Sleeping and Waking

Scripture Reading: Psalm 17:15

When I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness.

A friend of mine, now gone to be with the Lord, used to say, “dying is as easy as going to sleep.” I don’t know about the easy part, but the “dying is like sleeping” part is biblical. He took his metaphor from the pages of Scripture where death is oft referred to as sleep.

This is an apt metaphor for several compelling reasons. Let me name a few. For one, sleep comes at the end of the day, when our work is finished, when our bodies are weary, and when we need rest. We sleep because of the fatigue of living. When our final sleep comes it will be when our work is done, our bodies are weary and we need rest from the fatigue of life.

Though not as obvious, I think the sleep metaphor also speaks to the altered sense of time the sleeper experiences. When we lie down and sleep, we can sleep for hours, but upon waking it seems as though only a few minutes have passed. I suspect it will be so in a similar way for those believers who sleep in the Lord. The history of the earth, which seems to move slowly and go on forever, will seem to be but a few minutes to those in heaven. After all, 1,000 years are but as one day with the Lord.

But, as the Psalmist points to in our text, falling asleep is about waking too. It is not as much about sleeping as it is about awakening after sleep. The one who closes his eyes in sleep anticipates opening them again and awakening to a new day. But for David, for the Christian, waking is not waking to the same old self that went to sleep in death. It is to our true self and to a full vision of Christ to which we awaken. When we wake from that final sleep, we behold the face of God. All that had been before will be like a dream of a distant land from which we have escaped. The past will fade into the mists of memory. And there, after the resurrection, in the New Heaven and New Earth, we will walk in the Light of that new day.

And when we awaken from the sleep of death, we shall feel deep, abiding satisfaction. A satisfaction as we have never felt before. For we shall see Him as He is. And we shall be like Him.