd into the minds and we live a life long in a night. This is a sort of foretaste of the freedom from material ties, which the disembodied spirit shall enjoy. 5. It is in the time of sleep, again, that the soul, half-loosened from the body, is most open to communications from the unseen world (Job 33:15, 16). It was in the hour of sleep, in a vision by night, that the angel appeared to Mary, and to Joseph and to Daniel. The spirits of another world may have peculiar access to our souls when we are disengaged from this; and those that sleep in Jesus may so enjoy unrestrained communion with the innumerable company of angels. And the Father of the spirits of all flesh may thus be instructing and preparing them for His glorious kingdom. This long sleep of peace may thus be as needful for the expansion and perfection of our nature, as our nightly slumber is for the growth of our present frame, and for the refreshment of soul and body. Morning after morning now we each may thank our Maker, "I beheld and awaked, my sleep was sweet; unto me"; and every such arising we may hail as an omen of the day, when our eyes shall be opened to behold God's presence in righteousness, when we shall wake up after Christ's likeness, and be satisfied with it. Such a waking, who will not look up and hope after? Such a sleep, who need mistrust or fear? And would we know how we may so sleep with God? A quiet conscience gives the sweetest sleep. Night after night, let us take a closer and closer view of death, and then we shall not start from it when it comes. We shall lie down at last and be glad of it, just as we are glad to fall asleep. (C. F. Secretan, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep. |
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